We will be studying Mark chapter 9 verses 42 to 48 and you'll find that on the pew Bibles and pay on page 845 let me say a couple of things before we read this scripture here you'll notice that if you're using an English standard version Verses 44 and 46 are omitted. And there's a footnote there explaining why, that some of the Greek manuscripts that underwrite the New Testament don't include those verses. Why not? Because the original verses repeat, where their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched. So likely an early scribe kind of said, well, there's no need to repeat that. So we're not really sure what the original read, but it doesn't make a difference because we do have preserved here what God wanted us to have. and it doesn't change the substance of the meaning of the words before us. So before we hear God's Word, let's pray together. Our Father, as we come to this passage this evening, we ask for a special measure of grace because these are fearsome words. Never in our wildest fanaticisms or imaginations Would we dare to dream up something like our Savior speaks to us this evening? We thank you for the Prince of Peace and the King of Love, our Savior Jesus, who bears our wrath and takes away the sin that would send us to hell. We pray that you would bless our time together this evening. In Jesus' name, amen. Mark chapter 9, beginning at verse 42, this is God's holy, inspired, and therefore inerrant word. Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life lame than with two feet to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. The grass withers, the flowers fall, and the word of the living God will stand forever and ever. Amen. If you want to know how to change substantially the tone of a dinner party, get asked what you're preaching on this Sunday, which I was asked over the weekend. And I said, I'm teaching on Jesus, teaching on hell. It's kind of one of those scenes in the movies where the record skips and everybody stops. And the question that was immediately fired back to me was, you don't go to one of those hellfire and damnation churches, do you? And, mercifully, Callie was there in these situations. She's very good about putting her arm around me and just saying, calm down. And I said, you know, what we do is we believe the Bible. And, friends, the doctrine of hell is a biblical doctrine. It is not a stray teaching in either the Old or the New Testaments. And if you were to go through and just look by sheer headcount, as it were, of Jesus' favorite sermon topics, of His recorded words that we have, His two favorite sermon topics were hell and money. The one who loved us and died for our sins spoke more about hell than anybody else in the Bible. And before we get to the verses, let's define what we mean by the term hell. We mean the conscious, everlasting punishment of unrepentant sinners under the wrath of Almighty God. And I've chosen my words carefully. The conscious, everlasting punishment of unrepentant sinners under the wrath of Almighty God. And in our society today there is no subject really anymore, no subjects rather, except for two that are taboo. Everything else we can speak about freely. There is no shame in speaking about anything except for two subjects in my limited experience. Death. in the first place. We shift uncomfortably when that subject comes up. We, more than maybe any society before us, does all we can to cover up the gruesome effects of the fall when somebody dies. But if death makes us uncomfortable as a subject matter, then hell is not only distasteful, but seen as the worst thing you could mention in polite company. Most people don't believe in it, and that's not just unique to our society. Charles Darwin, right before he set voyage for his fateful trip to the Galapagos Islands on the HMS Beagle, wrote in his diary, if the Bible is true, then my father and brother will go to this place called hell of everlasting punishment, and that is a damnable doctrine, he said. Joseph E. Talmadge, writing in 1924, one of the early apostles of the Mormon Church, said this about the doctrine of hell. He said, it is the most pernicious result of a misapprehension of scripture. Ellen G. White, founder of the Christian Society cult, said it is a doctrine never to be mentioned. And on and on it goes from those who begin religious sects to those who are of atheistic persuasions. The topic that Jesus addresses before us tonight comes to us as our Creator summons us here tonight with the most pressing urgency because it's the most terrifying subject. And we'll look at Jesus' words here tonight under three heads. In the first place, the reason for hell. The reason for hell. And then in the second place, the nature of hell. And then in the third place, the length of hell. The reason for hell, the nature of hell, and the length of hell. And as we launch into these fearsome words here tonight, let me say this, and I've said it before, let me say it again. If this doctrine has never made you question the truth of Christianity, let me suggest humbly that you may not have taken in the full measure of this doctrine. Hell will test you like few doctrines will. And that's because it's so terrifying, we put it out of our minds. When we come to passages like this, we read them and then we move on. We want rather to read what Jesus said in the previous chapter, with God all things are possible. And that's true and wonderful and we celebrate and rightly rejoice in those words. But then we come to Jesus' words here. And He begins by telling us the reason for hell. He gives three examples of sin. And He opens with this principle that whoever causes one of these little ones, who are the little ones? He's talking about His disciples, not just children, but all of His disciples. And notice that terminology that He uses, that metaphor He begins this whole section with. A millstone tied around their neck. Go home and Google, not right now, go home and Google first century millstone. They were huge. Can you think of a more horrifying way to die than being drowned in the sea with a giant stone tied around your neck? And that's the metaphor. Those are the terms that Jesus reaches for to teach us at the outset the seriousness of sin. He says it would be better for that to happen. than if we were to cause others to sin. And then he uses three other metaphors which are equally gruesome. He says, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your foot causes you to sin, cut it off. If your eye causes you to sin, cut it out. We don't like to think about our lives without an eye or without a hand or without a foot. And Jesus says, if I can make it even more serious for you than drowning by millstone around your neck, maim yourself as it were, spiritually speaking, to avoid hell. This is the urgency with which He summons us to consider this doctrine. He says, how serious is sin? Serious enough that if you think about some of the worst things that can happen to you in your enfleshed life, he says, that's a faint picture of what you would want to avoid in hell. Did you see how he put it? It's better to enter into life made than to have your whole body intact and go to hell. His point is simple. Deal radically with sin. Don't toy with it. I heard a dear friend say recently, we were talking and he said, it just struck me, he said, the enemy is patient and crafty. As we'll see when we study 1 Peter, he says that our enemy is like a roaring lion prowling about seeking someone to devour. He's patient, he's crafty, and sin is serious. John Owen, the great Puritan writer, in his probably the best treatise ever written on sin and how to deal with it. If you've never read the Puritans in your You maybe be a little dissuaded by the Puritans and you say, I read the Westminster Confession of Faith and I don't really understand it. I'm not sure I'd understand reading the Puritans. Don't be intimidated to pick up one of the modern versions of John Owen on the mortification of sin. Because it is a masterpiece of the unfolding of the psychology of our hearts. And in one of the passages in that book, he talks about how sin, we can seem to have beaten it down and dealt with it, then all of a sudden it springs to life and hits us again. And that's why Jesus says what he says here. This is how serious sin is because it is pernicious. It is crafty. The enemy is patient. He lies in wait. It is coming for all of us. It will entrap all of us. And unless we take His Word seriously and deal with them urgently, then sin will get the better of us. And if our life pattern is unrepentant sin, Then Jesus warns us that we will be, notice the terminology here, thrown into hell. And sin is serious because God is holy. Sin is serious because God is holy. And if we don't grasp the holiness of God, we'll never grasp the reality of hell. The prime objection to hell is that punishment doesn't fit the crime. Everlasting punishment for temporal crimes, as it were. Crimes committed in a life span. My friends, it's not about the quantity of the span of life, but the quality of the being with whom we have to do. And the being with whom we have to do is the thrice holy Almighty Creator of the universe. whose holiness knows no bounds, knows no exceptions. He is of purer eyes than to behold evil. He detests sin with a holy hatred that burns every day. It is not a trifling matter. It is not something that he looks upon and says, I'll give you a pass, let me grade on a curve this once. The holiness is inexorable. It admits no exceptions. It makes no dalliances with sin. It says, no, this is it. This is the standard. It is high. It is lofty. It is unobtainable for any sinner because His purity is that wonderful, that majestic. My friends, do you know God is holy? Holy, not in the sense that He's a little better than us. He's not just a bigger version of us. If we're good sometimes, He's good all the time, and that's true, but it's not like He's just an elevated standard of goodness. He is the standard. His holiness and His goodness and His justice and His love and His mercy and all of His attributes are not just bigger versions of the virtues we have. They are separate. They are different. They're on another plane. And as He relates them to us, He calls for us to consider, first and foremost, His holiness. And we don't like to consider that today because holiness makes us uncomfortable. When we see people who are walking with Jesus more closely than we are, people who we would describe rightly as holy, Our first instinct is just like Adam and Eve's was, it's to hide ourselves from such people. It's to justify ourselves and say, well, I can do better and I may have fallen in a few places, but I'm not as bad as X, Y, and Z person. And that's because we're all innately terrified of holiness. And that's why when we read about encounters with angels, let alone the true and living God in Scripture, we find people in awestruck terror because of the holiness, not just of God, but of the very beings that surround His throne. If they cause terror, how much more the one who is holy for all eternity. And so the reason for hell is the holiness of God. It's not just about Our sin is the instrumentality as it were. But it's the nature of God that causes the reality of hell. What about then the nature of hell? Look what Jesus says there. He says, verse 48, their worm does not die and their fire is not quenched. What's the nature of hell? He uses a picturesque word here in the original. It's still there today. It's called Genna. It's a combination in Greek of two Hebrew words that speak about the valley of Hinnom. You can read about it in 2 Kings 21, 2 Chronicles 33, 6-10, I believe. It's this place in the Old Testament that was the awful place where the Israelites would burn their children alive. It's the place of which God says, it never entered into my mind for you to do something as horrifying as that. And by the time of Jesus' ministry, Gehenna, the valley of Hinnom, on the south side of the old city today of Jerusalem, the south side there, it was the garbage heap of the city. It's where there were fires smoldering as you burned trash. Where the bodies of dead animals would be discarded. It's the kind of place where if you approached near it, maybe even a hundred miles away, you would have to take your sleeve or something to put over your nose and your mouth because the stench was unbearable. Jesus uses a word that would have made your stomach turn. He uses a word that for the original audience would have been something like, you wouldn't say that in polite company, Jesus. And then he tells us to explain further, he quotes from Isaiah 66 verse 24. And that's stunning. It's stunning because when you read the book of Isaiah, especially the last chapters, they're about the new heavens and the new earth. They're about everything being put right again. It's a soaring crescendo to this tremendous Old Testament prophecy of all being right, everything being the way it should be, and then it ends with that verse. They will go out and look upon the dead bodies, and their worm does not die, and their fire is not quenched. If you were to go to an ancient synagogue in Jesus' day and you read about it in Luke 4 when He takes the scroll that's handed to Him and He opens up to the 61st chapter of Isaiah and quotes it and preaches. If you were to turn further in that scroll and let's say somebody else was reading on a different day and they turned to Isaiah 66 and they would read regularly through it, they would come to that verse and skip it. in the synagogue readings because the rabbinical tradition at the time is that it was too terrifying to read. That it wasn't fitting to conclude a book on that verse. And Jesus selects that verse carefully to strengthen, cement, and fix in our minds His argument here. What is the nature of hell? He says, it's terrible. It's like a giant trash heap. And people will say, well that's just symbolic. The symbol is greater than the reality. That's the point. The symbol is always greater, or the reality is always greater than the symbol. The reality is greater than the symbol. Let me give, I hope inject a little levity into our discussion here. We were on a road trip with our kids this weekend. And if you want to get my three-year-old excited, Madison Avenue has won the battle on this one because if she sees the Chick-fil-A sign, there will be shouts of joy and almost an inaudible, barely breathed out, Chick-fil-A. I mean, for her, it's eschatological to see the scene, okay? And so when we're driving down the road, she sees the sea and she goes crazy and Chick-fil-A is coming. How strange would it be if we'd pulled over and gone up to the sign and said, here we are. No, the reality is greater than the sign. And that's what Jesus is saying here. If he's using metaphors like fire, then he's saying it's worse than that. This is a faint picture. This is a shadow of how bad it will be. And we need to get clear about this nature of hell because throughout church history and in popular literature and in the dreams of poets and philosophers, the tendency is to downplay the nature of hell. It's to say that maybe there's a second chance after we die. No. You can't find that anywhere in the Bible. Or maybe that hell is somehow corrective justice. That maybe it's meant to rehabilitate us. Maybe it's meant to rehabilitate the sinner and if he suffers long enough he'll be rehabbed and be fit for heaven. Hell is not rehabilitative justice, friends. It's retributive justice. and retributive justice means that there is a penalty visited upon the crime simply for the sake of the crime itself It's not meant to correct. It's not meant to reform. It's meant to be that in God's economy of how He deals with us, He has purposed, He has predestined to deal with us on the basis of His inflexible law. And any transgression of that law is an affront to His holy majesty. And an affront to His holy majesty deserves retributive justice. That He upholds His holy justice by punishing sinners. And then in the flight of theological fancy, we have the innovation of purgatory, taught by the Roman Catholic Church to this day, that we can somehow be purged of our sins by suffering in a world between heaven and hell. That's another invention to escape the full force of Jesus's words here. The nature of hell is conscious, everlasting punishment. There is no escape after death. There is no such thing as purgatory. It will not correct and reform the sinner. It will be justice visited upon the sinner for the sake of upholding God's holiness. And it will be just. And none of us will be able to gainsay him and say, what are you doing, God? And then finally, the length of hell. Notice how Jesus states it there, the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Just reading in Matthew 25 the other day, when Jesus, in that scene, that brings us, I hope, to our knees to consider when He returns. And He calls the nations before Him. And He separates them as a shepherd would separate the sheep and the goats. And He says to those on His right hand, inherit the kingdom prepared for you before the foundation of the world. It's all God's grace is what he's saying. And he goes through and says to those on his left, you are not going to where those on the right are going. You are going to the place where the devil and his angels are. And he finishes that section with the same exact language he uses here. He says, these, referring to the righteous in him, will go into everlasting life, but the rest into everlasting punishment. The same word. If heaven is eternal, then hell is eternal. If heaven is a real place where we go if we know Christ and we are saved by His grace alone, then hell is an equally real place where people go. The length is staggering. This is why it will test us. This is why Charles Darwin, we can sympathize with him. He took it in. He said, my brother and my father, suffering forever. Friends, loved ones, family, maybe headed for this place. Does that cause our knees to tremble? Does it cause us never to rejoice over this place? Never to say to ourselves, well, maybe we never articulate this, but we see somebody who has mistreated Christians or who has done bad things. We say, well, we know where they're going. We never say that. There's no joy. There's tears if it comes home to us the way it should. There's fear. There's pleading. There's falling down and saying, why would you go there? Why would you go to a place like this that is real, that lasts forever? My friend, if you are not a Christian and you think, I will bravely stand up to it, you say with the old poet, my head unbloodied and unbowed, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul, you will bow. Every knee will bow, the Apostle Paul tells us on that great day. No, the brave fantasies of those who imagine they can withstand the wrath of God are like a child trying to empty the ocean with a spoon. It's foolishness. And therefore, as we close, let me say two things about what this does for our day tomorrow. What does this mean for the rest of the week? In the first place, let me say this, if you're not a Christian here tonight, And maybe this is the first time you've heard anything like this. Welcome. Thank you for being here. And let me say this. All of us want there to be hell. Let me put it another way. Nobody wants Hitler and Billy Graham in the same place, right? Nobody. It doesn't matter if you are a Christian or not, that offends our moral sensibilities to think about Hitler and Billy Graham ending up in the same place. In other words, all of us want there to be ultimate justice. All of us want there to be, this to be the kind of universe where it's not, as Richard Dawkins put it, blind, pitiless indifference. We don't want that. We want the human trafficker to finally face justice if he doesn't face it here. We want the war criminals of Nazi Germany who cowardly took their own lives, we want to know that when they awoke that there was justice visited upon them. We want to know, we ache to know, we yearn to know. That when we die, everything will be put right. We want a universe where what Jesus is saying here is not a dream, is not a flight of fancy, is not a myth. We want there to be ultimate justice because we see such a lack of it here. and all the frailty of sin, and all the perniciousness of human society, and all the foibles of mankind gather themselves up together to make a mockery of justice so often in our lifetimes, and therefore we want to know the one whose unseen hands guides all the orbits of the planets and guides all the details of our lives, will one day summon everyone to his bar of eternal justice. Everyday life is inconceivable without that great event. We want it to be this way. So, all of us want there to be hell. And let's close thinking about this. Remember who's talking to us. Here's why it makes no sense to go to hell if you're not a Christian. Or if you're wrestling with this doctrine, maybe. There's no good reason to go to hell. Because in God's amazing design of redemption, The very One who warns us about hell is the very One who descends into it to take it from us. That's what we confess every Sunday morning. He descended into hell. That was what He was doing on the cross. He's suffering hell in your place. And it's because God's eternal love and His eternal justice are never meant to be at odds with each other. But instead at the cross they kiss and meet and reconcile and walk arm in arm into eternity together because it was God's love that sent His Son to meet the demands of His justice and His law. It's His grace alone that saves you from hell. It's His magnificent love. It's His unbounding grace. It is His never failing grace that comes to us and warns us like this and says, you don't have to go there. Nobody else teaches anything like this. Every other system, to the degree that it does speak of endless punishment, talks about what you do to avoid it. Only Jesus comes to us with words of warning on His lips, but it's the very lips that would drip with grace at Calvary's hill, saying, Father, forgive them! God's love sends Jesus. to satisfy God's justice. My friends, is there a greater God than this? Who would rescue us this way? Who would warn us this way, but also love us enough to save us from this way? Who would send His only Son to take the punishment we deserve Would you do that? Would I do that? There's no one like God. And therefore, as you go forward this week, be reminded of the grace that saves. Be reminded of the Savior who loves. Be reminded of the Spirit who tonight is pleading with you through God's word to say, do not go to hell. Avoid this at all possible costs. It reminds me of a story I read recently about Rico Tice. Some of you all know that name. He's an English evangelist. He designed the Christianity Explored curriculum. And he was in Australia visiting a friend and was going to go for a swim in the ocean. And there were signs everywhere that said, warning, sharks. And he said, being a good Englishman, I said, don't be ridiculous. Proceeded to take my shirt off and run towards the ocean. Until his friend grabbed him and said, Listen, mate, 200 Australians have died in shark attacks this year. Now, you're a grown man, you make your own choice, but do you think these signs are there to kill your fun or keep you safe? And Tice said, I decided not to go for a swim. And when we come to a warning like this from the savior who's the king of love and the king of grace, it is not intended to kill our joy. It's intended to give us a warning to escape everlasting death and enter in to everlasting joy with Him. Because He loves us, He warns us. And because He loves us, hell can be avoided. Let's pray. Our Father, as we leave here tonight, re-engage us in our mission. Let us see the world as You see it, not through the lens of a misty self-righteousness, but through the urgency that You tell us about here for those who do not know You. Bring in the lost, Lord. Give us a heart for those who do not know Christ and send us from this place changed. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.