Hey guys, no doubt you’ve caught wind of the controversy that’s swirling around. Let me ask you a question. And I want you to imagine that this question is not coming from me on a podcast, but from someone you love. What if your son or your daughter looked you in the eye and said, “Dad, mom, I know you believe in hell.
I know you believe that God is just. I know you believe that sin is serious. And I know that Jesus is the only way to heaven. So when a unrepentant person who doesn’t turn to Jesus dies, what does the Bible actually say happens to them? Are they preserved forever and kept alive by God in a place of endless conscious torment, suffering forever, weeping and wailing and nashing their teeth with no end? Or is the judgment that scripture describes something different? Is it still real, still just, still severe, but culminating in what the Bible calls
death, destruction, or the second death, which is the lake of fire? What would your answer be? This isn’t a trick question. This isn’t me dodging it. I’m going to get into all of this right now. This isn’t a reaction to a headline. And I’m not asking for what you’ve always believed or been taught. But what do you believe the scriptures actually teach? That’s the question that my son asked me and that’s the question that started this conversation.
Over the last few weeks, that conversation has sparked strong reactions. To put it mildly. Some of those reactions have been thoughtful, like my friends at Answers in Genesis and my friend Ray Comfort and even uh my friend apologist Wes Huff. Some have been supportive. Many have said, “We’ve asked these same questions but been afraid to really put them up on the table.
” And then some have been deeply critical. I’ve been accused of denying hell, denying judgment, even denying the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. I think it has to do with the culture that we’re living in. We now have incredibly short attention spans. I get it. People watch a 10 or a 15 second clip, often edited by somebody else, pulled out of context, sometimes intentionally, in order to stir outrage and drive clicks and increase viewership for someone else’s channel.
