Mark 9:42-49
Fire, Brimstone and the Love of God

Next Sunday will be the first day of Spring! I love Spring. I love crocusses and daffodils. I love the to see the leaves of trees begin to bud in every imaginable shade of green. But best of all is the warm spring summer sunshine. All over the valley -- all over the northern hemisphere -- people will, for a few weeks act like sun-worshippers. Just walk over to Mount Holyoke or walk through the Umass campus on the first warm, bright day of spring and you'll see sunworshippers everywhere. You'll see people delighting in the goodness of the sun, rejoicing in the presence of the sun, wanting nothing more than to soak in the warmth and light. Strangers will spontaneously smile at each other -- yes, even New Englanders -- and say, isn't the sun glorious. Isn't it a great day. [ It is a great picture of what worship should be like. If only our worship of God could be so spontaneous and joyful. ]

After a long New England winter, it is hard not to have sympathy with sun-worshippers. The sun is a wonderful gift. It's warmth and energy make life possible. The beauty of its light gives color to the world. Imagine life without the sun -- no warm, bright spring days; no trees, no outrageously colorful flowers. The sun is a good and glorious gift of God and war are right to rejoice in it -- to soak it up.

But that is not the whole story. We do not always experience the sun as warm and pleasant. Later in the Spring, when the sun is hotter and brighter, some of you sun-worshippers will take your enjoyment of the sun a bit too far. Your skin will grow red and blistered. You will be in agony. And if you have a really bad sunburn for a few days you will want nothing to do with the sun. The sun is a source of agony and suffering. For the sunburnt person, or the skin cancer victim or the person with a migraine or a hangover, the sun is a fearful thing -- an enemy. When you are sunburnt you want nothing more than to be protected from its burning heat. The sun which was once good and loving now seems hostile and angry.

How is this possible? How can we reconcile the goodness of the sun with the agony of sunburn and skin cancer and drought and thirst. Has the sun, which seems so friendly on a spring day suddenly become evil?

Of course not. The question is absurd. We see immediately that the problem is not with the sun, the problem is with the sun worshipper. The sun is good -- it makes life possible. But it is also dangerous. And you cannot have the good without the danger. The very energy which sustains life is fearful and dangerous to those who do not treat it with respect. A sun which was not dangerous would be a wimpy sun, too weak to do any good. You might say that the goodness and the wrath of the sun cannot be separated.

And so too with the goodness and wrath of God. I want to suggest to you this morning that just as the energy of the sun is both life-giving and deadly, so too the glory of God. There is no conflict between the love of God and his wrath. God is both loving and dangerous, life-giving and fearful. We cannot have one without the other.

And today I want to consider the most fearful and troubling dimension of the wrath of God. I want to talk to you today about Hell. It is an uncomfortable subject. Uncomfortable for me to teach about. Uncomfortable for you to have to hear. And it should be uncomfortable! If we can be sit glibly and at ease and think about hell then something is desperately wrong -- either I have a heart of stone or I am not thinking about the real thing. If I am thinking about the real thing -- the way hell is depicted in scripture, and not some cartoon version -- then the appropriate response is to shrink away in horror. The way Jesus describes hell is terrifying.

Turn with me to Mark 9:42-49.

The imagery here is terrifying. Amputation is better than hell. Having your eye plucked out is better than hell. Being thrown into the sea with a millstone around your neck is better than hell, where "their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched." Elsewhere Jesus talks about hell as a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. This is not a pleasant picture, but its a picture that is consistent throughout the teaching of Jesus and throughout the whole of scripture: All of the depictions of hell describe unmitigated agony under the wrath of God.

Can this horrible picture possibly be compatible with a loving, compassionate God? I believe it is. In fact, I will go farther. I believe that we cannot fully comprehend the depths of the love of God unless we can come to terms with the reality of hell. Without a clearsighted understanding and acceptance of the reality and horror of hell we cannot appreciate the costliness of our salvation or the wonder of the love and grace of God.

Three things come clear when set against the terrible reality of hell: The horror and destructiveness of sin, the depths of the love of God, and the infinite worth of salvation.

1. Hell exposes the horror and destructiveness of sin.

If you want to understand the destructive nature of sin, consider the following experiment: First, build a large bonfire in your back yard. When the fire is nice and hot, go to the garage, douse yourself in gasoline and try roasting marshmallows. Being sinful in the presence of God's holiness is like wearing gasoline soaked rags in the presence of a bonfire. It is suicidal.

Now in our present lives we only get a small foretaste of the horror of sin. We see how sin of all kinds addicts and enslaves, ruining lives and destroying relationships. We see how sin when it is unrestrained leads to enormous destruction and suffering. And we get a small taste of how sin makes it impossible to experience the presence of God with joy. When we embrace sin we feel alienated from God -- we can sense God's anger.

In this life, however, we never feel the full effects of our sin. God graciously shields us from the unmitigated experience of his holiness. He keeps the bonfire at a distance. We are all, every day preserved by God's restraining grace.

But in the next life we will no longer be shielded from God's holiness. Hell will be the eternal agony of being exposed as a sinner to the blazing heat of God's holiness. To be a sinner in the presence of God will be like being sunburned, naked and unprotected under a blazing sun.

We are all sunburned by sin. It is the mercy of God that for now we are shielded from his full glory. Just as the the sunburnt person or the person with a hangover experiences the presence of the sun as a source of agony, so too the presence and glory of God will be experienced as horror and agony by those who embrace sin. For the sunburnt sun worshipper, the sun is a fearful thing. For the sinner the presence of God is a fearful thing. For the sunburnt person not to be able to escape the sun is agony. For the SIN burdened person not to be able to escape the presence of God will be agony -- it will be hell. Hell will be the permanent agony of being sinful in the presence of a holy God -- being unable to experience his goodness because we shrink form him in fear.

On a bright sunny day a person with a sunburn or a migraine will shrink from the sun. Their neighbor may revel in the warmth and beauty of the sun. Same sun, yet some shrink away, while others bask in its light. So it will be, but to an infinitely greater degree, when we experience God in eternity. To one God will be a consuming fire; to another a source of joy and life.

It is desperately important that we recognize that the horror of hell is the direct consequence of sin. Hell is not some arbitrary punishment for sin devised by a vindinctive tyrant of a God. Hell is the logical result of sin. It is sin come to fruition.

[One of the amazing things about Dante's Inferno is that he portrays this connection between sin and hell so vividly. He depicts the various sufferings of hell as the logical effects of each sin that is punished. "Whatsoever a man sows, so shall he reap."]

And that is why Jesus gives us such stark warnings about sin. It is better to maim yourself, he says, than to face the horror of hell. It is better to gouge out your eye than to embrace sin and have to face the blazing holiness of God without protection. And all of the images of hell in scripture are God's way of trying to communicate to us the horrible agony of facing God as sinners -- fire that cannot be quenched, weeping and gnashing of teeth -- these are just images. The reality will be far more horrible than we can imagine.

To trivialize hell is to trivialize sin. Only when we take Hell seriously will we recognize how destructive sin really is and learn to hate the gasoline soaked rags that alienate us and people around us from God.

2. Hell reveals the depths of the love of God.

What happened as Jesus was hanging, suffering, dying on the cross? What caused him to cry out "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" 2 Corinthians 5:21 gives the answer. On Jesus was placed the full burden of our sin -- he became sin for us. "God made him who had no sin to BE sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

And what that means is that Jesus experienced the agony of hell. When we talk about Jesus paying the penalty for our sin, we don't just mean that he suffered physical death for us, but that he faced the heat of God's holiness bearing our sins. In other words, he endured hell for us. The price that he paid for sin was not just physical death -- in that case we would all be able to atone for our own sins. No, the price that Jesus paid was spiritual death -- he entered hell for us. He took all of our sin-soaked rags, and he walked into the bonfire of God's holiness wearing them.

Hell is not a measure of God's hatred for us -- it is a measure of God's great love for us. God was not willing for us to suffer the agony of hell, so Jesus took on the agony of hell himself to shield us from God's wrath.

"O Lord, what love is this, that pays so dearly -- that I, the guilty one, may go free! Amazing Love, O what sacrifice. The son of God given for me. My debt he paid and my death he died, that I might live."

Every time you think of the horror and agony of hell, you should say in amazement: "O the depths of the love of God, that he willingly endured such agony for me." Hell is not incompatible with God's love -- hell is the very measure -- the very evidence of God's love.

Finally, Hell reveals the infinite worth of our salvation.

Life never seems so sweet as when we come near to death. I remember vividly the terrible fear of being in a plane that was clearly in trouble. We were just 15 minutes past take off when the pilot suddenly banked the plane and began a terrifying descent back to the airport. When we landed the whole plane erupted in spontaneous applause. The ground never seemed so wonderful. Life never seemed so sweet.

And Heaven never seems so sweet as when we face hell. Eternal Life will not have real sweetness for us until we squarely face the horror of the eternal death. For salvation to be of any worth -- for it to mean anything -- there must be something to be saved from. We will only fully appreciate the infinite value of eternal life when we honestly face the infinite horror of hell.


I would like to end with one final image.

A few years ago there was a terrible fire in the London Subway system. The London Tube is a labyrinth of stairs and passageways and ancient escalators. And some of the escalators are frighteningly long -- they seem to go on and on without end. One of the most horrible things about the fire was that many people were carried right to the heart of the inferno by escalators. They got on the escalator completely oblivious to the danger, and the escalator carried them inexorably to their deaths.

I would like you to fix that horrible image in your imagination for a moment, and add something to it. Imagine yourself on a long down escalator. You cannot see the end of it. You are going down, down. And you are loaded down with luggage. There is an up escalator across from you. And suddenly you hear a cry from below. Fire! Fire! What will you do? Will you cling to your luggage and let it drag you down to destruction.

There is only one appropriate response -- throw off your bags, flee from the fury of the flames and cry out for help.

Similarly when any of us are confronted with the reality of hell, there is only one appropriate response: Throw off your sin, flee from the wrath of God, and cry out for his Amazing Grace.