Verse 19, And there was a certain rich
man, which was clothed in purple and fine
linen, and fared sumptuously every day.
And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus,
which was laid at his gate full of
swords, desiring to be fed with the crumbs
which fell from the rich man's table.
Moreover, the dogs came and licked his sword.
It came to pass that the beggar died,
and was carried by the angels into Abraham's
bosom.
And the rich man also died and was
buried.
And in hell he lifted up his eyes,
being in torment, and said, Abraham afar off,
and Lazarus in his bosom.
And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have
mercy on me.
Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip
of his finger in water, and cool my
tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.
Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy
lifetime receivest thy good things, and likewise Lazarus
evil things.
But now he is comforted, and thou art
tormented.
And beside all this, between us and you
there is a great gulf fixed, so that
they which would pass from hence to you
cannot, neither can they pass to us that
would come from them.
Then he said, I pray thee therefore, Father,
that thou would send him to my father's
house, for I have five brethren, that he
may testify unto them, that they also come
into this place of torment.
Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and
a prophet.
Let them hear them.
He said, Nay, Father Abraham, but if one
went unto them from the dead, they will
repent.
He said unto him, If they hear not
Moses and a prophet, neither will they be
persuaded, though one rose from the dead.
We pray thee, O Heavenly Father, that thou
wouldst give us ears that we may hear,
and hearts that we may understand.
Save us, we pray thee, from the routine
and the habit of things, and the meaningless
and feelingless handling of holy things.
Help us to hear, we pray thee, as
if this were our last sermon.
Help us to speak as if this were
the last talk to be given on earth.
Help us, Lord, be thou at this moment
also with every other man who rises to
preach the word.
May this be a night when some encounters
are had and some events take place in
the kingdom, seen or unseen, known or unknown
to us, that will advance thy cause, rock
Satan back, and make thy church to grow.
We ask it in Christ's name.
Amen.
These sermons, my thesis has been that man
is a moral wanderer, is away from God
and is venturing dangerously far from home and
from God, unable and unwilling to return.
But that God is calling him home, and
that God is entreating with many voices, saying,
O return ye unto me.
God is entreating by revealed truth in the
holy book.
He's entreating by general truth, reason, and common
sense, as I've explained.
He's entreating by the fact of life and
death, and by the fact of human history,
and by our own moral constitution.
God is saying, Return ye even unto me.
Now, the morally wise are hearing him, and
they're hearing him everywhere.
But the morally foolish hear no voice at
all.
They think we've made it up.
They have ears to hear and hear not,
and they have eyes but see not, and
they have hearts but their pattern cannot understand.
And for the moral fool there is no
tongue in trees and no sermons in stone
and no books in the running brooks, and
no word in the conscience, and no reason
why they should come home.
But our Lord Jesus Christ here makes us
to hear a voice, and this time it's
a strange voice, and I think the only
time we've ever heard about it is the
voice of a lost man pleading for people
to come home to God, adding his voice
to the voice of the saved, and the
voice of conscience and reason, and the voice
of God's love, and the voice of the
Holy Ghost, and the voice of the church,
and the voice of testimony.
Now we have something here that is different
from unusual, and it's an extreme thing indeed.
The Lord of all worlds, the Lord of
life and death, and the Lord of eternity
drew aside the curtain that hides that world
from this world, and he lets us see
and hear what had never before been seen
by living men, only by the dead.
And he lets us hear a voice that
never had been heard by living men, only
by the dead.
He lets us hear the actual words of
a condemned man, heard before only by the
finally lost, and never by the lost on
earth.
And here a lost man becomes an evangelist
when it's too late.
He becomes an evangelist whose voice is a
powerful entreaty, and he says that he doesn't
want people to come where he is, and
his voice cries, O return ye unto God,
even though it's too late for him to
do it.
Now we want to look at this story
which our Lord gave us here, and note
some things in it.
It is such a full story, and contains
so much that no man can hope to
do it justice in a dozen sermons, or
two dozen.
But I want you to note a few
things that stand out here so obviously that
anybody can see it.
The first thing I call attention to is
that the beggar was not saved because he
was poor.
Now the beggar was a beggar all right,
and he was a poor man, and there
was nothing said about his being a Christian
or a believing man, but it says that
he died, it came to pass that he
died.
It doesn't say it happened that he died,
as in some translations, it came to pass
that he died.
Things don't happen in the kingdom of God,
they come to pass.
Quite a difference between a thing happening and
a thing coming to pass.
So it came to pass that the beggar
died and was carried by the angels into
Abraham's bosom.
Now because this man who died was poor,
we have begotten the impression that he went
to heaven because he was poor.
I want you to notice that this is
not, and could not be, the case.
If it were the case that a man
went to heaven because he was poor, then
naturally salvation would depend upon poverty and rags,
and a man would be saved because he
was poor, or because he was dressed in
rags, or because he was covered with boils.
Well we know that isn't so, because that
would make salvation a human thing and not
a divine thing.
Beside that, there are many beggars that are
liars, and no liar shall have his part
in the lake that burns with fire.
Every liar shall have his part in the
lake that burns with fine brimstone, and no
liar shall have his part in heaven.
There are many beggars that are thieves, and
there are unclean beggars, and there are beggars
who murder, and there are drunken beggars.
So let's remember that this man, Lazarus, didn't
go to heaven because he was poor.
He was poor, and he went to heaven,
but his qualification for going to heaven wasn't
his poverty.
Keep that in mind always when reading this
story.
The second thing I want you to notice
is that the rich man did not go
to hell because he had plenty.
This also is mistakenly believed by some, and
I suppose preached by them.
If that were the case, if a man
went to hell because he had plenty, then
that would be to equate eternity with time,
and ignore the spiritual nature of men.
Men go to hell not because of how
much they possess, they go to hell because
of their spirits.
Many holy persons have had wealth, though no
holy person ever loved money.
I want you to see the distinction there.
The love of money is a root from
which all evil grows, but it is not
money, it is the love of money.
You can love anything so as to make
it idolatrous, and you will perish because you
love evil, or love at least that which
is not God.
So let's remember that we do not have
here a story of social inequality, as one
translator puts at the head of this story.
The danger of social inequality, that you know,
socialism and communism and all the rest, comes
in and says that a man is marvelously
wonderful because he's poor, and that he's a
scoundrel because he has something.
But I notice as soon as the poor
men get anything, they act the way the
rich man got acted when he had it.
So human beings are just human beings whether
they have anything or not.
Now I say the rich man didn't go
to hell because he had money, but he
went to hell for another reason, and Lazarus
went to heaven for another reason.
Now this is the crux of the short
message tonight.
I want you to get it because to
me it is the most solemn thing, and
if you have not heard it, it may
be a startling thing.
But the reason Lazarus went to heaven and,
by these, the rich man went to hell
was that each one went to his separate
place because that was where he belonged by
nature.
Always remember that.
You'll always go where you belong by nature.
The fish belongs in the sea, and it'll
stay in the sea if it can.
The bird belongs in the air, and it
will be in the air when it can
be.
Certain animals belong in the snow, and they
will stay where it's cold if they can.
Others can only live where it's warm, and
they go where it's warm.
They go where they're fitted to exist.
The holy angels inhabit the heaven of God
because they are holy, and God's heaven is
holy.
That's what the Bible means when it says,
Pursue holiness without which no man shall see
God.
A holy God has a holy heaven, and
the holy people are fitted for that heaven,
but there's no other kind of people that
is fitted, or are, if you like, fitted
for heaven.
So each person went where he belonged.
He went where his nature fitted him to
go, and that is where we'll all go
finally, my brethren.
We'll all go where our nature fits us
to go.
In Bernard Celeste's country from which Jerusalem the
Golden is taken, there are 40 stanzas of
that Jerusalem the Golden incidentally, and there are
only about three or four that are ever
sung, but I have read with great delight
over and over the others, and one of
them says this about the saints that walked
around on the earth and suffered and grieved
and labored and worked.
It says when they die, Jerusalem demands them.
Heaven demands them.
Why does heaven demand them?
For the same reason that when you throw
a stone in the air, the earth demands
it.
It goes down where it belongs, the earth.
When you toss a ball into the air,
it goes a little way and then stops
and then starts down, and it starts down
because the earth is claiming its own.
When our Lord Jesus Christ had said about
our Lord Jesus Christ, he said about himself
that when Satan comes, he'll find nothing in
me.
The only reason Christ escaped the devil and
was free from him was that there was
nothing in Jesus that Satan could lay claim
to.
There was nothing there that belonged to him.
Satan couldn't claim him because Satan couldn't show
that there was anything there that was like
Satan.
But never you forget it that as long
as Satan can lay claim to anything in
a man, Satan will do it.
And wherever heaven claims anything, heaven will get
that thing in that person, and where hell
claims anything, hell will get that person.
There was Judas Iscariot.
Nobody sat down and looked over the record,
no archangels or seraphim or cherubim, not even
the great God himself sat down and looked
upon the record and said this deed that
he did was good and this deed was
bad and this deed was good and this
deed was bad.
Somebody tried to tell me, they came to
see me the other day, I had a
chat with a good, nice chap, but he
had the idea that your deeds were weighed
against each other.
Nothing like that took place here, and nothing
like that took place with Judas Iscariot.
Nobody said, I think we ought to send
Judas to hell because Judas has done this
and this and this.
The scripture says he died and went to
his own place, and that was all there
was to it.
He went to where the moral gravitation pulled
him.
Heaven is a magnet that draws the saint
there, and they can't go anywhere else.
Let a saint die, and he couldn't go
to hell because the magnet draws him.
Heaven demands him because his nature belongs there.
But the rich man died and went immediately
to hell, not because he had money, but
because he had a nature that belonged in
hell.
And as soon as he was dead and
the body gave him up, his nature went
where his nature belonged in hell.
To me, this is a terrible thought.
We are very kindly when we get in
trouble, people are to rule, they're very kindly
at the time of death, and we like
to think of all the good deeds that
people did which don't mean a thing.
Or we think very kindly and sympathetically and
pardon the wrong deeds they did, and that
doesn't mean a thing.
Where does his nature belong?
Does his nature belong in hell, or does
his nature belong in heaven?
Does he have a new birth, a new
nature within him?
Does he have the spirit dwelling within, and
does his nature belong with God?
Then nothing can keep him away from God.
Does his nature belong in hell?
Then nothing can take him to be with
God.
Before she was converted, my dear little old
sympathetic mother, she sympathized with everybody to the
point where she suffered most of the time,
not because there was anything wrong with her,
but because things were wrong with other people.
And she'd cluck, cluck, cluck, and chuck-chuck
about people, and she'd say, oh, he doesn't
go to heaven, there's no reason why heaven
should exist.
She'd say, that good man, he was so
good he ought to go to heaven.
Well, he had done some good deeds, but
the point is, what kind of nature did
he have?
Did he have the nature that belonged to
God, and which God demanded back and heaven
claimed?
Or did he have a nature that belonged
to Adam and sin and hell?
Well, that's the way you figure it, not
whether he gave a bag of groceries to
a poor widow, or whether he was kind
to his neighbor when he had his leg
broken, whether he gave to the Red Cross.
That's not the way to tell where you
go when you die.
The way to tell where you go when
you die is what kind of nature you
have in you.
Jesus, our Lord, said, Accept him, and be
born again.
That is, born another time.
What happened when he was born the first
time?
When he was born the first time, he
had a nature given to him.
We don't like to think it, but we're
born into the world with a nature that
belongs in hell and not in heaven, and
when we die we go where our nature
belongs.
That's why the Lord said, Accept a man,
be born another time.
What is it to be born another time?
It is to have an infusion of another
nature.
Theologians call it regeneration or the infusion of
eternal life.
They have different names for it, but it's
the receiving of another nature.
Peter says that by the exceeding great and
gracious promises, we have obtained the nature of
God.
That's what a Christian is.
He's somebody that's obtained the nature of God
through Christ, and because he has God's nature,
he'll go where God is.
He'll go to Abraham's bosom because he has
the same nature of Father Abraham, who is
the father of the faithful.
That, to me, I repeat now for the
second time, is a very solemn truth.
It doesn't make any difference whether I have
joined a church, it doesn't make any difference
whether I give commission, though if I have
a new nature, I will join a church
where the people are that have the new
nature, and I will give to the church
that is there for those that have the
new nature, and I will appreciate what God
has done for me, and I will want
others to share in it, and so I
will mingle with missionary-minded people and evangelistic
-minded people because I will want others also
to share this new nature.
So that's what you and I are set
out to do.
We have arrived at a place where almost
everything we talk about now is a need
to be fulfilled.
We appeal to the people, we say, Well,
you have certain needs, and Jesus is just
the one to meet your needs.
Now, that need may be to have a
good grade in school, it may be to
go someplace in safety, it may be to
have a better job than you have, it
may be to have a restful mind, to
have peace of mind, as we say.
Whatever the need is, our evangelists run out
and say, The Lord will meet your need,
and personal workers say, Well, he'll meet your
need.
This is not what we're sent to say,
that the Lord is a need-meeter.
We are sent to say that the Lord
is the Lord and giver of life, and
that he gives life and a new birth
and a new nature to men who have
a wrong nature.
Because he gives us a new nature, then
when we die we go where our nature
belongs, and our nature belongs where God is
who gave us that nature.
That's why men go to heaven.
They go to heaven because they have the
right nature.
Each nature has its own proper place.
The rich man had been content with earthly
goods.
He had a wrong nature, and nobody could
tell him about it.
He was always busy.
He had one party after another and was
always getting new clothes, and his money hindered
him.
There's no doubt about that.
Our Lord said it was difficult for a
rich man to enter the kingdom of God
because his money was in his way.
That is, his money prevented him from getting
the nature that would have taken him to
God.
He was busy.
Instead of going to the temple or to
the synagogue and hearing the Law of Moses
read and finding out how bad he was,
and hearing the Psalms read and finding out
he could be forgiven, he was a Jew,
instead of doing that he had another party
and dressed richly and fared sumptuously.
He had plenty to eat and plenty to
wear, and so his money came between him
and God.
But it wasn't his money that damned him,
it was his nature that damned him.
If we could only keep that in mind
and remember it, we'd be good theologians and
we'd be wise in the truth.
But to get the notion that the Lord
looks at a man and says, Well, you
enjoyed yourself on earth, didn't you?
Well, you go to hell.
You had a tough time on earth, didn't
you?
Well, you come to heaven.
That is simply making heaven to be a
kind of a florid for people that can't
stand the snow.
The place where people go, they say, Well,
earth treats me pretty bad.
I was sick while I was on earth,
and I was miserable, and I didn't have
much money and never could hold a job.
Oh, well, the Lord said, You deserve something
better.
Off to heaven you go.
Another man says, How about you?
Well, I had plenty.
I had two or three estates.
I had a couple in Canada and one
in California and one in Florida, and I
had plenty.
All right, God says, You've had your share.
Well, you know that?
That's figuring things the way man figures them.
It's looking at things the way man sees
them, and it isn't biblical at all.
God doesn't ask how much money you had
or how little.
He doesn't ask whether you ate steaks or
whether you lived on the scraps.
Your nature takes you where you're going.
Today you're trusted in the mercy of God.
It was the mercy of God that took
the man to heaven, the mercy of God
that gave him the new nature and prepared
him for heaven above.
It was the mercy of God that forgave
him his sins.
You say, The Bible doesn't say he sinned.
Yes, it does.
Have you found that in the Bible, that
the poor man sinned?
Have you found that there?
Did you say you didn't read it?
Yes, I did.
Not tonight, but I read it.
All have sinned and come short of the
glory of God.
There is none that doeth good, no, not
one.
There is not one that doeth righteousness.
He was a man, and he, being a
man, sinned.
Therefore, the poor man was a sinner.
And if the poor man had died a
sinner, his poverty wouldn't have taken him to
heaven.
He was cleansed and pardoned by the Lord
God of Abraham, so that when he died
he could go to Abraham's bosom.
But the rich man perished because he had
neglected in his preoccupation with the wealth of
this world, he had neglected to seek the
pardon and the mercy of God, and so
he went to hell.
And when he got there, he called to
Abraham and recognized him.
Did you say, how about this?
Well, this is not part of the sermon
tonight, but it's teaching of the Bible, and
teaching of the old Jews, and the teaching
of the Church, that before Christ rose from
the dead and went to God's right hand,
the place of the dead, shul, hades, or
hell, was somewhere below and divided into two
compartments, and the good were in one side
and the evil in another.
And when our Lord died, you remember the
old creed says, and he died and he
descended into hell.
And some people don't like it, but he
did.
He went down where that place, not the
fiery part of hell, but that part we
call now Abraham's bosom, and he gathered all
that were there and took them to heaven
above.
This is, I say, apart from another sermon.
But there was a division there, and it
was called a great gulf.
It was fixed between the two.
That is not the gulf that is fixed
between the hell that's out there somewhere and
the heaven that's there somewhere, but it is
the gulf that was fixed in those days
before our Lord led captivity captive and gave
gifts unto man.
So Abraham could see the beggar, or yes,
could see the beggar and take him in
his arms, and the beggar could see across
that gulf that was fixed and see the
man who was in hell suffering there.
And he cried, speak to my brothers, let
they come to this place.
The man who hadn't time to think about
his brothers while he was on earth enjoying
himself with his money thinks about his brothers
now where he can't do anything about it.
But always remember, if you were to make
a triangle, if you were to have heaven
here and hell here and earth here, remember
from earth there's a one-way street to
hell, and from earth there's a one-way
street to heaven.
But between heaven and hell there is no
passage at all.
Scripture says, You that would come to us
cannot, and we that might want to go
to you cannot.
The man in heaven above who might want
to go to hell, if it were possible
to speak to someone there, cannot go.
There is no passageway, there is no road,
no highway between heaven and hell, and there
is a one-way highway between earth and
hell.
The man who goes there can't come back,
and the one who goes to heaven can't
come back.
So says the scripture.
Speak to my brother, he says.
He might have been a hard and inhuman
man while he lived, not because he really
was hard, but because he was fleshly and
lustful and loved to eat and drink and
feast and forgot his soul and forgot his
breath, the soul of his brethren.
Now he felt concern for his sinning brethren.
That's the voice of the lost, my brother.
I believe it's the voice of the lost
sounding tonight, if you and I had good
enough ears to hear it, because here our
Lord Jesus Christ let us hear it.
He let us hear a voice that never
had been heard by anybody but the damned.
Now we hear it.
We hear the voice saying, let's send somebody
back.
You notice he didn't ask to go.
He said, send Lazarus, because he's a saved
man and he could go.
The voice of the lost, friends and relatives.
The rich man had been a religious Jew,
that's quite obvious, because he called him Father
Abraham.
He was not a Gentile.
He had opportunity.
He could have gone to the synagogue and
heard the reading of the law, which the
Bible says Moses has read every Sabbath in
your synagogue.
Paul said he was a rich man and
he was a Jew, and he knew something
of theology.
He had been taught, evidently, as a lad
the doctrines of Israel.
But he didn't come.
Nobody wants to say anything these days that
gets them in trouble.
Everybody wants to stay out of trouble, and
that's why you hear very little blunt, downright
truth telling, even from the best pulpits.
But I'll say this, nevertheless, that a great
many people go to hell from churches.
A great many.
Not only that, but I am deeply convinced
that a great many go to hell from
the pulpits.
This rich man, this religious Jew, knew Abraham
and called him Father Abraham, and knew something
of the mercy of God, and knew something
of the patience of God.
He knew something of theology.
I'm not sure, but this rich man, now
that the riches he threw of that, that's
out of his circle of interest, I'm not
sure he couldn't have given a few pretty
good answers to the Jewish catechism.
But he was in hell, nevertheless.
It's an awful thought.
Nobody wants to come to hear preachers say
it.
Nobody is ever popular that dares to say
it.
But I believe it's true, nevertheless, that hell
receives many recruits from the pulpits, from the
boards, women's societies, youth groups of the church,
because they are not taught they need to
be born again, they are not taught that
Christ died for their sins according to the
scriptures, they are not taught that they need
to be washed in the blood and filled
with the Spirit, they are not taught this.
And they go, as the rich man went,
preoccupied with other things but religious, not that
they'd know Abraham, they saw him and could
recite the catechism all right, but they're not
prepared for heaven because their nature is not
fit for heaven.
And they will perish because they have a
perishing nature.
Like Judas, when they die they'll go to
their own place.
No matter how nice they were, they'll go
to their own place.
So it's not human niceness, it's not the
friendly joviality of Adam that saves a man,
it's having a new birth, being regenerated, having
the nature of God planted in your heart,
having the life of God imparted to your
soul, then you're saved.
And if you die in that state you
could not go to hell because heaven demands
you, and will demand you.
The voice of many a lost preacher is
more eloquent now from hell down there than
it ever was when he preached on earth.
He only could be heard, one man was
heard, he wasn't a preacher, he was just
a Jew who had lots of money while
he was on earth and went there.
But I doubt not that many a man,
if he could only speak to the congregations
of lost men now in this world, would
speak more eloquently and persuasively from the world
below.
And yet I wonder if he would speak
more persuasively.
He certainly would speak more eloquently, but our
Lord said, they have Moses and the prophets,
let them hear them.
For if they hear not Moses and the
prophets, neither would they be persuaded, though one
rose from the dead.
Somebody says we need something dramatic, something tremendous.
Yes, but here is that dramatic, tremendous truth.
It's truth that saves men, not drama.
Now God help us.
I hope that every one of you is
renewed and born again, and you have the
nature of God in you and eternal life,
and that you're ready to go home by
the way of the cross.
I hope that.
If it's not so, then I'm available to
speak to you following this service in the
side room.
Brother Coulter, myself, any one of the numbers
of men and women here would be happy
to speak to you.
If you think it over now, have you
had that event, have you had that encounter
with God that took away your sin and
imparted to you that nature which belongs in
heaven, God's own nature, eternal life?
Or are you just a religious person doing
pretty good, not being too bad, but with
no renewal of nature?
If that's the case, then I urgently invite
you, and I think if you listen you'll
hear a voice from below saying, let somebody
go and tell them lest they come to
this place of torment.
Let's pray.
Lord, how thou didst ever find us when
so many millions go their way careless tonight.
We'll never know, but it's great sweet grace
eternal that takes all our sins away.
And David's royal fountain washes us clean.
We thank thee, pray thee for all present
to see.
Pray there might be a searching of heart
and an exposing of our nature before thy
light to know whether indeed we belong in
heaven or in hell, whether indeed we're sons
of Adam or sons of God.
O God, save us from carelessness.
Here in Canada and down in the United
States and many, a few other countries in
the world, we're like this rich man.
We have so much.
We live sumptuous, and it's in our way,
and it's making us forget that sometime soon
we're going to die, and we're going to
go where the claim is laid to us,
where we belong.
O God, help this evening, this hour, and
pray for Christ.
Let us sing, and if now or after
this service you want to see me, I'll
be available.