"Then he said, 'I beg you therefore,
father, that you would send him to my father's house,
for I have five brothers, that he may testify
to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.' Abraham said to him,
'They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.' And he said, 'No, father Abraham; but if one
goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' But he said to him, 'If they do
not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise
from the dead.' " – Luke 16.27-31
This is a passage that I almost wish we could overlook. It
is the account of a rich man who lived for himself and did quite well in this
life and a beggar who struggled in this life. In the story they both die and
find their positions reversed. The rich man finds himself in a place of torment
and poor Lazarus finds himself carried safely to what the passage calls ‘Abraham’s
bosom.’
We can argue specifics and theology all day long, but that
is already being done. The truth is that one man died and went to heaven and
the other died and went to Hell (or Hades). His eventual fate will be the lake
of fire. The other went to Heaven.
What is the difference? One had repented and the other had
not. The rich men pled for someone to go tell his brothers about this place of
torment so that they might repent. He wanted a heavenly messenger to go to his
brothers. They would surely believe if that happened.
But no – Abraham said that they have ‘Moses and the prophets
(their Bibles) and if they don’t believe that they wouldn’t be persuaded even
if someone rose from the dead to tell them.
Sadly, that ‘place of torment’ still exists. Those who don’t
repent will spend eternity there. We have the word of God to share. God is not
going to send someone from hell to witness to the lost. That is our job. We need to get busy.
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