Leaving Beyond – Grounded In Scripture

Written by: April J. Buchanan

The problem with hearing words that strike fear into your heart and urge you to flee now to Christ because tomorrow you may die is this: when tomorrow comes and you wake again, you convince yourself you have overcome that fear. You begin to call it irrational. You comfort yourself with the thought of living for today, reasoning that perhaps tomorrow will not come.

It is true that we are not promised tomorrow. But that is not our greatest concern. Our great concern is that God is holy. He is good. He is righteous. And we are not. He is just, and He will judge every man righteously.

C. H. Spurgeon writes,

“The wrath of God does not end with death. This is a truth which the preacher cannot mention without trembling, nor without wondering that he does not tremble more. The eternity of punishment is a thought which crushes the heart. You have buried the man, but you have not buried his sins. His sins live and are immortal. They have gone before him to judgment, or they will follow after him to bear their witness as to the evil of his heart and the rebellion of his life. The Lord God is slow to anger, but when He is once aroused to it, as He will be against those who finally reject his Son, he will put forth all his omnipotence to crush his enemies.

I am certain that to preach the wrath of God with a hard heart, a cold lip, a tearless eye, and an unfeeling spirit is to harden men, not benefit them.

The conscience of man, when he is really quickened and awakened by the Holy Spirit, speaks the truth. It rings the great alarm bell. And if he turns over in his bed, that great alarm bell rings out again and again, ‘The wrath to come! The wrath to come! The wrath to come!…’

There is no trouble like genuine conviction of sin. Racks, scorpions, death—these are troubles to be laughed at, as compared with the weight of guilt pressing on the conscience, the sight of an angry God, and the fear of the wrath to come.”

Death is not our greatest fear. We may live another day. But we will stand before the righteous and just God.

Some pastors strike fear in the hearts of men by speaking much of hell, Satan, and the certainty of death. Then they offer what amounts to a “get out of hell free” message. They know wicked men do not want to go to hell. So they present a Jesus who loves them deeply and simply wants to help them out.

But they fail to deal honestly with who God is. They fail to make clear that hell is what we deserve because God is just, and His wrath is good and holy against sinners such as ourselves. They do not speak plainly of His justice and His mercy, His wrath and His love, His grace toward those who are entirely undeserving.

The message of the Gospel is not merely escaping consequences and clinging to the kindness of a Jesus who wants to rescue us from discomfort and suffering. That is a distorted view of the holiness of God and of the depth of our sin.

Unless men speak honestly about who God is, we will never see rightly who we are. When God’s character is softened, the Gospel is perverted. Men are converted by a message that feels good but does not save.

We need sobering words that speak with authority and strip us of our delusions about God and about ourselves. We need the true Gospel.

If the message we proclaim does not lead men to cry out against their own hearts, and if it never provokes hostility toward the faithful proclamation of truth, we may need to examine what we are proclaiming.

The unregenerate love a Jesus who keeps them out of hell. They hate the Jesus who is Lord, who commands all men everywhere to repent and to trust in Him alone for the salvation of their souls.