The Rich Man and the Beggar

Luke 16:19:

“There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

“The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

“But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

“He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’

“Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’

“‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’

“He said to [them], ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Amen.

Father, we pray that, with our Bibles open upon our laps, that you will be our teacher. Unless you come and quicken your Word and quicken our ears and illumine your Scriptures and open our eyes, then the whole exercise is simply the futility of listening to a man talk. But we believe that when your Word is really preached, that your voice is truly heard. So we listen for your voice as we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

For those of you who are particularly perceptive and have been following our studies in Luke’s Gospel, you will notice that I’ve just made a jump of ten verses. I acknowledge that for the three of you that knew that I did that, and the rest of you are saying, “Oh, yes, that’s remarkable, isn’t it?” although you hadn’t a clue where we were last time, and you’ve been making a discovery this time. That’s fine. I think I would be in much the same boat if I weren’t able to go and look at what I did last time. The reason that I’m doing this is because I want to come back and pick up the central section from verse 10 to verse 18 but allow these parables to follow in succession from one another.

This is the third of three parables that Jesus has told, each of which begins concerning a man. In the first of them, in Luke 15, he says, “There was a man who had two sons.”[1] At the beginning of chapter 16 he said, “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions.”[2] Here, in the nineteenth verse, he says, “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen.” So, clearly, the ongoing dialogue between Jesus and his listeners is cohesive. These are not some random bits and pieces that have been thrown together by somebody trying to put a Gospel together, but it is the unfolding instruction of Jesus that they would be concerned about the abuse of people and that they would be concerned about an overpreoccupation with possessions.

And at the beginning of chapter 15, we’re told that Jesus was speaking, and it was the folks who were outside the realm of religious orthodoxy who were particularly interested in listening. Luke tells us that it was “the tax collectors and [the] ‘sinners’”[3] and the kind of people that didn’t routinely show up at services. The folks that you would find down the pub rather than down at the church, the kind of people who were out just enjoying sport and recreation, these were the individuals who were saying, “Oh, we want to hear what Jesus has to say.” So he spoke in such a way that the outsiders were drawn in. And funnily enough, the insiders were thrown out—that the religious people, who you would have thought would be listening particularly carefully to this rabbi, were actually just muttering, because they didn’t like what it was he had to say. And indeed, by the time he had finished the previous parable, which some of us have studied together, their response was just to sneer at Jesus. In verse 14: “The Pharisees … loved money,” they heard what Jesus had to say, and so they “were sneering at Jesus.” So Jesus says, “Well, let me tell you another story that’ll wipe the sneer off your faces.” That’s my paraphrase. He doesn’t actually say that.

What Jesus is doing here is challenging his listeners—and we are his listeners this morning—to consider their destiny. The writer of Ecclesiastes says,

It is better to go to a house of mourning
 than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of every man;
 [and] the living should take this to heart.[4]

In other words, the time to think about dying is while you’re still alive, because once you’re dead, you’ve had it. There will be no further opportunity after death to make decisions that will affect your eternal destiny. There have been those throughout the history of the church who have found in obscure places mechanisms for trying to create that postdeath experience. But just a careful reading of the Bible makes it impossible for us to reach those conclusions. Rather, “it is appointed unto [man] once to die, [and] after this [comes] judgment.”[5] And Jesus here speaks about this matter of eternal destiny and confronts his listeners with an immense challenge.

Jesus spoke in such a way that the outsiders were drawn in. And funnily enough, the insiders were thrown out.

Well, his stories are wonderful, aren’t they? I hope you’re enjoying them. I certainly am. I love it every time I come to one and he says, “I have a story for you.” As a child growing up, I loved, always, when I was told stories. I had really no greater joy than someone telling me a story. And so every time I read and it says, “There was a rich man who was dressed in [fine] purple,” I say, “Well, here we go again. I’m sure this is going to be a great one as well.”

It’s the story of two men and five brothers. Only one of the individuals has a speaking part. That’s the first fellow. “There was a rich man.” How do we know that he was rich? Well, by his clothes, first of all: He was “dressed in purple and fine linen.” You say, “Well, why is purple an indication of financial well-being?” Well, the purple dye was very costly. It was squeezed from a particular shellfish, the Murex shellfish. They were rare. Therefore, to get sufficient quantity to dye clothes was an indication of the fact that the person was not short of cash. At the same time, to be able to line these magnificent robes with the kind of “fine linen” which is referred to here, the kind of material that would be used also as undergarments, were a significant expression of the man’s wealth.

And we can understand that, because in the same way today, there are all kinds of clothes that represent, from the infancy of children now all the way through the spectrum, some indication of status. And indeed, much of the clothing industry seems to be driven in its marketing strategy by trying to appeal to the acquisitive nature of us, that we might be able to say, “Yes, this is, of course, one of those, you know.” My son said to me yesterday, a suit I was wearing—I had a black suit—he said, “What is that suit?” I said, “It is a suit.” He said, “Yes, but what suit is it?” So I looked inside, and it just said, you know, like, “A Suit.” So he was singularly unimpressed. But that was fine. It was okay. What did he want on it, a sticker or something? We understand that. And this man was identified in that way.

He was identified by his clothes, and he was also identified by his feasts. That’s the significance of the phrase “[He] lived in luxury every day.” It’s a big, long Greek verb. It’s the same verb that you have in Luke 15, where the father says, “Let’s have a party. Let’s kill the fatted calf. Let’s make merry.”[6] That’s the same phraseology that is employed here. So in other words, people knew. They said, “The parties at the rich man’s house are fantastic.” He lived the good life. He didn’t have down days. He “lived in luxury every day.”

And if you doubted this and were unable to get access to him, then there was one dead giveaway of his financial status, and that was his gate. Verse 20, it says, “At his gate was laid a beggar.” Why does it mention the gate? Because it was the mother of all gates. This wasn’t some little gate, you know, that hangs on a wooden fence. The word that is used here for “gate” is of a huge, ornamental portico such as you would find in front of a palace or perhaps in the entryway to a temple.

So there wasn’t much else that could be put in his obituary. Essentially, what they were able to write when he died was “He was a rich man.” And if you think about it for a moment or two, there is something quite sad in such a description.

Now, the second individual who is identified for us at verse 20 is also tied up with his gate. The difference is he’s not in the gate; he’s at the gate. Inside the gate was total luxury; at the gate was abject poverty. The word here for “laid” at the entrance is actually marked by a measure of decorum that is not present in the Greek. It really means that he was thrown at the gate. Perhaps somebody dropped him off as a beggar, or perhaps he was routinely just throwing himself down at the gate—the kind of individual who is so much a fixture of the locale that people just routinely ignore him, so that this man would be able to come in and out of this vast gate and past the beggar each time, with his entourage moving on and ignoring him completely.

If the back of the rich man was covered in fine purple and in wonderful linens, the back of the beggar was covered in sores. He was malnourished, and his skin bore the evidence. There were no feasts for him. In fact, it says that he longed “to eat what fell from the rich man’s table.” We might contemporize it by saying that on a Thursday morning, when the garbage trucks went down and out of the gate and off down the road, the beggar lying there said, “You know, I wish I could get my hands on some of that guy’s garbage. Because he throws out after these parties better food than I’ve ever eaten in my life.” That’s how hungry he was. That’s how much in need he was. If he could have got his hands on the stuff that the people threw out, he would have eaten it.

There is wonderful stuff at the back of McDonald’s. You say, “Oh, not only is he gathering pennies now, but he’s eating out of the trash at McDonald’s!” No, I haven’t gone there, but there’s just something that rankles at me when I think about it being there. ’Cause there is an immense dissonance, isn’t there, between all of that stuff lying at the back of McDonald’s and all of those people lying in the street? There is some strange and bewildering circumstance when we are able to destroy product in the West in order to keep up our economic policies while nations of the world starve to death.

We all understand inequality. We face it every day. That’s why everybody is so interested in equality. The Marxist is interested in the equality that comes about as a result of giving everybody the same start. The capitalist is interested in the equality that comes about as giving everybody the same opportunity. But both are interested in equality. Both have a different strategy for dealing with it. The Bible is not silent on these themes. Jesus here is dealing with an inequity that is very real and, with the passage of time, is no less present.

All those of you who love dogs, here you are: “Even the dogs came and licked his sores.” Now, is that a good lick or a bad lick? You have to try and determine. I don’t know. At first I thought, “Oh, that’s nice. The dogs were licking his sores.” Then I thought, “Oh, that’s disgusting. The dogs were licking his sores!” I’m actually at “disgusting” at the moment. I may go back to “That’s nice,” but I think what he’s saying here is he’s doing the same thing as in Luke 15. Remember? “And he went, and there was a famine in the land. And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he fain would have filled his belly with the husks of the pigs, but nobody would give him anything.”[7] In other words, his degradation was so bad that his only companions now were pigs.

The same is true here in the story of this man. The only creatures that pay any attention to him at all are the scavenging dogs from the neighborhood, or perhaps the dogs from the rich man’s estate, who come down and lick him. And perhaps his condition is so malnourished that he is unable to lift his hand to defend himself against the interference of these creatures. Read it any way you choose; it’s not germane to the issue. It simply expresses the extent of his degradation.

But he has something, you will notice, that the rich man doesn’t have. What’s that? He has a name. The rich man’s just a faceless millionaire. He’s just run-of-the-mill. The beggar has a name. Do you know what I found interesting? I can’t find any other parable that Jesus told where he gives a name to one of his characters—not one. This is the only one. And he gives him the name Lazarus. He says there was a man called Lazarus, or Eliezer. The word actually means “God has helped me.” There was a beggar lying in abject poverty, the dogs licked his sores, and his name was “God has helped me.” Can you imagine the listener saying, “What?” Because standing from the outside and looking at the circumstances of these two individuals, you would say, “If anybody should have a name ‘God has helped me,’ it should be the man with the purple and the linen.” But no, he says. Why?

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are [they that] mourn, for they [shall] be comforted.”[8] Happy are the sad. Rich are the pure. Exalted are the humble. You see, how Jesus turns everything upside down—turns the Western dream of being a rich man, wearing the right clothes, living in the right house, and being able to host the right kind of parties, turns it absolutely upside down and says, “Now, I want to talk to you about a beggar with dogs licking his back.” You see, the Pharisees are sneering all over again. They say, “Well, we don’t like that kind of thing, Jesus.”

Now, the bells should be ringing in the minds of his listeners and should be ringing in the minds of some of us who’ve been studying Luke’s Gospel. We should hear Jesus saying, “Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort”—Luke 6:24. “Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.” What Jesus was saying there was this: that if riches is all you have, you’d better enjoy it, because that’s it. ’Cause if you go beyond this into the realm of eternity, where riches are irrelevant, then what will be your comfort? So, woe to you for whom riches, acquisitiveness, acquisition, the good life is the end of the journey. Woe to you, because you’ve had it!

In fact, that’s the significance here, isn’t it? When Abraham responds to the rich man, he says, “Listen, in your lifetime”—verse 25—“you received your good things. I mean, I hope you had a good life, because that was it. You had your good stuff. You made your choice. You said, ‘I don’t want to listen to the Bible. I don’t want to obey God. I don’t want to listen to Moses and the Prophets. I just want to do what I want to do.’” So Abraham says, “You made your choice in time; you live with it in eternity.” Do you understand this? That the decisions that we make in time will impinge upon what eternity means for us. And time is such a short thing, and eternity is unending.

This man obviously wasn’t prepared to do what Jesus had said in the previous parable. Remember, in 16:9 he had said, “Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves.” This man hadn’t made a friend of the beggar at his gate, clearly. He obviously knew who he was; otherwise, he couldn’t call him by name and shout for him and ask him to go and do things for him. So it wasn’t he could say, “I didn’t know there was a beggar at my gate.” He knew there was a beggar at the gate. He knew the name of the beggar at the gate. He must have passed in the morning, said, “Well, there’s old Eliezer. There’s old—hahaha!—‘God has helped,’ you know. If that’s God helping, you know…” And that’s what people say: “Well, if this is your God, and this is what he does…” You say, “Hang on a minute. The records are not finished yet. We haven’t taken the final test. The whistle hasn’t blown. It’s not the end of the game. I know it looks like this.” Why do the people who seem to do right get it in the ear, and why is it that the people that seem to just do what they want prosper so greatly? That’s a question from the Bible.

Modern America has lived with that. Some of the most fantastic spiritual songs have come out of that experience, have they not?

Tempted and tried, we’re oft left to wonder
Why it should be thus all the day long
When there are others living around us,
Never molested, though in the wrong.

Further along we’ll know all about it,
And further along we’ll understand why;
So, cheer up, my brother, cheer up, my sister,
And live in the sunshine,
’Cause we’ll understand it all by and by.[9]

But you see, we are such time-bound creatures that we have no concept of then to influence us in the living of the now. So we live all of our now as if there were no then—which is really dumb. Because then is what it’s about, and now is a short journey. And this guy obviously never paid attention if he heard Jesus say, “When you’re putting together a party list, invite the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame.”[10]

Now, we must hasten on, ’cause some of you already are drifting off. I can see that. Verse 22. Death changes everything. Scene 1: in which the circumstances of these two individuals are described in their lifetime. Scene 2 takes us into the portals of eternity and gives us, in an allegorical fashion, an insight into the dramatic reversal of roles.

People who live, having gained access to every club and every restaurant and every place, have some assumption in their minds that when they go heaven, they’re going to be able to do the same thing: They’re going to get their car valet parked, they’re going to get immediate access to whatever it is, they’ll be able to sit at the right table, and so on, because “Oh, yes, it is you, Mr. Bellingsgate. Do come in, and we have a place just for you here.”

No, that’s what this is all about, you see. The roles are reversed. You can hardly go through a week without somebody saying, “Death is the great equalizer.” “Death is the great equalizer.” Well, there’s a sense in which that’s true. Death doesn’t recognize class distinction. So “no matter if you’re born to play the king or pawn, for the line is thinly drawn ’tween joy and sorrow.”[11] It’s a fine line between genius and craziness. It’s a fine line between sickness and health. And when you take that horizontal journey in the back of a hearse, it’s not going to matter whether you’re a professor or whether you were a nincompoop. And in that sense, death will equalize. Who was it, Three Dog Night or whatever? You know,

Oh, the games people play now,
Every night and every day now,
Never [thinking] what they say now,
Never saying what they mean.

And they while away [their] hours
In their ivory towers
Till they’re covered up with flowers
In the back of a black limousine.[12]

Chorus: “Na na na, na na na…” That was the great thing about the ’60s. They didn’t worry about lyrics. You just, when you’ve reached the end of a line, you just could launch into something like that. Now, the twenty-first century, they’ve gone for total incoherence.

Death doesn’t recognize class distinction. Jesus makes it very, very clear that society beyond the grave—notice this; look carefully at your Bibles; see if what I’m telling you is true—that society beyond the grave is no more egalitarian than society prior to the grave. In other words, we’re not all going to go off into eternity and everybody get the same kind of little garden and the same kind of little place, and no matter who we were or what we did or what we believed, eventually, we’re all just going to be absorbed into some eternal, blissful environment in which we just sort of eke out the remainder of this strange notion of eternity. No.

What Jesus says is that eternity—and it’s revealed here in this story that he tells—eternity reveals a separation that is far more polarized and far more uncrossable than that which was represented at the rich man’s gate. And essentially, what he’s saying is this: “If you think there is an inequity in time, check out eternity.” Because, you see, there was more of a possibility of the poor beggar being able to gain access through the gate to one of the rich man’s feasts than there was a possibility of the rich man being able to cross from hell into heaven. That’s what he’s saying. You can’t live with the notion that somehow or another, the experience of death will eradicate everything for us, and it all starts with a clean slate from there simply because we died. Jesus says no. The decisions that we make in time impact our life in eternity. That’s the significance of verse 26: Abraham says, “Between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from [there] to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.”

Now, let me just say a word or two about the central part of this parable. And I’ll say this as swiftly as I can but, hopefully, helpfully. What are we going to do with the details of this story: the dipping of the finger in the water, the cooling of “my tongue,” and so on? Let me just remind you that we are dealing here with a parable—that is, that Jesus is using in this section of this Gospel a literary device for teaching spiritual truths by allegorical means—that Jesus is not, in this section, seeking to satisfy the curiosity of those who are concerned about the details of life after death. If you use this parable to try and build a doctrine of the afterlife, you will be confused, and you will in turn be very confusing to everybody else. If you think about what Jesus is doing here: He is speaking in a moment in time; he is speaking to a gathered company of people; this eventually is inscripturated so that men and women living in time may be confronted by the seriousness of making decisions now which will affect then.

So in other words, we need to remind ourselves that the plain things are the main things, and the main things are the plain things. So, for example, where it says that “when the beggar died … the angels carried him to Abraham’s side”—now, this can take the average home Bible study off on one of the most unbelievable tangents you could ever conceive of. And the way to remedy that is to ask yourself the question, “How many other places in the New Testament is there any mention of anybody dying and being taken by angels to the side of Abraham?” And the answer is: not one single other reference in the whole New Testament. Aha! So are we going to build a doctrine, then, on one reference in the middle of a parable? Not if we’re wise.

If you use this parable to try and build a doctrine of the afterlife, you will be confused, and you will in turn be very confusing to everybody else.

Well, where does this kind of emphasis come? Well, it actually comes in the rabbinical writings. It’s impregnated in the rabbis’ teachings. Aha! So what does Jesus do? He takes the thought forms and the expressions and the genre of those to whom he is speaking, and he employs them in order to engage their minds so that, by means of these different hooks and barbs, he may then lead them to the central truth that he is conveying. Therefore, it is unwise to press the details too far.

And having said that, someone will come up to me or write to me this week, and they’ll say, “Well, is it possible to see heaven from hell?” you see. That’s one of the questions: “He was in hell, and he looked over, and he saw heaven. Can you see heaven from hell?” Answer: I don’t know. So don’t write—unless you want a different answer. But, I mean, I want you to know what the answer is right now. You say, “Well, aren’t you taking the Bible literally?” Yes, I am. I am taking it very literally. What we have here is a description, a parable, an allegory, and we’ve learned already in the parables that you don’t try and take everything and explain it all away. You realize that in laying out the story, Jesus is making a central point.

So, let’s take our principle: The plain things are the main things, and the main things are the plain things. What, then, can we say from this? Well, number one, we can say categorically, heaven and hell exist. Jesus is in no doubt about that, right? One went here; one went there. Secondly, personalities survive death in a conscious state. This person did not go into oblivion and was whirring around, as it were, on a cloud. No, he went somewhere, and he knew that he was there, and he knew that as a result of being there, he was not there. We can say that categorically. Thirdly, it is clear that death brings division and distinction between human beings. Also: that the dead are sustained by God in two different states, some in a state of bliss along with the redeemed of every age, represented here in Abraham as the father of the faith, and others in a state of isolated anguish, represented by this lonely rich man in hell.

Now, you see, when you go to the heart of the matter and you say, “Well, what can we say with absolute clarity?” then it’s like eating fish: When you get a bone, you take the bone out, you lay it at the side, and then you go ahead and eat the rest of the fish. You don’t make the bone the feature of the remainder of the meal, unless there’s something wrong with you. And when you read your Bible, if you get to something like “He dipped his finger in the water,” you know, and then you want to make that the key to the rest of the evening, then there’s something wrong with you. Because the Bible has not been put together as some trick book that only a weird group of people can ferret the meaning from. This is not some strange code. You can get that at the mall, but you don’t get that in the Bible. This is not a trick book that only the initiated can discover. It is clear. You need only an open heart and a thinking mind, and you will be able to get to the gist of it all and the central parts of it all. Jesus is seeking to express incomprehensible things in comprehensible language as an accommodation to each of us, who can only figure things in terms of time and space.

The crux question, to which I come in conclusion, is surely this: Any thinking person says, “Well, I’m not sure about this, and I’m not sure about that, but there is one question I want to ask: How did the one guy end up in hell, and how did the other guy end up in heaven? On what basis? Is this a kind of quasi-Marxist critique of the inequalities of a class-ridden culture? You know, is this the victory of the working classes over the bourgeoise employers?” Well, there are some people who have taught that from this parable. You can read about it in liberation theology. That’s the whole emphasis. And the fact is, you need an empty head and a closed Bible to get there. It’s obvious that Jesus is not saying that.

The key here is not that the man went to hell because he was rich, and the poor man went to heaven because he was poor. That would then lead us all to the divesting of everything—so, you know, people would be running out here trying to put a hole in your boat in Lake Erie so that you can sink it as another means of being able to get to heaven, because you’re sure not going to get to heaven on a boat in Lake Erie, because that’s a sort of bourgeois entity.

Well, no, Abraham’s in heaven. Abraham’s the key character here. Do you remember Abraham? Abraham is the Daddy Warbucks of the Old Testament! This is not some guy who lived in a shack. This is Abraham. Abraham had stuff! Stuff, stuff, stuff! So we know that it is not poverty that gets you to heaven—physical poverty. And we know that it is not riches that keep you from heaven. So what in the world’s going on?

What Jesus is revealing in this story is an expression of what he has taught in the previous story. He said, “[Listen,] you cannot serve … God and Money.”[13] “If you make money your god, then I cannot be your God. And only those whose God I am will live with me in eternity.” Therefore, to the extent that—whether it is money, whether it is academics, whether it is success, whether it is relationships, whether it is pride, whatever it might be—to the extent that any other thing would take the dominance of my life, thereby meaning that I refuse to bow before God, to believe his Word, to trust his promises, and to accept his Son, any of those things will keep me out of heaven. And to the extent that this man’s poverty… And it’s interesting, isn’t it? He never speaks any time at all in the whole parable. There’s no complaining out of him at the gate, and there’s no rah-rah out of him in heaven. “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” “I deserve nothing.”

See, that’s what’s keeping some of us from faith: We believe we deserve it! “I think God should come and do a miracle for me. If he would come and do a miracle for me, then I’d believe him.” Some of you are waiting for the Ghost of Christmas Past to come and visit you somewhere in the middle of the night, you see, to remove your Scrooge-like experience. I’ve got news for you: no miracle, no ghost! That’s the answer that is given by Abraham. The guy says, “Well, listen, if you would go to my brothers and let them know so that they won’t come…” Abraham said, “I don’t need to go to your brothers.” Why? “They’ve got their Bibles.” That’s the message. “They have got Moses and the Prophets. They’ve got the Decalogue, and they’ve got the prophetic books. They’ve got their Bibles.”

See this guy? When you become a person like this, it’s very, very difficult. He’s still giving orders from hell! Right? Even hell doesn’t cure a guy like this. “Send Lazarus over, and get me a drink of water, would you, please?”

“Hey, who do you think you are? You’re in hell, mister! You’re not giving directions to anybody.”

“Ah, well then, could you send somebody over to my brothers’ house?”

“Hey, you don’t give directions. You’re done. They’ve got their Bibles.”

“Oh, no,” he says, “no, no, no. Abraham, Abraham, excuse me, excuse me. Let me just tell you something: If somebody would rise from the dead, you see—if we could send Lazarus over there, if we could send the beggar over… They knew the beggar died. If the beggar shows up at their house, they’re going to believe!”

“Hey, if they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.”

Here it is. The confidence of heaven is in the Bible. If you will not believe the Bible, you will not believe in Christ. If you will not be changed by the Bible, you will remain unchanged.

Look at the story. Who would you like to be? Be honest. Well, I’d like to be the guy with the nice clothes, the big driveway, the gate, the parties. I don’t want to be the guy lying there in the street, dogs licking my back. Well, what if eternity was just to completely reverse the roles?

See, here’s the question… And I’m finished now, just so you know. I promise I’m finished. I can hear in my head I’m finished, so I might as well acknowledge it. But the challenge for the Parkside congregation out of Luke’s Gospel is surely this. Because by any standards, we are rich people. I mean we’re all rich. I don’t care what the scale is; we are stinking rich. And we have the freedom to travel. We have the freedom of our passports. We have opportunities, gazillions of opportunities. We have so much that is ours. And impregnated in our skulls, along with that is somehow the notion that because we’ve gained access to all of these other things, then we’ll be able to gain access to heaven as well. And Jesus says, “No. You can’t serve God and Money at the same time.”

The condemnation of the man was not that he was wealthy. The condemnation of the man was not even how he became wealthy. The condemnation of the man was that he was just wealthy. That’s all he had. That was his treasure. “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?”[14] Instead of using what he had as an expression of his gratitude to God, as an expression of his kindness to others, as a means of enabling others, he used it as a basis of self-gratification.

The confidence of heaven is in the Bible. If you will not believe the Bible, you will not believe in Christ.

He was the kind of man, if we saw him in the Chagrin Valley, everybody’d say, “He’s a very nice man. He never does anybody any wrong at all. And therefore, if he’s a nice man, and he’s obviously done well, and he never does anybody any wrong at all, then presumably, he’s going to heaven.” No, he’s not. And the reason he’s not going to heaven is not on account of the bad things he’d done, but the reason he’s not going to heaven is on account of the good things that he had left undone. For “to him [who] knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”[15] How can I see my brother in need and claim that I love God and do nothing about it[16] and actually claim to be a bona fide member of the family of God, whose heart is for the poor and the downtrodden and the blind and the beaten and the broken? It doesn’t work. That’s the danger, you see, in a sterilized, bourgeois, self-satisfied, evangelical, cliché-ridden American subculture. Because as long as we hang around with one another long enough, we can convince one another that we’re all okay—because after all, fifteen hundred people together couldn’t be wrong, could they? Yeah, they could.

If you will not listen to the Bible, you won’t listen to anything. Therefore, I suggest to you that if you have any inkling to think about who Jesus is and why he came, that you go home and read your Bibles. Frankly, I have said enough this morning to make any sensible person go home and read his Bible or her Bible. If I’d been listening to me, I’d be going home to read my Bible, ’cause I’d be sitting there saying, “You know what? I’m going to check this out. ’Cause I’m not sure that he was just as clear as he could have been.” I’ll buy that. “And I’m just going to go and figure this out.” Go ahead. Go ahead. Because if you won’t listen to the Bible, you won’t listen to anything. And if you won’t be changed by the Bible, nothing will change you.

Let’s pray together:

O God our Father, help us, we pray, to become students of the Bible. Help us not to fiddle with it, to tamper with it, to manipulate it. Help us to bow before it—the parts we like, the parts we don’t like, the parts that are apparently easy, the parts that are hard. Most of us want simply to believe that life in the fairground will go on forever, that we’ll be able to ride the carousel right out into the sunset of our lives. We don’t want to think about terminus. We don’t want to think about destiny. We don’t want to think about heaven. We certainly don’t want to think about hell. And yet you’ve put it in the Bible to remind us that every time we hear the Bible taught, we’re at a crossroads. Every time we hear the Bible taught, we’re at the gate of heaven and hell. Oh, grant us grace, that by your enabling we may step through the door that leads to life.

And may the grace of the Lord Jesus, and the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with each one who believes, today and forevermore. Amen.

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[1] Luke 15:11 (NIV 1984).

[2] Luke 16:1 (NIV 1984).

[3] Luke 15:1 (NIV 1984).

[4] Ecclesiastes 7:2 (NIV 1984).

[5] Hebrews 9:27 (KJV).

[6] Luke 15:23 (paraphrased).

[7] Luke 15:14–16 (paraphrased).

[8] Matthew 5:3–4 (NIV 1984).

[9] William Buel Stevens, “Farther Along” (1911). Lyrics lightly altered.

[10] Luke 14:13 (paraphrased).

[11] Paul Simon, “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” (1965).

[12] Joe South, “Games People Play” (1968).

[13] Luke 16:13 (NIV 1984).

[14] Matthew 16:26; Mark 8:36; Luke 9:25 (paraphrased).

[15] James 4:17 (KJV).

[16] See 1 John 3:17.