I sat across the table from the man who would officiate at my dad’s funeral. He was my pastor at the time. My dad had died the day before. Since they had never met, I started to tell him about my dad – about how he brought our family of six to Oak Lawn Bible Chapel every Sunday, about what we believed, and about my dad’s spiritual well-being, as far as I knew.
I would have told him more but with a wave of his hand, he interrupted me. “Oh, I just put everybody in Heaven.” No further discussion necessary.
His words comforted me because he put my dad in Heaven. But at the same time, they troubled me. If he puts everybody in Heaven, putting my dad there meant nothing.
And what a strange thing for a Baptist minister to say. Baptists are known for believing a person must be born again to have eternal life. How could a pastor who believed Jesus’ words, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3), just put everybody in Heaven?
I understand his motivation. Pastors want to give words of comfort to grieving families. But I wonder if this man’s practice of saying everybody goes to Heaven might be the worst thing a pastor can say, and the last thing the deceased would want him to say.
Jesus told a story about two men, Lazarus and a rich man (Luke 16:19-31). The rich man wore the best clothes and feasted sumptuously every day. Lazarus, a poor man, laid at the rich man’s gate. Sores covered his body. He ate only the table scraps that were thrown to the dogs. Eventually, both men died.
The poor man was “carried by the angels to Abraham’s side.” This expression is used as a figure for Heaven. Pastor and Bible teacher, John MacArthur, said “Lazarus was given a place of high honor, reclining next to Abraham at a heavenly banquet.”
The rich man died and went to the place of torment. He begged for mercy, but it was too late. He was desperate for a drop of water to cool his tongue, but he would have to go without. “Then I beg you,” the rich man said to Abraham, “send Lazarus to my father’s house – for I have five brothers – so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.”
I was raised in a church where we were often warned about Hell. It seems that might be a thing of the past. The late R.C. Sproul, founder and chairman of Ligonier Ministries, said: “We have so eliminated the last judgment from our thinking, and expunged any notion of divine punishment, or of Hell, from our thinking, and from the church’s thinking, that it is now an assumption that all you have to do to go to Heaven is to die.”
Maybe that’s why most Americans don’t expect to experience Hell first-hand. According to a Barna Group survey, 76% of adults believe Heaven exists. Nearly the same proportion believe there is a Hell (71%). However, just one-half of 1% of adults in America expect to go to Hell upon their death.
Yet the Bible is clear: “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13-14).
I suppose the most urgent duty of this life is to become certain of where we will spend the next.
Kathy Hardee is a wife, mother, grandmother, children’s church teacher and God-worshiper. You can contact her at kathy@kathyhardee.com.