Transcript
Luke chapter 16, reading at verse 19.
There was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate, desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.
So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried. And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.
Then he cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things. But now he is comforted and you are tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.’
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.’ And 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 rose from the dead.’
It was an extremely dangerous contest, but the prize for the winner was a car. It was a Tuesday night way back in November of 1984. Raynard Jenkins and Thomas Hamilton and a friend of theirs were together at the Jenkins home at 232 Glencairn Drive right here in Dallas. Jenkins was a slightly built nineteen-year-old young man who worked as a busboy. Thomas Hamilton was a friend of his who had put up his car as the prize for their contest.
Their contest has been tried before, and no doubt it will be tried again. The contest was this, to see which of them could hold the most liquor. They did a lot of drinking, and Raynard Jenkins was the winner of the drinking contest because he was able to put down a half gallon of 80 proof Old Charter whiskey along with some beers. The contest ended about 9:00 p.m., and about an hour later Jenkins retired to his room to go to bed.
About an hour after that some of his family members heard him get up and go to the bathroom and throw up, but they didn't think very much about it. The next morning when his mother came into her son's room about 7 a.m. to awaken him, she found Raynard dead, lying face down on his bed. Police estimated that death had occurred about two hours before she had entered his room. Death was decided to be accidental, and the cause was ascribed to acute alcohol intoxication.
And listen to this. Under Texas law you are considered intoxicated if the alcohol level in your bloodstream is 0.10. When the alcohol content of your bloodstream reaches 0.35 to 0.4 percent, the drinker usually passes out. The alcohol content in Raynard Jenkins’ bloodstream was 0.5 percent. He had apparently not passed out while he was drinking because he was drinking so fast.
Dr. Richard Bost, the chief toxicologist of the medical examiner’s office, reminded the media that alcohol is a depressant. That alcohol depresses the nervous transmissions, especially from the respiratory system. And if it depresses the respiratory system enough, he said, it can shut off the supply of oxygen, and that affects the heart. If you drink enough, said the doctor, it may depress the respiration so far that you are unable to come back. That's evidently what happened to Raynard Jenkins. His whiskey had depressed his system so far that he simply was not able to come back.
And apparently he never got to drive the car that his whiskey had won him.
Now my friends, my point this morning is not to tell you that our country is filled with alcohol abuse. Of course it is. But you all already know that. And my purpose is not to remind you that alcohol is a drug and that our country is filled with drug abuse. Of course it is. But you already know that as well.
My purpose this morning is to point out to you a drug, the most potent, the most addictive, the most intoxicating, and the most dangerous drug known to man. And its name can be spelled with eight letters, and the letters are P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E. Pleasure.
Why do people drink? It gives them pleasure. Why do people abuse drugs? It gives them pleasure. Why do people commit sexual immorality? It gives them pleasure. Why do they like to ride around in big cars and wear fancy clothes? It gives them pleasure. Why do they like to spend hours a day before the TV set? It gives them pleasure.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that all pleasures are wrong or that all pleasures are evil. We know the Bible does not teach that. But I am trying to say this, that pleasure is one of the most addictive things that exists in the world, and it is highly dangerous. And therefore this morning I want to give you this piece of information. Pleasure has an exit door marked death.
And as you will probably not be surprised to discover, that's the title of my message to you this morning: Pleasure Has an Exit Door Marked Death.
Now I'm curious this morning. I'm wondering how many of you in the audience have ever heard or read the story of the rich man and the beggar named Lazarus before this morning. Would you raise your hands? A good 50 percent of you, I would say, are already familiar with this story. That's good.
Now I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand on this, but suppose I were to say to you, do you agree that the major fault and failing of this rich man was that he was greedy and selfish? I wonder how many would raise their hand and agree with that. But if you did, I think you would be wrong.
Well I don't deny for a minute that this rich man was greedy. I think the story teaches us that. I don't think for a minute that he wasn't selfish. The story shows us that. But that is not the point that Jesus makes about this rich man.
Did you notice how the story opens? Jesus says, “Now there was a certain rich man,” and he does not say who was greedy. He says there was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple. We could translate the Greek words there, he enjoyed himself splendidly every day. So what did he do when he got up in the morning? He put on his most expensive clothes, his gorgeous purple robe, his expensive undergarment made of fine linen. When he sat down at his table it was always loaded with the very best food that money could buy. And all day long he just did what he wanted to do. He lived his life in pleasure.
What was wrong with him? May I suggest that he was addicted to pleasure. He was addicted to the good life. He was addicted to going first class every day in every way. Pleasure was all he lived for.
And outside of his gate there sat a man who was the direct opposite, a beggar named Lazarus. And Lazarus was certainly not addicted to pleasure. He hardly had any pleasure to be addicted to. His meals were meager, and if somebody had offered him a plate of the scraps that fell off the rich man’s table he would have regarded it as a feast.
And when he had sores on his body, which was apparently most of the time, he couldn't run down to the doctor’s and buy the very best medical attention. The only attention that he got was the stray dogs in the neighborhood coming up and licking his sores because that made them feel better. So there they were within walking distance of one another, a man who lived for pleasure and a man who lived mostly without pleasure.
Now I hope that nobody in the audience this morning thinks that that's the way all rich people are, because that's not true. About three years ago I was in an airport in another part of this country, and a pastor whom I knew met me there. And with him was a very wealthy man whom I had heard about but had never met before.
And when the two of them walked up to me in the airport, if my pastor friend had said this man here is a farmer, I would have believed it. He wasn't dressed in an expensive suit. He wasn't even dressed in expensive slacks and a sports shirt really. He was dressed like a farmer. That's true that he lived on a farm, but he wasn't a farmer. In fact it would be safe to say that this man was an electronics genius. He founded his own electronics company. He had personally discovered a process which had never been used before in electronics and became the special secret of his company. That was something like twenty-five or more years ago, and none of his competitors have ever been able to figure this process out. They bought his stuff, they tore it apart, they've analyzed it. They cannot figure out how this stuff is tough, and his company has prospered and does business with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He does business with the European satellite program. He has recently built a new factory over in Belgium and opened it, and he's doing well.
When I got to his farmhouse and walked into his front room, you know what I saw? A little kitchen, little dining and dinette area. Most of you know Lewis’s house, right? I would say that Lewis’s kitchen, dining room, and living room are about fifty percent larger than this man’s were. He has a barn out there, but it's not really a barn because downstairs in the barn is a state-of-the-art electronics laboratory where this man is constantly working.
At one of the first meals that I had with him he pulled some stuff out of the freezer and he said, “I apologize to you. I'm going to serve leftovers.” And he did that half the time while I was there. They were absolutely delightful leftovers. And so I kind of started up a running joke with him that this was the place to come to eat leftovers.
But you say, I've got that guy figured out. He's one of these rich people who gets on top and he's so stingy he won't spend on anybody. No, wrong. Do you know that this man is one of the most generous givers to the work of the Lord that I have ever met? From just the facts that I know about his giving, and I know some facts about it, but my estimation is that every year he probably gives in the neighborhood of $300,000 to God’s work. And it would not surprise me to find out that he may even give half a million dollars a year to the Lord’s work.
So that rich man is entirely different than the man in our story, because the man in our story was not addicted to God. He was addicted to pleasure.
And did you know that you don't have to be rich to be addicted to pleasure? You can be a poor man and be addicted to alcohol, be addicted to drugs, be addicted to sex, be addicted to good times. You don't have to be rich to be like that. But of course if you want to spend money on pleasure it helps to be rich. And guess what? Here were two men within walking distance of each other, and they were exact opposites.
But in process of time they both came to the same doorway. They came to the exit door marked death. And then Lazarus the beggar died first. He probably was in worse health than the rich man. And when his soul passed through this exit door he got all his sufferings behind him and he encountered royal transportation, because God says that when a man dies the angels carry him. The angels carried him to Abraham’s bosom. We'll talk more about that in a moment.
And then afterwards, we don't know how much longer afterwards, the rich man died and his body was buried. And his soul passed through the exit door called death. And when he woke up he was uncomfortably warm and he was extremely thirsty, because he woke up in Hades. He woke up in Hades.
Now please understand that in the Bible there are apparently two places that are called hell. One of them is called Sheol in the Hebrew language and Hades in the Greek language. This is apparently where all unsaved people go until they stand before God in judgment. After they are judged before God they are put in a place the Bible calls Gehenna or the lake of fire. So this rich man that we are reading about is still in Hades to this very day.
But please also understand that at the time before the Lord Jesus Christ came to earth and lived and died and went back to heaven, before that every saved person went to another part of Hades which in one place in the Bible is called paradise. Now we know that today when Christians die they go directly into the presence of the Lord, because the Bible tells us absent from the body is present with the Lord. But this took place before Jesus had died and risen again. And so both of these men were in the place called Hades, and they were separated by a giant gulf.
I’m going to pause here to tell you about the most amazing newspaper clipping that I have ever seen. The newspaper, you all have heard some of my stories and you know that many of them come from the newspaper. This is not exactly a story, but this is an astounding newspaper that appeared in the Dallas Times Herald for December 8, 1987. It reported on a meeting of scientists, and the combined new data found about earth’s interior. The meeting of scientists was sponsored by the American Geophysical Union.
And the scientists at this meeting were saying they were getting an entirely different picture of what the interior of the earth is like. Now remember the standard view has been that the earth’s crust lies on top of a big mantle of rock, and at the core of the earth there’s a kind of a ball of hot iron made up of molten red hot iron. But as a result of sophisticated studies these scientists were suggesting the following. They said they now believe that the interior of the earth was an upside down version of the surface of the earth, that in fact in the interior of the earth there were what might be called continents of semi-solid rock which were floating on top of oceans of molten iron.
Scientists from Harvard and Caltech have utilized sophisticated computer analysis of the waves that are given off, the seismic waves that are given off by earthquakes. And with the assistance of this computer analysis they were able to draw a rough map of the interior of the earth. Get this folks. Their computer analysis led them to this conclusion, that in the interior of the earth there are mountains as tall as Mount Everest and there are valleys six times deeper than the Grand Canyon. There’s a world down there. There’s a world there. And that’s where this rich man woke up. That’s where he found himself to be.
What a surprise. He is able to look out over one of these deep valleys. There’s nothing wrong with his eyesight apparently. And he sees the beggar that used to sit at his gateway, now in the bosom of Abraham. Now that apparently was a way they had of talking about a position that you took at a table. Remember the apostle John lay in the bosom of Jesus at the supper. It indicates that someone is reclining this way and their back is toward the front of the person behind him, and they are described as being in the bosom of that person.
So here he sees the beggar who was always begging for scraps sitting in what must have been a bountiful table. And he was evidently a guest of honor because he was right next to Abraham, right next to Abraham. And the rich man was uncomfortably hot. And that’s what was happening. Talk about a role reversal. Talk about changing places. That was it.
Let’s stop. Please do not make the mistake of making the Bible say something that it does not say. Jesus did not say that the rich man was in hell because he was rich. And Jesus does not say he was in hell because he was greedy or selfish. And of course Jesus does not say that Lazarus was in the paradise part because he was poor or because Lazarus was a good man who always patted the dogs on their head when they licked him.
Did you notice something? Jesus doesn't tell us by their name why they were there. He tells us they were there, but we know why they were there because we have the rest of the New Testament in our hand. We have the teaching of Jesus. We know the rich man was in hell because he had never received the free gift of salvation. And Lazarus was in paradise because he had. The Bible says by grace you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast.
Jesus is not trying to explain why they went where they went. That's not the point of his story. The point of this story is they had traded places. They had traded places. Their roles had been reversed.
Part of the point that he is making is simply this, that it is possible for a person to live an entire life of pleasure and wind up in a place where there is no longer any pleasure at all. Take a look at your unsaved friends. Take a look at your unsaved brother or sister. Are they having a good time? They run around drinking. Do they do drugs? Do they engage in sex? Feel sorry for them. Pray for them. Witness to them about the saving grace of God. Because if they do not trust him, someday the pleasure they're having now will end. Someday.
Do we understand that? That's part of the point that we can get from this story. So there they were, pleasure-loving rich man with no pleasure left, suffering beggar with pleasure lying ahead of him.
And listen folks, if we didn't already know this story every one of us would be shocked by the way the rest of the story goes. Maybe you weren't shocked. I read it for years and wasn't shocked, and one day I was shocked by this story.
Did you notice that when the rich man woke up in hell he was screaming bloody murder? Now we all know that in this life we can function with a certain level of pain, am I right? But if pain gets too intense everybody kind of shuts down. Sometimes we pass out. Sometimes we just scream. We can hardly think. We can hardly talk and communicate. And it's obvious folks that the rich man was not in that kind of position. He carries on a perfectly intelligent conversation with Abraham. Nothing wrong with his eyesight. Nothing wrong with his voice, because he cries out across that great gulf, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me. Send Lazarus that he may dip his finger in water and touch my tongue, because I am tormented in these flames. I'm not asking for much. I'm not asking for a whole drink of water, just a touch on my tongue.”
And Abraham says, well I'm sorry son, no can do. Please remember that when you were alive you had a lot of good things, and Lazarus kind of the opposite. And now the roles are reversed and you are suffering. He has pleasure. You can't complain about that, can you? But even if we did want to help you, that's impossible. Don't you see that being fixed before us? There's nobody that can come from where we are to where you are. There's nobody where you are that can come to where we are.
You haven't heard the biggest surprise yet. The rich man says, I have five brothers back on earth. What shall I do? No. The rich man says, “Father, you can't do anything for me. Will you please send Lazarus back to my house? Because I've got five brothers back there. Have him testify to them so that they will not come to this place of torment.” This is a lost man. This is a man who lived selfishly all his life. This may be the most unselfish thought he's ever had since the day he was born.
Nothing can be done for him, so now a little bit too late he's worried about his brothers. And Abraham says, I'm sorry son, no can do. They have Moses and the prophets. They have their Old Testament. They have their Bible. Let them listen to their Bible.
And the rich man says, no, they'll never do that. They'll never do that. But if somebody comes back to them from the dead then they will repent. And Abraham replied, wrong again my son, wrong again. If they don't listen to Moses and the prophets they won't even be persuaded if somebody comes back to them from the dead.
How surprising can you believe all this? I can't. It's in the Bible. But I'm just saying, is this what you expected? Here is a lost man in the fires of hell and he's enrolled in university. Call it the University of Hades. He's got one wrong idea after another, but he's improving. He's got a long way to go.
He thought, like many Jews thought, that the way to avoid hell was to repent of your sins. That's what he thinks. Did you notice that when Abraham replies to that he doesn't use the word repentance? He uses the word hear. He uses the word persuaded, which means to believe something. And that is why I read to you the verses from Luke 24, because after His resurrection the unrecognized Jesus is walking with two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus, and He begins to talk about Moses, the five books of Moses. He begins to talk about the books of the prophets. And what does He tell them? He explains in these books the things that concern Himself, how Christ must suffer and then enter into His glory.
This man is a long way from understanding that. But what he had needed in his lifetime and what his five brothers now still needed was to hear what Moses and the prophets had to say about Jesus Christ and to be persuaded by the Scriptures concerning him.
I hope nobody will misunderstand. You remember, this man is in Hades. It's too late for him to be saved. He will never get out of here. The Bible is clear. But in the mercy of God he's getting just a little bit wiser. And I have to believe our unsaved friends and relatives who may already have preceded us into the other world, who may have been lost, but I know that they are suffering. I thank God for the mercy of God. They are also very wise now.
Would you love to hear the rest of this conversation? I mean this wasn't the end of the conversation. And what Abraham could have told us was original. But that's where Jesus stops because Jesus has made his point. And what is his point? Did you get it? The word of God is more valuable than a whole lifetime filled with pleasure, because the word of God makes us wise unto salvation which is in Christ Jesus. It teaches us that we can be saved by faith in Him. And after we are saved the word of God teaches us how to live for Him, how there are rewards, how to increase the pleasures of the future.
Look at this book. Do you have a copy of it at home? It's the most valuable thing you own. There isn't anything in your house worth more than this. But you know it might be possible that we turn on the TV more frequently than we open our Bible. May I tell you something? The Bible is worth more than your favorite soap opera. The Bible is worth more than watching the Cowboys in the Super Bowl. The Bible is worth more than a delicious steak dinner at the posh restaurant in Dallas. The Bible is worth all of the pleasures on earth that you've ever had or ever will have.
You see the Bible prepares us for an eternal future that can be filled with pleasure. But pleasure comes to an end because pleasure has an exit door named death.
Some years ago a man calling himself a human fly came to the city of Los Angeles. It was announced that he was going to perform his act by climbing up the sheer face of a downtown department store. Long before he started his performance thousands of people had gathered outside that store, and they watched him as he started to climb. He would reach for a window ledge or he would reach for a piece of stone, a brick sticking out from the wall or cornice of the building. And up and up and up and up he went till finally he was very near the top.
And the crowd down there could see him sort of searching with his hand to the left and to the right and above him. And suddenly the man saw what appeared to be a gray stone or a discolored brick sticking out from the wall of the building. It was just above his reach. And so he took a little leap and he grabbed it. And the minute he did he began to fall, and he fell all those stories down to the pavement below, shattering his body and killing him.
And when they examined him he had clutched in his hand, guess what? A spiderweb. It had looked like something solid. It had looked like something stable and strong. And it was thin and wispy and worthless. I can't think of a better description of pleasure than to say it's a spiderweb. And the higher you climb to get hold of it, the further you have to fall at death. Because the only really stable, solid thing in this world is the word of God.
It's a children's chorus. I know some of us have known it since we were knee-high to a grasshopper, but it says it just right: The B-I-B-L-E. Yes that's the book for me. I stand alone on the word of God. The B-I-B-L-E.
Shall we pray?
Thank You for this book. Thank You for the salvation by faith in Christ that this book reveals. Thank You for the future pleasures for which it prepares us. Father, may we each realize the emptiness of earthly pleasure. May we cling to Thy word, believe it, and live by it. We ask this in Christ’s name, amen.