Heaven or Hell?

     When is the last time you heard a good sermon about hell? No, you didn’t mis-read that. I used the word “good” on purpose to refer to a truthful, straight-forward sermon on what the Bible says about hell. You might not know it by listening to a lot of contemporary preaching, but hell is still a reality according to the Holy Bible. It’s still there, although it’s no longer found in the sermons many preachers present. But we can’t just blame the preachers. The fact is for millions in our relativistic, “this is my truth” age, hell will no longer sell. The doctrine and place called “hell” by Jesus just won’t jive with the God many contemporaries have created in their own free-wheeling way of thinking. The very notion that God might actually punish and cause pain in an eternal place the Bible calls hell is very unpopular in this age when, as it was said of another people long ago, “every man [is doing] what is right in his own eyes” (Proverbs 17:6). For many preachers as well as people who sit in pews, hell has cooled off or been frozen out altogether. The fire of hell has been thoroughly drenched with the water of theological liberalism and faithless thinking. There is barely a flicker of hell left in the minds of many. We can choose to ignore it, we can get angry about it, and all hot-under-the-collar if the preacher preaches on it from time to time, but the Bible’s teaching about hell is still there right alongside it’s gloriously good news about Heaven. Jesus Himself taught about Heaven and told us to lay our treasures up there (Matthew 6:19-21). But the Lord also talked about hell. He pulled no punches about it when He warned (talking to His disciples of all people!) in Luke 12:4-5 — “And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do.  But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!” Read more of His sobering words about hell in Mark 9:44-48 (do it now if you haven’t read that passage lately); if what you read there doesn’t give you a big case of the heebie-jeebies, you didn’t read closely enough. Whether your preacher or church will preach hell or not, Jesus preached it.  
       Words by eighteenth century English poet Edward Young should provoke serious thought: “Time flies, death urges, knells call, heaven invites, hell threatens.” All of that reflects Bible teaching, and especially the vein of thought in 1 Thessalonians 5:9-11 (and several preceding verses) — “For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him. Therefore comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing.” We don’t have space to study it here, but the “wrath” Paul mentions is God’s wrath, and its final and fullest form will be in hell (Romans 1:18ff * Matthew 5:22 * 1 Thessalonians 1:10). That’s bad news. The good news is, praise be to God, because of Jesus you don’t have to go! Mark Twain said he didn’t want to commit himself about heaven or hell because he had friends in both places. Millions never grasp the fact we can go to Heaven, but we must commit to it. If we don’t, we automatically commit to hell. Serious stuff. Are you committed to Heaven? Have you thought about it?

by: Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN 

 

Prepare or Predict?

       I’m about to make a prediction. I’m going to tell a joke that I predict you will think is really goofy (as in wacky, silly, ridiculous, and “lame-brained!”). Here goes. Have you heard about the preacher who kept making false predictions about the second coming of Christ? The church he preached for finally had to file as a “non-prophet organization.” I’m certain my prediction came true. That joke IS goofy. I know that and you surely know that. But I told it to illustrate a point. Some predictions are fairly easy to make. For instance, I can with 100% accuracy predict the score of any NFL game or even the Super Bowl before it ever starts, and you can, too. It’s always 0 to 0 before it starts! More seriously, most things are not so easy to predict. Things like the weather or the outcome of the next Presidential election or what the stock market will do. In 1903, the President of the Michigan Savings Bank tried to dissuade Henry Ford’s lawyer (Horace Rackham) from investing in the newly formed motor company telling him, “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.” Oops. In 1920, a “New York Times” article dismissed the possibility of space travel and declared, “A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” The paper issued a light-hearted retraction in 1969 as      Apollo 11 headed to the moon! Niels Bohr accurately stated the situation when he said, “Prediction is a very difficult art, especially if it’s about the future.” The ancient wise man warned in Proverbs 27:1 — “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.”
      Truly we can't. But there is a day (yet future as I write these words and if you are reading them!) we can predict with absolute accuracy. Sort of that is. That day is the day the apostle Paul wrote about in 1 Thessalonians 5:2. There he declared by inspiration to Christians living in the ancient Greek city of Thessalonica, “For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night.” More than merely a prediction, those words are a promise from the God who cannot lie (Titus1:2). Verses could be multiplied. Christ is coming again to save those who believe and judge those who have not believed and obeyed the Gospel (see 2 Thess.1:7-10 * Acts 1:11 * John 14:1ff * 1 Thess. :10; 4:13-18, etc.). The verse cited above contains both clarity and obscurity. Clearly, Christ is coming again. We can be certain of that — “you yourselves know the day of the Lord comes.” But there is also obscurity — the coming will be “as a thief in the night.” That is, the coming is uncertain as to the exact day and time. Jesus teaches we can be certain nobody can know for certain when He will come again in Mark 13:35 where He urges His disciples, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” So much for all the prognosticators who come along fairly frequently predicting the day Jesus will come back. You can be trust this — nobody but God knows for certain when that day will be! The take home point: we should all worry about preparing for His eventual return instead of obsessing about predicting when it will be. As Jesus urges in Matthew 24:34, "Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” Are you ready?

Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN  

Would You Swallow That?

       A story tells about a mother who was sick in bed with the flu. Her darling six-year-old daughter wanted to be a good nurse. She fluffed the pillows and brought Mommy a magazine to read. She even showed up with a surprise cup of tea. “My, you’re such a sweetheart,” the mother said after swallowing several sips of the tea. “I didn’t know you even knew how to make tea.” The little nurse replied, “I do, Mommy. I learned by watching you. I put the tea leaves in the pan and then I put in the water, boiled it, turned off the stove and then I strained it into a cup. But I couldn’t find the strainer, so I used the fly-swatter instead.” Horrified, Mom screamed, “You what?!” And the little girl said, “It’s okay Mom. I didn’t use the new fly swatter. I used the old one.” The moral of that story: know what we swallow, but also what kind of strainer was used as a filter for what is served up to swallow! Strainers filter and separate out stuff we don’t want in what we prepare to eat or drink, etc. Who would knowingly drink tea strained through a used fly-swatter? Yuk! Flies are nasty, disgusting, disease-ridden creatures. They feed on stuff you consider to be trash and sewage! They get into your trash, load up on all kinds of pathogens and bad bacteria, then land and walk their filthy little fly legs all over your food or the rim of your glass. Gross. Would you willingly and knowingly swallow tea strained through a flyswatter?                       
    I think of all this when I hear somebody spout off some kind of morally and / or spiritually extreme idea. One example (by no means the only one) is when someone insists that gender is not “binary” but multiple. A computer search on “how many genders do progressives say there are” revealed an article entitled, “68 Terms That Describe Gender Identity and Expression” (@ healthline.com). A summary statement declared, “Gender is a spectrum, and there are dozens of ways to describe your individual gender identity. Man, woman, cisgender, and transgender are just a few options.” The article went on to say many people grew up with the idea that there are two sexes, male and female, that “match” with two genders, male and female. That view is condescendingly described as “simplistic.” In no uncertain terms it is stated, “In reality, neither gender nor sex is binary” (composed of two).  We are asked to swallow that, and many do. But what kind of filter is that kind of thinking slipping through? A fancy name for the philosophy is autonomy, the idea that each person is self-governing, self-ruling, and totally independent, free of any kind of control beyond each person. You’ve heard it expressed as, “This is my authentic truth.” Gender autonomy allows a man to say, “I identify / feel like a woman” or vice-versa.” I don’t pretend to know how people feel. I do know this — that kind of autonomous, feeling-based thinking, untethered from the idea that objective truth exists and is knowable, is not new. Long ago the inspired ancient wise man said, “There is a way that seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death” Proverbs 14:12). That’s God’s truth. The folks who insist there is no absolute truth expect you to accept that statement as absolutely true. Forgive me for being simplistic, but I can’t swallow that.

            “ ... He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female’” — Jesus, Matthew 19:4 

by: Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN

 

 

 

 

Sign the Ball and Kiss My Boo-Boo!

What would you do if you got clobbered on the head with a hard-hit baseball? Keep reading. No pain, no gain” is an expression most of us have heard and many have likely used. The words are often used in reference to exercise, implying that if you don’t feel any pain, you won’t lose weight or gain muscle. Some sources trace the idiom to Jane Fonda in her 1982 video series of aerobic workouts, although Benjamin Franklin said, “There are no gains without pain.” Long before Fonda or Franklin the Bible said, “Count it all joy when you call in to various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience” (James 1:2-3). Trials and testing can be productive. Like muscles that get sore but get stronger from “working out,” so faith does, too. No pain, no gain. Even when we feel the “burn” from life’s various trials and tests, because of the heavenly hope offered in the gospel of Christ, we can, as the apostle Paul directs in Philippians 4:4, “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I say rejoice.” Paul was in prison [likely in Rome] when he wrote those words about 62 A. D. But he had earlier learned to “sing in the pain” from a prison in Philippi along with his co-missionary Silas (read Acts 16:22-25ff for that amazing attitude and equally amazing results of it).

Let me tell you about Cory down in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I don’t know this guy, but he seems to know how to sing in the pain. He was in the news very recently. He is a big fan of the LSU Tigers baseball team and was one of thousands attending a game on Tuesday April 23, 2024, in Baton Rouge. Tyler Nettuno tells about Cory in an article posted @ sports.yahoo.com on April 24. LSU easily defeated the rival team from Nicholls 9-0. The victory was sealed in the bottom of the 8th inning when Tommy White smashed a three-run bomb to left field to give the Tigers a decisive 9-0 lead. That’s where Cory comes into the picture. He was in the bleachers and according to him in an interview before the game ended, the home run ball “was on a rope” and came straight to him. He was even wearing a baseball glove. He caught the high-flying hard ball missile traveling at over 100 mph — not in his glove, but on his forehead! In the interview he said, “Hole in the glove, man, what can I say? Beaned off my dome.” He even showed off a big “goose egg” on his ‘noggin where the ball bounced off his head! When asked if it hurt, he said, “It didn’t feel good.” But he had a great attitude and was laughing and joking about the whole thing. He couldn’t retrieve the ball, which bounced over the fence. But Tigers outfielder Josh Pearson later gave him a warm-up ball between innings. Cory (last name never given) went on to say, “I’ll probably go get Tommy White to sign it for me and maybe kiss my boo-boo.”                                                 

Touché Cory! What an attitude! His words and joyful attitude while wearing a large and no doubt painful “goose egg” on his head bring the words of Revelation 21:4 to mind: “God will wipe every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” Take heart, hurting Christian friend. Stay faithful to Jesus. Persevere through the pain and the rain. Someday your pain will give way to eternal gain literally out of this world. 

by: Dan Gulley

More Love!

Doug Stone, America country music artist, released a song called “More Love” in 1993. The song, as country songs occasionally manage to do, had a meaningful message. After a relationship fails, the character in the song is trying to figure out what he did wrong. He realizes what she really wanted, and what he should have given her, was “More Love” and less material things. Only too late does he realize it, and she’s gone! My interest is not in that song so much but in the words that are repeated again and again in the song. What she needed from him was “more love.” Who can argue that our world had enough love this morning? And I’m not talking about the romantic kind the world so often portrays when it writes and sings and makes movies and videos about “love.” Sadly, far too often, what the world means when it talks about “love” is in reality not much more that “lust” and, to dust off a Bible word “lewdness.” A good Bible passage that illustrates the point is Romans 13:13-14 where the apostle Paul wrote these words to Christians living in a culture where lust was on the loose: “Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts” (New King James Version). The King James translates the words for “lewdness and lust” as “chambering and wantonness,” and the New American Standard Bible (1995) renders them “sexual promiscuity and sensuality.” A point I want to make here is that sexual lust / immorality driven more by hormones and emotions and physical excitement have long been mis-labeled by the world with what the Bible often means when it tells us “love one another.” Just before Paul wrote the words above, he had instructed Christians in  Romans 13:8-10 — “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery ... not murder ... not steal ... not bear false witness ... not covet,’ and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” These verses make one thing clear. The world could use a lot more of this kind of love. The shocking frequency of sexual immorality, lust, lewdness, sensuality and what is called “sexploitation”, along with the rest of the harmful, hateful things humans do to each other that dominate daily headlines — surely all this should convince us we need more genuine love.       

Christians know God-like love is not just words, and certainly not just always doing what “feels so right.” The cross of Christ proves that (John 3:16 * Ephesians 5:1-2 * 1 John 3:16-18). God wants His church to love more. The Holy Spirit still speaks through what the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Thess 4:9-10 – “But concerning brotherly love you have no need that I should write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do so toward all the brethren who are in all Macedonia. But we  urge you, brethren, that you increase more and more.” There’s always a need for more love!  Love more!

by: Dan Gulley

Sing His Praise in the Pain!

Many years ago, I read the anonymous observation that pain and suffering are inevitable, but misery is optional. The Bible strongly reflects a similar kind of message. James, our ancient and Holy Spirit inspired brother in the Christian faith, wrote at James 1:2-3: “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.” The apostle Peter wrote words that bear out what happens to us and around us is not as important as what goes on in us in response to life’s pain. He wrote these words to suffering Christians: “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by various trials.” Peter has just reminded them they had been “begotten again to a living hope … to an inheritance and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:3-6). These Bible passages and many others support the idea that while pain and suffering are inevitable, misery is optional!

 

Misery is the default setting for many people when pain crashes into their lives. So, what do you do when a storm blows in as you sail life’s unpredictable sea? Bell Calloway, an African American historian in Omaha, Nebraska, once said, “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.” The apostle Paul calls for us to adjust our sails with words like these: “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice … giving thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:4 * 1 Thessalonians 5:18 NIV). Those all’s and always’s in the Bible always bother me! I’d much rather they said, “Rejoice in the Lord if you can or rejoice if life is good.” Didn’t Paul ever have “a bad day?” Bible students know much of Paul’s life was spent in miserable circumstances after he came to Christ. He was constantly in physically miserable circumstances. It was from prison he directed the Philippian Christians to rejoice in the Lord always as cited above. Acts 16:24ff finds Paul and co-missionary Silas in a prison in Philippi a number of years before Paul wrote the words of Philippians 4:4, but he’s practicing what he preached! They are in great physical pain. As a result of preaching Christ and doing good in His name, they had been libeled, falsely accused of breaking the law, unjustly beaten, thrown into prison, and their feet fastened in stocks. Pain was pouring down on their preaching parade. They are suffering, and they can’t get out (but eventually did due to God’s intervention!). They couldn’t control their physical position. What they could control and did control was their disposition! They refused to give in to miserable circumstances. In a prison cell, they adjusted their sails and kept prison from getting in them. Acts 16:25 says that at midnight (the darkest and deepest part of the night) “Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God.” Prisoners were listening. More importantly, God was too. Shortly after God delivered them by means of an earthquake (!!), the jailor who guarded them relieved their pain, asked how them to be saved, was taught the Gospel, and he and all his family were baptized into Christ! And it all began with two suffering Christians who chose to sing in their pain. Remember — suffering is inevitable, but misery is optional. When suffering, sing God’s praise—not for your pain, but in your pain.

 

  by: Dan Gulley, Smithville, TN 

The Bible: Wonder But Never Wander!

 

Somebody observed that the Bible will make you wonder, but it will never make you wander. To that I would say a hearty, “Amen!” Does the Bible ever make you “wonder?” Wonder is defined @ merriam-webster.com as “a cause of astonishment or admiration; rapt attention or astonishment at something awesomely mysterious or new to one's experience.” The Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the birth of my sons — I (and perhaps you) have been blessed to see at least some of these things that are “a wonder to behold.” Astonishment, admiration, rapt attention and awesomely mysterious — those are words that describe our reaction to such things.

 

So why would anyone say the Bible makes you “wonder?” First, consider its inspiration. The Bible claims, and tons of evidence support the claim, that God is its author. “All Scripture is given by the inspiration of God” is the claim in 2 Timothy 3:16 (also 2 Peter 1:20-21; 3:15-16). “God-breathed” is the way the New International Version says it. The Library of Congress in Washington D. C. contains a vast collection of 110 million items stored on 838 miles of bookshelves. The wonder in that is the Bible is the only book in the whole bodacious thing that can rightfully claim God as its ultimate author! Hundreds of times the Bible’s authors record the words, “Thus saith the Lord.” As someone said, if you want to hear God speak audibly, open your Bible and read it out loud! Now consider the Bible’s preservation and duration. Psalm 119:89 says, “Forever, O Lord, Your word is settled in heaven.” There is no debate in Heaven about the Bible being from God. Meanwhile, on earth, the Bible is booed, banned, belittled, burned, denounced, debated and devalued. But one thing the devil and his agents will never be able to do is destroy the Bible! In the words of theologian and author Bernard Ramm, “A thousand times over, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the inscription cut on the tombstone, and committal read. But somehow the corpse never stays put. No other book has been so chopped, knifed, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified.” And yet, like the Energizer Bunny, it just keeps “going and going and going!” It always will. Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away” (Matthew 24:35). Now consider the Bible’s translation and propagation. It has been translated into 704 languages as of 2021, the most of any book in the world, reaching 6.1 billion people worldwide (biblica.com). As to propagation, “Christian missionaries” in some 160 of the 195 countries teach the Bible today. Given fair consideration, as stated above the Bible will make you wonder.

 

The Bible makes you wonder, but it will never make you wander! In the words of Psalm 119:105, God’s word “is a lamp to my feet and a light to path.” Faithfully followed, that light guides us to God and to Heaven. The proper attitude we ought to have toward the Bible is captured by the apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2:13 — “when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you welcomed it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which also effectively works in you who believe.” In light of eternity, the real wonder about the Bible is why more people don’t welcome it.

 

Dan Gulley