Over the past two months, I preached through a series on the Christian view of Death and the Life after That.  One of the central aspects of that realm according to the Bible is the reality of judgment, that on that last day, Jesus will judge the world, and all that was not for His glory will be destroyed by fire, while all that was for His glory will be refined and survive into the new heavens and new earth.  And part of this judgment is the reality of Hell for those individuals who did not know the judge (see Matthew 7:23, among others).  With that in mind, I want to share two brief videos I came across recently.

 The first is by Penn Jillette of the Las Vegas illusionist duo Penn & Teller.  Penn Jillette is a very smart, outspoken atheist, and it is not hard to find videos online of him ridiculing religious people for their beliefs and practices.  In a recent video, however (which you can see at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JHS8adO3hM&eurl=http://umbl0g.blogspot.com/, he spoke briefly of an encounter he had with a gentleman after one of his shows.   Let me share some of what he said:

He walked over to me and he said, “I was here at the show last night, I saw the show and I liked it.”  He was complimentary about my use of language and my honesty… he said nice stuff… and then he said “I brought this for you” and he gave me a pocket Gideon’s Bible with the New Testament and Psalms… he said “I brought this for you, I wanted you to have it… I’m proselytizing… I want you to know I’m a businessman, I’m sane, I’m not crazy.”  And he looked me right in the eye, and it was really wonderful.  I believe he knew that I was an atheist.  But he was not defensive, and he looked me right in the eyes.  And he was truly complimentary.  It didn’t seem in any way that it was empty flattery; he was kind, and nice, and sane, and looked me in the eye and talked to me, and then gave me this Bible.  And I’ve always said, I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize.  If you believe there is a heaven and hell and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life or whatever and you think “well, it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward.”  How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize?  How much do you have to hate someone to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?  If I believe that there is a truck bearing down on you, and you didn’t believe it, there’s a certain point at which I tackle you.  And this is more important than that.  This guy was a really good guy.  He was polite and honest and sane and he cared enough about me to proselytize and give me a Bible which had written in it a little note to me and five phone numbers and an email address in case I want to get in touch.  Now, I know there is no God, and one polite person living his life right doesn’t change that.  But I’ll tell you, he was a very, very, very good man, and that’s really important, and with that kind of goodness, it’s okay to have that deep of a disagreement.  I still think religion does a lot of bad stuff, but that was a very good man.

 The second video is of a conversation between D.A. Carson, John Piper, and Tim Keller, three heavyweights in the field of ministry and theology (you can see the first video in the six part conversation at http://www.new.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=34324371575.  I highly recommend watching all of them if you have the time).  They were discussing the balance between ministries of mercy and evangelism, and whether feeding the hungry and caring for the poor detracts from the importance of evangelism.  They had a lot of insightful things to say, but one of the things that stuck with me was when Piper said:

It’s very hard to give up preaching the gospel if you believe there is a Hell, endless suffering for those who do not believe in the gospel.  We exist to relieve all suffering, especially eternal suffering.  It’s a prioritization of time and intensity.  If I succeed in relieving all poverty and did not relieve the eternal problem, I would prove to be unloving…The eternal matters more than the temporal.

Penn Jillette and John Piper would not agree on much, but they both highlight that if Hell and judgment are real, then the most loving thing you can do is to tell someone about it in the hopes of relieving eternal suffering.  It is very Biblical and right to relieve the suffering experienced in this world by hunger, poverty, oppression, discrimination, etc.  But someday that suffering will end.  The suffering experienced by those in Hell will go on forever.   If that is true, then there is nothing more loving than letting people know the gospel, that Jesus Christ died to save sinners, to restore them to a right relationship with God, that all who would repent of their sins and put their faith in Jesus Christ will have eternal life.

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