Gospel Prism

Yesterday, I watched the movie Poseidon. It was the typical ship disaster movie. Nothing great, but at least it was entertaining. There was a scene where everyone was climbing a narrow shaft to continue to climb to the top of the ship (which was actually the bottom since the ship was upside down). One woman in the shaft was claustrophobic and so she was panicking inside the shaft. The man on top of her in the shaft suddenly gets stuck. The water was rising in the shaft so if she did not continue to move up, she along with the person behind her would drown. Unless she pushes his foot up so that man on top could be freed, they would all drown. So the man behind her attempts to reason with her to climb the shaft. She continues to say she couldn’t do it. Finally, both men are yelling at her to simply reach up her hand and push the foot up. You can hear their desperation as they plead with her profusely, yelling, screaming. Finally, despite her natural inclinations to want to ignore their pleas, she listens and begins to push.

When things are desperate, there really is no time for pleasantries and politeness. The urgency of the moment requires strong pleadings and sometimes, even strong tones. If these two men continued to politely say, “Ma’am, would please consider pushing my foot,” in a quiet, even tone, I am sure everyone watching the movie would think that that would be an absurd response in light of the oncoming danger. But if the danger is real, then the urgency of the message should and must be displayed in tones and pleadings. Anything less would not only be absurd, but perhaps even cruel.

So preaching to a lost world with urgency, with pleadings of the full picture of the darkness of hell, is not mean at all but rather kindness. If hell is not the biblical picture of eternal torment, then there really is no need for such urgent preaching. But if hell is everything that Jesus claims it to be in the Gospels and what John sees in Revelation, then ‘hell-fire preaching’ cannot empty vitriol, but instead it is a mercy far greater than any other . Gordon Chen quotes Spurgeon:

Men are perishing, and if it be unpolite to tell them so, it can only be so where the devil is the master of the ceremonies.

Out upon your soul-destroying politeness; the Lord give us a little honest love to souls, and this superficial gentility will soon vanish. I could with considerable refreshment to myself pour sarcasm after sarcasm upon religious cowardice. I would cheerfully sharpen my knife and dash it into the heart of this mean vice. There is nothing to be said in its favor.

It is not even humble; it is only pride of too beggarly a sort to own itself.

Gordon adds:

Too often both the content of our speaking and the manner of our speaking are conditioned by what people would like to hear, or what we believe they should hear on the basis of our personal observation, rather than what they need to hear based on what the Bible reveals. The ideas of hell and judgment are the ones that are particularly likely to suffer when we forget to return to the Bible to shape and form the content of what we say. Similarly, when we move away from Scripture’s example, the manner in which we teach will invariably tend in the direction of a sort of florid, learned-sounding blandness. Plain speaking always gets us into trouble, yet that’s exactly what the Bible pushes us towards.

And what the Bible pushes us towards is what we must consider doing or we act with what Spurgeon describes as “religious cowardice.”