Preaching: So what’s the toughest doctrine for you to preach?Smith: I’ve never been asked that before. Probably, hell. I believe in it. I believe that it exists—I don’t believe in annihilation at all. I believe that hell is just as real as heaven. It’s separation from God. In fact, Luther said that God’s hell is God’s love for us—the fact that God loved us so much is God’s hell.
But this thing about separation from God—which I think Jesus had a foretaste of in His cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”—it’s tough for me to preach on that, and not because I don’t believe it but because it breaks my heart to have to say things that are true that will mean the eternal separation from God for people. It’s kind of like Paul saying, as he writes in Romans, “I would consider myself accursed—I would consider myself a candidate for hell—if it would result in the salvation of my Jewish people.” He loved his people that much. I could not say that. I have not come to that place. But Paul had incredible love for his people. So that’s one of the things—that to speak the truth of God’s Word with such a great cost when it comes to people rejecting it and ending up in hell. That’s the first thing.
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Second of all, I know that there’s going to be congregational disinclination. They’re not going to want to hear it. So I start off knowing that. I announce the text. I announce the title. Immediately the red flags go up. Immediately I start feeling like Isaiah: “Lord, who hath believed our report?” Maybe even like Jeremiah: “Lord, who hath even heard our report?” They don’t want to hear it.
It’s anti-authoritarian—who am I to talk about that? It’s political incorrectness. Then all of this other stuff about universalism, which some people are moving toward—God is too good to allow anyone to be lost, that eventually everyone will be saved.
It’s difficult because there is some ambiguity there. A text like in
1 Peter 3:18-24, as Jesus went to the lower environs, went to hell, went to Hades, preached to the spirits that were in prisons. Is that hell? I preached a sermon on that one time during Beeson Divinity School’s sermonic series on the Apostle’s Creed. I took that part, “...and he went to hell and preached to the spirits.” I titled the sermon “Going to Hell for All the Right Reasons.”
I said what I thought the Scripture was saying, took that text, married it to
Psalm 24, saying that Jesus went to hell—not for an evangelistic meeting, because once a person is lost there is no transfer, there is no second chance, no purgatory. He went there to declare Christus Victor—that Christ is Lord. I closed by saying what the psalmist said, “Lift up your heads, oh ye gates”—that Christ went there to declare, “I’ve won. It’s victorious,” which I hoped would whet the appetite of those who listened if they were not saved, that they would want to join in the victory celebration.
I think the greatest deterrent against people going to hell is for them to see the love of God and how much God loves them rather than to scare them, which is not what Jonathan Edwards was trying to do at all in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” But let them see how much God really, really loves them and the cost He was willing to pay that they might forever be with Him. So my emphasis on hell—why I would preach it—is not what you can avoid in terms of the fire but what you miss in terms of the intimacy.
