It’s Gospel season

By Elizabeth Prata

Christmas is a time of blessing, love, warmth, and peace. Even non-Christians enjoy this season in their way, expressing generosity and care to those around them. We all seek to put hard feelings, pettiness, and trouble behind us.

Christians exult in the celebratory season because the Son of God, very God, Perfect God, poured His infinite self into human flesh to live and die for our sins, and also to impute His righteousness to us. We remember the babe in the manger but also the Man-God on the cross taking all the Father’s wrath for sin.

If a person gets that far in their thinking, it’s usually as far as it goes. We do not like to think of the wrath of God. But we must think of it, because this is the eternal destination for unbelievers.

The next step after the Babe, after the cross, even after the ascension, is to ponder His judgment. He came to save, but He will also punish. He is King, Priest, Prophet, Friend to repentant sinners, and Judge for those who won’t.

Christmas is a good time when unbelievers are thinking of Christ, whether they want to or not. It can be called Gospel season…

Think of those who bask in their sin, refusing God’s Gospel, and die in unrighteousness. They are consigned to hell. Jesus took the wrath for sinners, yes, but we must repent of those sins and fall at the feet of Jesus, else when a person meets Him they will hear those fearsome words, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire.” (Matthew 25:41). The wrath is real.

I have been thinking lot about hell lately. I have unsaved family members. Some of those have heard the gospel from me, some from others. I’ve received negative reactions, dismissals, and rejections. I’ve heard “Away with your dogma!”, “Religion is a crutch for stupid people,” and “I’m fine, I served on the church board and I’ve done good deeds.” Sinners really hate the gospel.

But the reality of hell hangs over them. Some have gone on to their place, including my father. He died at the scene of a car accident he caused. The newspaper took a photo of his tarp-covered body, one elbow sticking out, crumbled car behind him. He was tootling along the highway one second and the next, he was in hell (probably). Of course I can’t know for sure, but after 84 years of rejecting Jesus in his confirmed atheism, one surmises the outcome is not good.

Jonathan Edwards preached about heaven, and in his follow-up sermon, Edwards preached the famous sermon about hell titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It is a startling sermon even today. Edwards was no showman and reportedly read his sermons in practically a monotone, but the weight of the words and the reality of hell caused people to fling themselves out of their pews toward the altar crying “What must I do to be saved?!”

I think of a portion of that sermon that hits my soul like a bowling ball on a mosquito,

“It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long forever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts, and amaze your soul; and you will absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, any mitigation, any rest at all. You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this almighty merciless vengeance; and then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be infinite. Oh, who can express what the state of a soul in such circumstances is! All that we can possibly say about it, gives but a very feeble, faint representation of it; it is inexpressible and inconceivable: for ‘who knows the power of God’s anger?'” ~Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

In whose hands are you today? Have you looked to Jesus? Charles Spurgeon was suddenly gripped by a faltering shoemaker, a layman who took over the pulpit that snowy morning, who kept saying from Isaiah 45:22 over and over again—”Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else.” Spurgeon looked. He saw, his eyes were opened.

You do not have to be a skilled preacher, an astute theologian, or an experienced evangelist to share the gospel with someone. Spurgeon said the layman who took over the preacher-less pulpit that morning didn’t even pronounce all the words right, “but that did not matter. There was, I thought, a glimpse of hope for me in that text.” It’s the TEXT that saves, not your delivery of it. God’s word is powerful with the Holy Spirit behind it, whispering it along, or in some cases like mine, hammering it into my stony heart to shatter all my self-sufficiency.

“Is My word not like fire?” declares the LORD, “and like a hammer which shatters a rock?” (Jeremiah 23:29).

Here is a Founders article on The Horror of Hell. It does not carry the same sweetness as thinking of the Babe in swaddling cloths, but it is the default destination of everyone who, in this Christmas season, looks upon a Nativity set and goes their unrepentant fleshly way.

The Horror of Hell by Tom Ascol.
“So, what should we think of hell? Is the idea of it really responsible for all the cruelty and torture in the world? Is the doctrine of hell incompatible with the way of Jesus Christ? Hardly. In fact, the most prolific teacher of hell in the Bible is Jesus, and He spoke more about it than He did about heaven. In Matthew 25:41–46 He teaches us four truths about hell that should cause us to grieve over the prospect of anyone experiencing its horrors...”