Hell's only a holding cell for Big House

There’s a dangerous but popular doctrine among Christians that says when Jesus Christ died on the Cross, He first went down to the torments of hell and "dumped off" saved people’s sin before being resurrected and going up to heaven.

“When Jesus Christ said on the Cross, ‘It is finished,’ He meant it’s finished,” explains Richard Jordan. “Is that hard to understand?! It’s done; it’s finished. What was finished? Fulfilling the Scripture. As we know from John 19:28, He thought through all the Scripture and the one verse that hadn’t yet been fulfilled, He said, ‘I thirst,’ which was Psalm 69, and it was all done!

“To say Christ died, went to hell and somehow deposited your sins there is also a misunderstanding of what hell is and the issue of eternal judgment. It’s a dispensational issue in the sense that where (lost dead) people are, and where they’re located and how they’re treated, changes progressively as time goes on. Ultimately, lost people wind up in a place called ‘the lake of fire,’ and hell and the lake of fire are not the same thing in the Bible.

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“In time past, hell, which is in the heart of the earth, had a torment side and ‘Abraham’s bosom,’ or the paradise side (Luke 23:43). That’s why King David could say, ‘Thou shalt not leave my soul in hell.’ He went to Abraham’s bosom because he was a saved guy. Lost people went to the torment side.

“As Jesus Christ says of the rich man in Luke 16:23, ‘And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.’ In other words, the rich man, who’s lost, goes down to the torment side and Lazarus, as a Believer, goes to Abraham’s bosom. Any question about that?

“By the way, the rich man sees Lazarus. He’s conscious. It’s conscious existence in torment. That’s what the text says. Somebody argues, ‘It’s a parable.’ Then the reality is worse than what you’re reading! You make it a parable and that means the reality is more severe than the illustration. People have all these ideas to get around it, but you just get yourself in the soup even worse.

“Verse 24: [24] And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

“Notice what’s in hell and in paradise has a finger and a tongue. The rich man’s buried body is just a carnival for the maggots up on the surface, but your soul has a physical shape to it--appendages to it that are comparable to your physical body. In other words, it’s REAL; it has substance to it.

“He says he’s ‘tormented in this flame.’ If you say, ‘Well, I don’t believe it’s literal,’ then it’s something WORSE than fire. Whatever it is, it’s going to disintegrate you just like that. If you want to do all the symbolic, figurative and apocalyptic stuff, go ahead, but it just makes it worse; it doesn’t make it less.

“This is why people think the grave is hell because these two guys are there. It’s not. The body’s in hell. Verse 25: [25] But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.

“Do you see how you still have your mental faculties? It’s a conscious ability to think. You know, one the most tormenting things to me about a place called the torments of hell would be that issue of remembering.

“If you’re lost, you’re going to die and go to hell and remember every opportunity you had to not to be there. Sure as you’re sitting there, there’s some little bony-fingered demon going to come up in your face and say, ‘forever, forever, forever, forever,’ and you’re going to remember it didn’t have to be that way.

“Verse 26: ‘[26] And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

“So if Jesus Christ died and went down to the torment side, that verse says you can’t go from the torment side to the comfort side. You see how that works? There’s a gulf fixed where you can’t go back and forth.

“You say, ‘Well, Jesus is God; He could do what He wanted to do,’ and yeah, He’s telling you right there how He set it up to do! He doesn’t contradict His Word. How does it work? If you’ve over there, you stay over there, and if you’re over here, you stay over here. You see, folks who don’t understand how hell works in the Bible wind up with doctrines that don’t fit how things work in the Bible.

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"Come to Revelation 20 and notice how hell is not the ultimate end of lost people. Starting in verse 11, it says, [11] And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
[12] And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
[13] And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
[14] And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
[15] And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.

“After the Cross, and the Old Testament saints are moved into ‘the third heaven,’ who’s down there? Nobody but lost people. Today when somebody dies and goes to hell, it’s because they’re lost. In the Old Testament you could die and go to hell and be a Believer. Paul says 'to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.'

“Isaiah says ‘hell hath enlarged herself.’ It took over the whole place. After Christ comes back, and at the end of the millennium kingdom's thousand years, you have this Great White Throne Judgment where the dead, small and great--all the people down in hell--stand before God and all the people not found in ‘the book of life,’ i.e. lost people, are cast into the lake of fire.

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“The verse says hell and death are cast into the lake of fire. Hell is a temporary holding cell until the final judgment.

"John 3:18 says, ‘He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.’

“You see that word ‘already’? They didn’t have to become condemned; they are condemned already. You see, God isn’t waiting to see whether you deserve to die and go to the lake of fire. You deserve it! You were already a sinner come short of the glory of God and condemned.

“It’s like if you go to courthouse and they find you guilty, they then send you out to county jail, but you return to the courthouse for your sentencing. There’s no ‘finding you guilty’—you’re already guilty, dude! The trial’s already been had.

“If you want see the transcript from your trial—all of your arguments to get around it—go back and read Romans 1-3. In chapter three, Paul says, ‘We have before proven. We’ve taken you to court and proven you that you’re guilty!' You were hoping for a ‘not guilty’ sentence? YOU? Knowing about you what you know about you, and you think you’re going to stand before a righteous God . . . well, you know better than that.

“What the Great White Throne Judgment is is the sentencing where you’re sent to the Big House called the lake of fire. That’s where you’re ‘judged out of the books’ and laccording to your works.

"The severity of the punishment takes place there and then all of that is cast down into the lake of fire. They don’t experience the second death in hell; they experience the second death here. Hell’s bad, but in the lake of fire there’s something else that goes on that’s even badder than bad.”

(to be continued tomorrow)