Luke 16:25-31 - Not listening

16:25,26

We should remember that this is a parable, so should be wary if reading too many doctrinal details into the account. Abraham reminds the rich man that in his lifetime he received many good things, but Lazarus received bad things. Now the situation was reversed. So does this mean that the rich automatically go to hell and the poor to heaven? No. In fact, Abraham, who is in heaven in this parable, was a rich man. It is what we do with our lives that counts. If we have wealth but use it only for selfish purposes, or make an idol out of it, then we are indeed in trouble.

Then the man is told that there is a great chasm, an uncrossable divide. There is a final judgement coming, and we need to live our lives in the light of that coming judgement. None of this is in the context of earning our salvation, but is in the context of how we should live our lives. To live our lives as though this is it is pure foolishness. we need to have an eternal perspective. And that most definitely does not mean that what we do here doesn’t matter, quite the opposite, it means that what we do here has eternal significance.

16:27-31

The rich man accepts his plight, but then pleads for a warning to be sent to his brothers so that they can avoid the same fate. Interestingly he still asks for Lazarus to be sent. But there was no need for this, there was Moses and the Prophets, ie all of the Old Testament. The rich man is unconvinced, just as many today claim that God does not provide enough evidence for His existence. This is not true, and the rich man’s assessment of the situation was not true. If they did not believe Moses and the Prophets, they would not even be convinced by someone rising from the dead. We do not realise how stubborn our hearts are, it takes a work of grace to awaken our spirits, otherwise we remain dead in our sins.

There is ample evidence that we live in a designed universe. Malcolm Muggeridge said “the depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact”. There is absolutely no problem with God not having provided enough evidence, the problem lies entirely with our own blindness.