The Great Paradox

In today’s guest post, NJ Thompson discusses The Great Paradox. What is the great paradox you ask? It is profound yet incredibly disturbing – it has to do with that four letter word Christians are seemingly avoiding as of late. Perhaps this is one four letter word we need to reinstate into our vocabulary and allow it to jar us back into a reality of bended knees and weeping eyes.

 

The Great Paradox

“Could a mariner sit idle if he heard the drowning cry? Could a doctor sit in comfort and just let his patients die? Could a fireman sit idle, let men burn and give no hand? Can you sit at ease in Zion with the world around you DAMNED?” (Leonard Ravenhill)

 

These words will seem preposterous to the post-modern, incredulous “Christian.” We live in a day where many within the Church have forsaken the facts of an eternal, unquenchable hell that awaits all who do not know Christ and believe in Him. The devil is quite wise. He has convinced many that the fires of hell are a rather politically incorrect metaphor and has caused many to embrace the illogical fallacy that one can’t really know anything. By doing this, he has shrewdly stripped men of all motivation for missions and evangelism.

 

I, however, do not write to such doubtful critics. I write to the faithful few who do indeed believe the Scriptures and the testimony of the church for the past two-thousand years. I write to those who do believe in a hell where men are ceaselessly tormented for eternity due to their rebellion and sin against a thrice-holy God.

 

There is a great paradox amongst Bible-believing Christians today. We believe in hell but are completely unmoved by a lost world who is running fast to an infinitude of suffering there. We believe in the ceaseless, excruciating torture that awaits the countless unbelievers around us who walk the wide road that leads to destruction but we don’t lose a moments sleep over the fact nor shed a single tear.

 

We are much too worried about and consumed with our petty, ridiculous issues to have time to weep over the lost around us. We are so caught up with ourselves, so lost in the seas of selfishness, that we hardly think a thought about another unless that person is somehow affecting us.

 

The great paradox today is that Christians could believe in hell and have not a tear in their eyes nor the slightest anguish in their hearts over the lost and perishing world around them.

 

Does anyone see the absurdity of this? Sure, we take pride in our orthodoxy but do we really believe what we say we do? For one who truly believes in hell cannot but constantly live with tears in his eyes and anguish in his heart for everywhere he looks he sees precious souls slipping down into an eternity of burning-hot misery.

 

The little-known John Smith of England after spending several hours in prayer would emerge from the closet with eyes swollen from weeping and say, “I am a brokenhearted man; yes, indeed, I am an unhappy man, not for myself but on account of others. God has given me such a sight of the value of precious souls that I cannot live if souls be not saved. Oh give me souls, or else I die!”

 

John Hyde, a missionary in India, would often spend entire days and even weeks at a time in agonizing prayer over the heathen who were slipping into hell. This man was rarely seen with dry eyes. He carried such a heaviness of soul over the lost that his heart literally shifted from one side of his chest to the other due to the strain of anguish and it killed him.

 

It seems that such lovers of souls have become extinct in the day in which we live. Where are the broken men? Where are men who carry an unceasing anguish and agony for the lost? Is there anyone who cares? Anyone who shares the love and heart of Christ towards sinners?

 

One cannot disregard the prophetic song written by brother Keith Green: “Do you see, do you see all the people sinking down? Don’t you care, don’t you care, are you gonna let them drown? How can you be so numb not to care if they come? You close your eyes and pretend the job’s done. ‘Oh bless me Lord, bless me Lord,’ you know it’s all I ever hear. No one aches, no one hurts, no one even sheds one tear.”

 

A story I read yesterday afternoon has haunted me ever since. Read and weep.

Charlie Peace was a criminal. Laws of God or man curbed him not. Finally the law caught up with him, and he was condemned to death. On the fatal morning in Armley Jail, Leeds, England, he was taken on the death-walk. Before him went the prison chaplain, routinely and sleepily reading Bible verses. The criminal touched the preacher and asked what he was reading. “The Consolations of Religion,” was the reply. Charlie Peace was shocked at the way he professionally read about hell. Could a man be so unmoved under the very shadow of the scaffold as to lead a fellow-human there and yet, dry-eyed, read of a pit that has no bottom into which this fellow must fall? Could this preacher believe the words that there is an eternal fire that never consumes its victims, and yet slide over the phrase without a tremor? Is a man human at all who can say with no tears, ‘You will be eternally dying and yet never know the relief that death brings’? All this was too much for Charlie Peace. So he preached. Listen to his on-the-eve-of-hell sermon.

“Sir,” addressing the preacher, “if I believed what you and the church of God say that you believe, even if England were covered with broken glass from coast to coast, I would walk over it, if need be, on hands and knees and think it worthwhile living, just to save one soul from an eternal hell like that!”

I weep as I write for I fear that I am no different than this chaplain. Oh, Jesus have mercy. How can I be so numb, so cold, so indifferent to those who I know are running to an everlasting sentence of unceasing burning in hell? How can a hardened, godless criminal have more love for a soul than a professing Christian?

 

We must awaken from our slumber of temporal, worldly thinking and begin to see things from an eternal perspective. We must pray along with Jonathan Edwards, “O God! Stamp eternity on my eyeballs!” For there are millions of souls perishing as we speak without hope and without Christ who will spend forever in the most horrible of torment.

 

Does this move you, Christian? Are there tears in your eyes? Do you know anything of the anguish over the lost that drove the Apostle Paul (Romans 9:2-3)? Do the fires of hell keep you awake at night?

 

This great paradox must end! For tell me how one can be called a Christian and yet be so heartless. I say it is an impossibility! Our lack of love for a lost world is good reason to question whether we even know the first thing about Christ.

 

It is time that we get to our knees and cry out to God. May this be our prayer:

“Oh! for a heart that is burdened! Infused with a passion to pray; Oh! for a stirring within me; Oh! for His power every day. Oh! for a heart like my Saviour, Who, being in an agony, prayed. Such caring for OTHERS, Lord, give me; on my heart let burdens be laid. My Father, I long for this passion, to pour myself out for the lost—to lay down my life to save others—‘to pray,’ whatever the cost. Lord, teach me, Oh teach me this secret, I’m hungry this lesson to learn. This passionate passion for others, for this, blessed Jesus, I yearn. Father, this lesson I long for from Thee—Oh, let Thy Spirit reveal this to me” (Mary Warburton Booth).

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Thompson is a man whose heart has been pierced with the eternal. Refusing to live a mediocre or a mere “normal” (ie: paltry) Christian existence, Nick has given himself completely and unreservedly to Christ to be spilled and spent for His glory. After much proding, he has finally started a blog to write the musings of which Jesus has been pressing upon his soul. You can read more of his studies and thoughts by visiting his deep, probing, and often controversial blog: NJ Thompson.