III. Gravity of Ascribing False Teaching to Christ, Embodiment of Truth

1. USE OF PARABLE NOT ENDORSEMENT OF ITS THEOLOGY

The question arises, Did not Jesus’ use of this Jewish belief make Him endorse the fictitious plot of the parable? Rather, is it not like the Christian story of the man who dreamed that he died and went to the gates of Heaven? Saint Peter supposedly met him there, and gave him a long piece of chalk. He told him to climb to the top of some marble stairs, and there he would find a blackboard on which he was to write down all his sins. Making his way slowly up the stairs, he met a friend hastening down. In his surprise he asked his friend where he was going, and the friend replied, “I’m going down for more chalk.” Now, we ask in all seriousness, would the telling of that story commit one to believing the literality of the theology of the illustration, or rather the point it was designed to convey?CFF1 263.1

2. GRAVITY OF IMPLIED CHARGES AGAINST CHRIST

The seriousness of charging that Christ personally believed, publicly sanctioned, and actually set forth as truth this Greco-Jewish parable involving Immortal-Soulism, is to charge Him with gross inconsistency, neutralizing His own testimony, playing false to truth, and contradicting His own eighteen illustrations, from animate and inanimate life, concerning the doom of the wicked. Without exception, He taught the utter, ultimate destruction of the wicked. It is likewise to put Christ in total conflict with His own seven references to the complete destruction and disappearance of being, for the wicked, in His definitive descriptions of the relentless fires of Gehenna.CFF1 263.2

More than that, to attribute belief and endorsement of this fable of Dives and Lazarus to Christ is to make Him deny His own uniformly consistent and multiple teachings on Hades—the term actually used for “hell” in this parable—as a state of unconscious sleep for all men, good and bad, between death and the resurrection (as in John 11:11, 14), from which there must be an awakening before there is any return of consciousness, thought, or activity, and where none of the wicked are at present undergoing torment.CFF1 263.3

It likewise puts Christ in the position of endorsing the contention that Hades is eternal, whereas according to the Apocalypse, it is at last to be destroyed (Revelation 20:14). And even the fires of Gehenna are ultimately to burn out and disappear when they have done their appointed work, and the wicked are no more, and all pain and death and torment end forever, as the new heavens and new earth supersede the present world that is to be destroyed in the coming lake of fire (Revelation 21 and 22; 2 Peter 3:10-13).CFF1 264.1

3. MAKES CHRIST GUILTY OF PURVEYING ERROR AND PERVERSION

Such a charge makes Christ guilty of endorsing all the multiple inconsistencies of a literalistic interpretation of a then-current Jewish fable in which the fictional figures comport with notions of retribution during the period of “death” clearly adopted from Platonism, which makes death but a continuation of life in the afterworld. It would thus charge Christ with guilt in the purveyance of error and perversion. It would put Him into direct conflict with the all-sufficiency of Scripture, and of His own timeless admonition: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:31).CFF1 264.2

4. DEMANDS OF RESURRECTION BROUGHT ON CRISIS

To accept the Platonic dogma of Immortal-Soulism is to cast overboard all that Moses and the prophets have written—God’s appointed witness, as well as all that Christ taught. Moreover, one did actually rise from the dead a short time later and bore his testimony (Lazarus, in John 11). Christ’s carping critics there proved the futility of such an appearance. In fact, it was this very episode—Christ’s last and crowning miracle—that brought on the crisis in the rejection of Jesus as the life-giving Messiah.CFF1 264.3

It was this very miracle, demanded by Dives, that spurred the priests on to plot and accomplish Christ’s death (John 11:47-54). Christ’s words were eternally true—they were neither persuaded by Lazarus’ resurrection (John 11) nor by His own, which climaxed it all (Matthew 28:1-6). They were not at all persuaded (Luke 16:31), much less did they repent (Luke 16:30).CFF1 265.1