How can God be loving yet send people to hell? from A Passion for Life on Vimeo.

1 Peter 3:8-22

• What are the characteristics of believers listed in 1 Peter 3:18? Which of these characteristics do you find are most difficult/easiest to live out when under stress?
• What instructions are given to “whoever would love life and see good days”? (1 Peter 3:10)
• In what way are you blessed “even if you should suffer for what is right”? (1 Peter 3:14)?
• What did Peter urge believers to do in the face of suffering (1 Peter 3:15)? What does this mean? How does one do this? What is “the reason for the hope that you have”?
• When was the last time you had an opportunity to talk about your faith with a nonbeliever? What reasons did you give? Looking back what were  the easiest and most difficult aspects of the experience for you?
• 1 Peter 3:18 is the key verse in this section. In what ways does the work of Christ make all the things listed 1 Peter 3:8-17 possible for the believer?
• Peter stresses that Christ’s suffering led to exaltation (1 Peter 3:22). How does Peter say believers should respond to this? (See Also: Romans 8:34; Ephesians 1:20-21; Philippians 2:9-11; Hebrews 1:3-9; Hebrews 8:1; Hebrews 12:2)
• This passage explains that those who persecute the people of God will not have the last laugh. A day of judgment and perfect justice approaches. In what ways should this truth motivate believers? In what ways can you model God’s mercy as a way of pointing people to Christ before it is too late? (See also: Revelation 20:11-15; Romans 3:19; 2 Thessalonians 1:6-10)

The sermon will not touch on the issue of Christ’s decent into Hell that is found in 1 Peter 3:19-22. To learn more about how to understand this passage please consider what the Lutheran Confessions say about it HERE. The WELS web site addresses the issues raised by this text HERE.

I have had some interesting conversations with people lately about what Jesus, and the Bible as a whole, teaches about God’s final judgement and Hell, and how this biblical teaching relates to issues of justice. I touched on some of these issues in this week’s sermon on 1 Peter 2:12. If we want to understand what it means to love our enemies (Luke 6:29-36), be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9), and move out into the world as ambassadors of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20) then we must also understand what is at stake for those who reject God’s grace.

If you are interested in exploring these issues in greater detail you might want to consider the following quote that I used in the sermon that was taken from from Miroslav Volf’s book Exclusion and Embrace:

My thesis is that the practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance…My thesis will be unpopular with man in the West…But imagine speaking to people (as I have) whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned, and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit…Your point to them–we should not retaliate? Why not? I say–the only means of prohibiting violence by us is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God…Violence thrives today, secretly nourished by the belief that God refuses to take the sword…It takes the quiet of a suburb for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence is a result of a God who refuses to judge. In a scorched land–soaked in the blood of the innocent, the idea will invariably die, like other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind…if God were NOT angry at injustice and deception and did NOT make a final end of violence, that God would not be worthy of our worship.

Tim Keller highlights this quote from Volf in his recent book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skeptism and in his sermon on Luke 16:19-21 entitled: “Hell: Isn’t the God of Christianity an Angry Judge?” This is an excellent sermon which shows how hell is ultimately a natural consequence of living a self-centered life. You can download the sermon in MP3 format HERE. You can download the Study Guide for the sermon in PDF format HERE. This sermon is summarized in the study guide with the following quote:

Dorothy Sayers wrote that “there is no power in this world that can keep a soul from God if God is what it really desires.” Yet we see evidence all around us that our tendency is to desire other things more than we desire God himself. We tend to desire the blessings more than the one who blesses. This constitutes a move away from God and, as we do that, the joy, love, and wisdom God’s presence brings disintegrate and fail in our lives. In our move away from God, we see the soul disintegration our self-centeredness creates.
We can see how our selfishness and self-absorption lead to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Yet this tendency to move away from God is our choice.

Now ask these questions: “What if our souls have no end, so that when we die, spiritually our lives extend into eternity? What would our choice to move
away from God look like extended into eternity?”It would look like hell — the trajectory of a soul living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on forever. Hell is one’s freely chosen identity apart from God, on an infinite path. In the passage above (Luke 16:19-21 ),we get a glimpse of what this trajectory looks like.