NOT PERISH

For God so loved the world, John chapter 3 and verse 16.

or eternal life, as it says in some versions. I want to focus on the phrase “should not perish”.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life”.

Perish means to die. The opposite of life is death. And contrary to modern ideas, death is not the end. The Bible makes that clear. Many people in this world have been taught to believe that death ends all. They say in Scotland, ‘if you're deid, you're deid’, and that's it.

Well, if there's no consciousness or no existence beyond this life, then we may as well ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die’ - and then go to Switzerland when the the quality of life deteriorates and commit suicide. We may as well do that if there's no accountability to a higher power, to a Supreme Creator. Because if there's nothing beyond this life, then it doesn't matter how we live or what we do. And if that's true, then the death of Christ was meaningless. It was wasted. It was a completely unnecessary sacrifice.

It says in Genesis chapter 2, ‘God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’ That's unique to mankind. It doesn't say that about the animals. And furthermore, it says that God created man in His own image. So that means that we're moral beings. We have the capacity to think and reason and make choices based on our free will. We're not robots. We have a living soul, and we don't cease to exist when the body dies, and we'll prove that from Scripture today, because the Bible is the Word of God and we put all our trust in the living Word of God. There's a power in the Bible that there isn't in any other book in this world.

It says in Romans chapter 5,

‘God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us’.

So it's because we're morally and spiritually accountable to the God who made us that the King of Kings stepped down from the throne of heaven and allowed men to mock his claim to kingship, who rammed a crown of thorns on his head, it’s because he loved us and because he didn't want us to perish and be outcast from his presence forever. That's why he went to the cross and died for us.

Perish means to destroy utterly. The opposite of eternal life is eternal death. It means what it says.

So those who preach universal redemption are completely wrong. Because some people comfort themselves with the idea that because Jesus bore the sins of the whole world, of all mankind, then it follows that all mankind will eventually be saved. That's what they say. Regardless of whether they accepted him as their Saviour or rejected him, regardless of what kind of life they lived.

Another variation of this idea is the Roman Catholic belief in a place called Purgatory, a fictitious place which is nowhere found in the Bible. Where they think that people who have fallen short of the mark in this life they go through a period of suffering before they're allowed to enter heaven. So in effect, what they really believe is that they can atone for their own sins. Well, that's tantamount to saying that the atoning work of Christ on the cross wasn't enough to save them. What an insult to God's free grace! What an insult to the Saviour who gave his life and suffered for them on the cross! And what a direct contradiction of the victorious words which the Lord Jesus shouted as He gave up His spirit when He died. He dismissed His Spirit. He said, ‘It is finished!’ And then he bowed his head and dismissed his spirit. It was a finished work that the Lord accomplished on the cross of Calvary. And if he really did accomplish a finished work, ‘the work that his father had given him to do’, the Bible says - then there's no need to invent a place called purgatory. Hallelujah! A famous German monk discovered the truth of this: ‘The just shall live by faith’.

So by one act of faith in the life-giving power of the Son of Man, we have eternal life. It says in Romans chapter 10,

Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

That's it for time and eternity. Because the Lord Jesus came from heaven to earth to do for us what we could never do for ourselves. Horatius Bonner put it this way:

Upon a life I did not live,

Upon a death I did not die,

Another's life, another's death,

I stake my whole eternity.

And then some people, they can't reconcile the thought that a God of love would allow his creatures to suffer in hell, in the lake of fire, forever. But in doing so they either have to bypass the need for repentance, or they have to subscribe to the unbiblical theory that God will give sinners a second chance to repent after they die. Well, such a a doctrine or teaching is never found in the Scriptures. On the contrary, it says in Hebrews chapter 9: It's appointed unto men once to die, and after this comes judgment. That's what the Bible says. There's no thought in the scriptures of a second chance. In Daniel chapter 12 in the Old Testament, God revealed to Daniel that the day is coming when ‘those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake’. That's those whose body lies in the dust of the earth, whether you're cremated or buried, it doesn't matter. They'll awake. God will awaken them. And it says in Daniel, (God revealed this to Daniel):

‘some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt’.

And the Bible gives ample evidence of an afterlife.

Saul -King Saul- consulted a Medium, a Spiritist Medium. And she got the shock of her life when it wasn't the familiar spirit, it was actually Samuel who appeared to her. In spirit form, Samuel himself, and he said, ‘Why did you disturb me?’

Moses and Elijah appeared on the Mount of Transfiguration to speak with the Lord Jesus ‘about his decease, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem’. And Peter and James and John were there. They were eyewitnesses - eyewitnesses of His Majesty.

And the Lord Jesus spoke about the day that's coming, when He will return to earth. And He says, ‘Abraham and Isaac and Jacob will sit down in the kingdom of God’.

So the Bible is very clear that there's an afterlife, that this is not the end. Death is not the end. And Jesus very clearly warned about it in Matthew chapter 25. You can read it for yourself when you have time. I'll not read the whole scripture, but we'll just turn to it and we'll read part of that passage in Matthew 25. It's reading from verse 31 - 46, but I'll skip over most of it and we'll go to verse 46:

and these shall go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

The righteous are those who have put their trust in Jesus, who have put their trust in God their Saviour. That's what makes you righteous in God's sight, because we're not righteous of ourselves. We're sinners who need a Saviour, and God gave a Saviour,

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him should not perish, but have eternal life’, everlasting life.

So Jesus spoke about everlasting punishment, punishment that never ends.

His apostles spoke about it in the New Testament. Paul said in 1 Corinthians chapter 1, he spoke of those who shall:

‘suffer punishment, even eternal destruction, from the face of the Lord and from the glory of his might.’

He repeated it in 2 Thessalonians chapter 1. You can read these scriptures for yourself.

The Apostle John said in 1 John 5: He said,

He that has the Son has the life. He that has not the Son of God has not the life.

And he said in John 3, that very famous chapter from which we quote that verse, John 3 and 16. But you go to the last verse of that chapter, and here's what it also says.

He that believes on the Son has eternal life, but he that obeys not the Sun shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him, remains on him.

And the Apostle Jude in verse 7 of his letter, he speaks about:

Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them, having in like manner with these given themselves over to fornication and gone after strange flesh are set forth as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire.

Eternal fire. That's without end. And he says in verse 13, Jude says that these people, some people of whom he was warning the church, who weren't believers in Christ at all, they're ‘wandering stars for whom the blackness of darkness has been reserved for ever.’ That's a living, eternal death. A living death.

And the writer to the Hebrews, who may well have been Paul, in Hebrews chapter 1 speaks of eternal judgment.

And John, writing in the book of Revelation, speaks of the second death in Revelation chapter 20.

And in Revelation 14, he writes about the smoke of the torment of those who take The mark of the beast, and worship the beast who's coming, that Antichrist world ruler who is coming upon this earth. And he says that they'll be

‘tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.’ That's the Lord Jesus.

And the smoke of their torment goes up for ever and ever, and they have no rest day and night, they that worship the beast and his image, and whoso receives the mark of his name.

So these are very solemn truths. And so we say to anyone who's not saved, we would say Whose side are you on? You can't sit on the fence. Either you're on God's side, the side of the one who has absolute power, or you're in the side of God's arch-enemy, Satan, the Devil, the opposer of all that God stands for. And Jesus said about Satan, he said,

he was a murderer from the beginning, and he stood not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own, for he's a liar and the father thereof.

And Satan has sowed the lies of deceit in the minds of men. So that they think there's no accountability, there's nothing after death, but that's the lie of the Devil. God's word is faithful and true. God warns us about eternal death, the second death, eternal punishment. But that's why he sent his Son. That's why it was so important to realize, for us to realize, that ‘God so loved the world’. There was no other way that we could be saved.

God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son.

He gave His only begotten Son to be a sacrifice. For our sins, for our failure.

We inherit sin from our first parent Adam, and because of that We're lost to God, and the only way He can reclaim us is through the atoning work of the Lord Jesus on the cross.

‘For God so loved the world’, he loved you, ‘that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever,’ -whoever - ‘believes on him should not perish’ (eternally), ‘but have everlasting life’, (eternal life).

God wants you to be saved. God doesn't ‘desire the death of any’, it says in the Scriptures, ‘but that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth’.

And so we say to our unsaved friends, will you reach out the hand of faith today and put your hand in the nail-pierced hand of the Man who gave his life for you on the cross? He died, and he rose again victorious on the third day, and he's waiting for you to come and say:

‘Thank you, Lord Jesus, for dying for a sinner like me’.