The Furnace of Fire
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2013 · 21 July 2013
We come to the last of seven parables given by our Lord Jesus Christ in Matthew 13. And this one is the climax. This particular parable is a parable about judgment. It is a parable about hell. And the key of the parable is found in verse 50, the furnace of fire, where there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Our Lord spoke often and a lot about hell, He said many things about the damned, the wicked, the Christ rejecters. But of all of the terrifying things that Jesus ever said, perhaps the most startling was when He said to the Jewish leaders in Matthew 23:33, “How can you escape the damnation of hell?”
We don't normally associate the Lord Jesus Christ with hell, but He said more about hell than he did about love. He said more about hell than all the other biblical preachers combined. Some people think that hell is fun. What deception. Hell is not fun. There is no way to describe hell, nothing on earth can compare with it.
No living person has any idea what it is. No murder scene with splashed blood and oozing wounds could ever suggest something that can come close to hell. Let the most gifted writer exhaust his skill in describing this unending flame and he would not even brush the nearest edge of hell.
This is a parable in which the Lord warns us about hell. Remember, just like in the parable of the wheat and the tares. He allows good and evil to coexist during this period. But in the end comes judgment. We have seen the parables that describe the nature of the kingdom, the power of the kingdom, the personal appropriation of the kingdom, and now we come to the climax and the judgment.
It is a fearful warning that in the end there will be eternal separation of the damned from the redeemed. And the world is moving toward this. Every human life is moving toward that inevitable hour, every day at least six thousand one hundred and seventy people in the United States alone will die and enter eternity, and most of them will go to hell.
Matthew 13:47-52, “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered some of every kind, 48 which, when it was full, they drew to shore; and they sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but threw the bad away. 49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come forth, separate the wicked from among the just, 50 and cast them into the furnace of fire. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. 51 Jesus said to them, “Have you understood all these things? They said to Him, “Yes, Lord.” 52 Then He said to them, “Therefore every scribe instructed concerning the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old.”
Fishing in our Lord's time was a common enterprise. Fishing for some of the disciples was their way of life, so they would understand clearly what He said. Basically there were three ways to fish; you can do it with a line and a hook. The second kind of fishing was using a special net. It was a net that was like a large circle and on the outer perimeter of the circle were weights.
The fishermen threw the net so well that it would hit the water in a circular form and as it sunk toward the bottom it would capture in it as the lead weights pulled down the edges, all the fish that were in that area. So the fisherman would wait until he saw a school of fish, then he would spin that net to capture the fish and he would pull the net together. And that is the net our Lord taught them to be fishers of men, throw out the net and catch men for Christ and pull them in.
But that is not the net that is used here, this was a troll net. It speaks of a very, very large net that could not be worked with the hand of a man. One end of this large net was attached to the shoreline and the other end was attached to a boat. And as the boat would begin to move in a circle, it would sweep into all the fish into that net.
This net basically is immense and it brings in everything. This is like a great vertical wall that has swept up everything, living and dead, it sometimes pulled in all kinds of things, seaweed, every form of life that would be there would be caught in that net. Verse 48, "And when it was full, they drew to shore and sat down and gathered the good into vessels, but threw the bad away."
Now the picture is very clear, isn't it? Let's look now at the spiritual principle in verse 49, "So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come forth, separate the wicked from among the just." Let us stop at this point. There's a lot that you could say about that parable and there are some interesting possibilities. But the Lord is only interested in teaching one thing and that is the separating process that went on where angelic beings are used to separate people in judgment.
You see, during this era good and evil go together and God allows evil. But the time is coming when He will separate those who know the Lord Jesus Christ, and those who do not. And that separation is inevitable and it is ultimate. This dragnet draws in all kinds of fish. The kingdom of heaven is like that net, it moves silently through the sea of life, drawing men, almost without them knowing it, to the shore of eternity.
The only spiritual thing that the Lord pinpoints in this parable is that last act of the fishermen. Everything else passes without comment. And I think we ought to leave the rest without comment and just take what our Lord meant to teach. When He spoke of fishers of men, He used that in a positive way to speak to the disciples of catching men for Christ. But when He speaks of this drag-net, He is talking about gathering men for judgment.
Look at verse 49, "So shall it be at the end of the age." This is just a general statement that all in the world are caught ultimately in the net of judgment, to be separated in the end. And notice again that the angels are the executioners. The angels are the separators, just as we saw in verse 41, just as we see in Matthew 24; the angels come with the Lord to act out judgment. Just as we see in Matthew 25, just as we see repeatedly in Revelation
14. The angels are the agents of God's judgment.
Matthew 25:31-32, 34, 41, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them one from another. 34 Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come, you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 41 Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
And Jesus said in John 5:28-29, “for the hour is coming in which all who are in the graves will hear His voice 29 and come forth—those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of condemnation.” There will be an eternal destiny for every soul that has ever lived on the face of the earth.
Men may not perceive the kingdom, they may not see God moving in the world, but He is always moving. And men very often when touched by the gospel of Jesus Christ, or threatened by judgment, run toward the freedom they think is ahead of them but sooner or later they run right back into the same net because there's no real freedom out there. And they are inexorably moving toward the inevitable judgment.
All people are gathered in the net. The kingdom will ultimately engulf them all. And God with His angels will separate them. Now, that leads me to a third thought, and that is the peril. Verse 50, "And shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth."
Now that is a fearful verse. And yet Jesus spoke more of hell than anybody else. If Jesus had not taught us about hell, we would not have believed it. We cannot conceive of eternal damnation. More than anything else, Jesus threatened men with hell. And if you don't think so then you haven't been paying attention to the words in His ministry.
This was a constant part of what our Lord taught. Now if you then, are to evaluate what should be the emphasis of preaching, based on the example of Christ, it should be preaching on hell. Our generation doesn't do that. It's so terrifying. Now, what is this furnace of fire?
Number one, hell is a place of unrelieved torment. The Bible defines it as outer darkness. Our Lord describes hell as unrelieved darkness forever with no hope of the light and no hope of the dawn. And the Bible also says it is a fire. Now it is not a fire that we would know as fire, to burn something in this world.
Fire is God's way of describing it because it is a tortuous, unrelieved kind of fire, more terrible than any fire that we would ever know. But fire here describes the torment of the damned; no relief from the suffering, the agony and the pain, forever.
Only two times in all of Scripture that we have any insight into how people respond to hell. The one is the Lord's parable in Luke 16:24 where He says, “the man cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” And the other is in Matthew 13:50 where our Lord said that there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. That's hell.
Secondly, it is a place of unrelieved torment for body and soul. When an unbeliever dies, his soul goes out of the presence of God, into the torment of hell. It may not be the final lake of fire that comes after the great white throne judgment, for that needs a transcendent body to endure it, but it is a torment as illustrated by the rich man who in hell was tormented.
In the future, there will be a resurrection of the bodies of the damned; they will be given a transcendent body that will then go into a lake of fire to be punished forever. We, as Christians, will be resurrected to have a transcendent body also, a glorified body, where we will live with God and all angels and redeemed people forever in heaven.
And that's why Jesus in Matthew 10:28 said, "Fear not them that can destroy the body, but fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." You see, hell encompasses soul and body. Transcendent, eternal bodies are going to be given to the damned so that they will suffer in those bodies forever.
Jesus said in Mark 9:48, “the worm does not die.” Now what did He mean by that? When a body decays, worms begin to consume that body and the worms will die when the food is gone. But in hell, the worms never die because the body, though it is continually being consumed, is never consumed. The Lord was saying the unrelieved torment of body goes on and on.
Thirdly, torment of body and soul happens in varying degrees. In other words, for some people, hell will be worse than others. It says in Hebrews 10:29, "Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified a common thing, and insulted the Spirit of grace?”
People who have stepped on Jesus Christ, who have rejected His cross, will experience a greater hell than those who have not. The same way as there are degrees in hell there will be degrees of reward in heaven as well.
Matthew 11:24 says, "It will be more tolerable for Sodom than for you." In other words, it's only relative, it isn't going to be tolerable for every being, but it will be more tolerable for them than for you because of what you have experienced. You had Jesus Christ in your city, they didn't. You rejected Him with more information; therefore hell will be more severe for you.
And then you have that parable in Luke 12 where the Lord says in verse 47-48, "And that servant who knew his master’s will, and did not prepare himself or do according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. 48 But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few.” So, hell will be unrelieved torment of body and soul in varying degrees.
Fourthly, there is torment for body and soul in varying degrees endlessly. The worm never dies, the fire never goes out, the light never breaks, the sweet relief of death never comes, endlessly. The only reason in which we in this life can even make it through trials and suffering and disease is because we know there will be an end to it.
Well, how do you avoid hell? Only by receiving of Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. If you don't appropriate the kingdom, you see, if you don't take the treasure, if you don't purchase the pearl of great price, there's no way out.
Now, the final point, the application. So in verse 51, Jesus said to them, “Have you understood all these things?" Have you got this all put together in your minds? And do you see that it's going to go along like this with good and evil until the end and then comes a final separation? Did you get it?
And they said to Him, “Yes, Lord, we understand it.” And Jesus accepted their affirmative answer, otherwise He would not have said what He did in verse 52, “Therefore every scribe instructed concerning the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things new and old.”
And the wise head of a household or teacher teaches the old with the new in balance. Now you have a storehouse that is filled with old and new. They knew the Old Testament and now they had heard the mysteries of the kingdom. They were one up on the scribes who only knew the old stuff. But Jesus says - God called you and prepared you to tell others. I hope that we all realize that God is telling us this now so that we are willing to preach the gospel at any time, to anybody, anywhere, Amen?