The parable deals with several extreme opposites: torment and comfort, death and life; hell and heaven. The characters are a wealthy man and a beggar who lived in extreme poverty, but their fortunes are reversed in the afterlife. Jesus warned the Pharisees not to follow their instincts, traditions, and religious convictions. He was urging them to repent.
If the story slams you with a feeling of shock, that was precisely Jesus’ intent. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is the Bible’s most vivid description of what hell entails. It is a horrific and deeply unsettling story. The parable makes clear that even people in hell right now want their loved ones to be warned about the terrors of a very real hell. After all, the whole of this parable is to sound a clear warning about the fearsomeness of hell, its horrors, and the very real threat it poses to those who live in unbelief and unrepentant sin.
The story has one purpose: to warn the hearers that hell will be full of people who never expected to be there. There is no possibility of escape and no rest.
Luke 16:19 introduces us to the rich man, and every phrase in that verse lets us know that he was lavishly, outlandishly, over-the-top wealthy. Such great wealth, then, as now, assured that he was highly influential. He was the kind of person the average Israelite, under the teaching of the Pharisees, believed to be most assured of heaven. Most of those listening to Jesus would have concluded that this man was greatly blessed by God.
As for the poor man, Lazarus, he was beyond destitute, paralyzed, unable to move or care for himself. Lazarus was “full of sores.” He longed for a crumb of the dirty bread the dogs would eat from the floor under the rich man’s table. The Pharisees and their disciples would regard such suffering as proof that Lazarus was cursed by God. Of these two characters, he was the one they would have regarded as worthy of hell.
The shock of Jesus’ story is the great reversal. The beggar who longed for a breadcrumb receives a place of high honour in heaven. The rich man who enjoyed every earthly advantage—whom Pharisees wanted so much to emulate—goes to hell, where he is humiliated, abandoned, without hope, and reduced to begging for a drop of water.
Notice that when the rich man finds himself in hell, he does not ask for reconsideration or release on the grounds of pity or mercy. He knows he deserves to be in hell. All he asks for is the smallest hint of relief. The only concern he has left is for his brothers, because he knows they are exactly like him—respectable, comfortably wealthy pillars of society, doing whatever they want, going through the motions of enough religious activity to maintain an honourable reputation, but headed directly for hell.
Abraham’s response is firm: “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them” (Luke 16:29). There is no better method or more effective messenger with special power to give sight to the blind or life to the dead. The power is in the Word of God.
The rich man was in hell forever, not because he lacked information, but because he ignored the message he had received through the Word of God. The only way his brothers would ever escape hell would be by listening to that message and believing it. No miracle of any magnitude will convince someone who hears and understands the message of Scripture but rejects it anyway.
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