As I heard someone put it recently, it is certainly true that you can be a farmer to the glory of God, but no one will be saved from the fires of hell just because you are.

At Covenant College we talk a lot about the biblical concept of calling, referring first to God’s call on us through the gospel – his call to faith and trust and worship and obedience – and second to his call on us through the gifts and passions and opportunities which he puts within us and before us – his call to particular pathways of service and obedience through which we live out, in particular ways, his gospel call.

There are wonderful benefits in thinking about life and work in terms of God’s calling and God’s callings, among them the affirmation of the genuine value of every vocation from politics to plumbing, from pharmacy to farming, from baking to banking, from art to athletics, from mechanical engineering to ministry.

Recognition of God’s manifold vocational callings helps us escape the trap of the sacred/secular distinction, according to which some paths are more “holy” than others. All such callings are from God, who has created with such complexity and variety and beauty that there’s hardly any limit to the range of types of work and service which people can take up, as worship to God for the good of the world.

Calling also helps us appreciate deeply both the extraordinary activities of some people some of the time, and the ordinary, even mundane activities of most people most of the time. Whether the work is routine or unusual, through it God’s creation is developed and nurtured and celebrated, his people served and discipled, and his Kingdom advanced.

Not everyone will be a William Wilberforce; in fact, we might say that William Wilberforce wasn’t William Wilberforce for most of his life, in that he spent decades in faithful, relatively unexciting, ordinary work — not really the stuff of books and films with which later generations have honored him.

In pursuing our callings, we are declaring and demonstrating the preeminence of Jesus Christ in all things, and we are bearing witness to God’s purpose in accomplishing and demonstrating his redemption of his creation. Creating art and music, building businesses, discovering cures for diseases – all these are godly pursuits, grounded in God’s creational norms and informed by common grace understanding, and they will, as tasks pursued for God’s glory, find their consummation in eternity: They have real, lasting value, and have their appropriate place as suitable trophies of God’s abundant common grace.

Likewise, deeds of compassion, mercy, and justice – caring for the sick and suffering, defending the unborn, working to free those in unjust bondage – have such real, lasting value as well. This is good and important work — Kingdom work — and it will endure for eternity as a display of God’s abundant love and wisdom and power.

In what follows, I do not intend to take back one bit of all this true reflection on calling, nor do I want to detract one bit from the worthiness of what millions of God’s people have done, across the centuries and around the world, in pursuit of their callings as acts of genuine worship to the Lord.

I don’t want to trigger a single doubt about our students’ explorations, during their college years, of the pathways of God’s vocational callings for the years ahead, nor to cast doubt on the genuine goodness of the good that by God’s grace they will do throughout their lives – as doctors and teachers, accountants and farmers, fathers and mothers, neighbors and friends and church members, i.e. in all the callings which God will call and enable them to fulfill.

But in this posting, I want to remind readers of a feature of the landscape of our faith which I believe is getting slighter and slighter attention these days, even as we rightly rejoice in the callings of God. It’s a feature which can raise some discomfort among even faithful Christians, but it’s so important that, if we lose hold of it, our view of our callings can get seriously out of focus with respect to the biblical gospel.

That feature is hell, and here I want to consider how, and how much, we think about hell – and more generally how we think about the eternal destiny of every human being, even as we treasure God’s callings.

It is well-documented that, in our churches, we don’t hear as much about hell as in previous generations. There is perhaps a variety of reasons for this:
· It seems a rather negative notion, as well as a negative motivation for faith and obedience; after all, shouldn’t we be drawn and motivated by God’s grace rather than by fear of eternal punishment?
· It strikes some as a remnant of a more “primitive” stage of religious understanding; all that unending and torturous punishment is, well, barbaric.
· Still others consider it unbecoming of the God of love and redemption.

So hell has become a source of embarrassment for many Christians, a doctrine which we should modify for modern sensibilities and sensitivities if we must mention or retain it at all.

But hell and eternal destiny are referred to often throughout Scripture, and certainly have been important themes of Christian doctrine across the centuries. Indeed, Jesus spoke about hell as much as he spoke about anything else.

In Matthew 5, for example, Jesus speaks of “the hell of fire.” In Matthew 8 he calls hell a place of “outer darkness” where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” In Matthew 25 he speaks of “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” and in Mark 9 of “the unquenchable fire” where “their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” – graphic language, to be sure, of worms’ perpetual feeding and fires’ perpetual burning.

More than one of Jesus’ parables describe rulers who return from long journeys and find some of their workers in rebellion; those workers receive the ruler’s justly angry punishment for defying his authority, an outcome pointing to the dreadful destiny of those who defy the will of the sovereign God who rules over all. In this light we can understand Jesus’ words in Matthew 10:28, spoken to his disciples as he sent them out –
And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.
Rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.

God alone is worthy to be feared, for he holds their eternal destiny in his hands.
And it is a permanent destiny. The Luke 16 story of the rich man and Lazarus, which some commentators think is a literal story rather than a parable, presents the idea of a great and fixed chasm across which no one can pass, a chasm on one side of which is eternal comfort at Abraham’s side and on the other side of which is unrelenting torment and anguish.

These are hard but clear passages, even as they may be more rarely heard these days.

Just a couple of generations ago it would have been common in churches for such verses to be regularly quoted as part of gospel proclamation, so that no one could miss the great divide between God’s righteousness and our unrighteousness, our desperate helpless and hopeless condition apart from his saving grace in Jesus, and the respective eternal destinies that await the redeemed and the reprobate, those who believe and obey and those who reject and disobey.

It was thought that Christians could give no adequate presentation of the good news of Jesus Christ without including an articulate, biblical statement of the “bad news” regarding the destiny of those who do not believe and obey the gospel. For only in light of the wrath of God on sin demonstrated in his resolve to punish the disobedient with eternal punishment would the glorious and gracious message of Christ’s once-for-all accomplished redemption settle on sinners with its full biblical weight of mercy and eternal hope, and would the redeemed understand how great is the love that their redeeming God has set on them.

So here is my question: In our worthy pursuits of our God-ordained callings, fully acknowledging the good work that God’s people are called to do in the vast array of vocational and personal areas of life and work – are we relentlessly remembering that, as Scripture so clearly and consistently states it, there is one of only two destinies awaiting every single human being who has ever lived or will ever live?

Are we remembering that, as important as our vocational callings are as true worship and true obedience which bring true glory to God; as surely as those callings, faithfully pursued, are real foretastes of and produce real fruit in the coming, fully-to-be-realized glory — are we remembering that those callings find their glorious consummation in eternity only because of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and that no one who has not found the refuge of saving grace in Jesus will know anything of that coming, fully-consummated good?

As Covenant’s president, I have, I believe, a good and worthy calling, ordained and blessed by God for the good of the college and the church and the world. I really do believe this, and I get up every morning committed for good biblical reasons to do what I do in my job – as, I believe, do Christian professors and lawyers and teachers and construction workers and parents and pastors and all calling-pursuing Christians.

I believe that the good in what I do – in students’ minds and hearts and lives, in the impact on communities and churches and workplaces around the world – I believe that that good is lasting and will be somehow wondrously gathered up and glorified in the glory of Jesus Christ in eternity.

But, as I review and reflect on the Scriptures’ and Jesus’ words on hell, I am struck by this somewhat disconcerting thought: I could pursue this presidential calling, and do it well and even in a godly way, and in both a temporally and eternally fruitful way – and no one might, through my work, ever be saved.

I could pursue my God-given vocational calling and at the same time fail to be an instrument of the gospel in saving anyone from the pit of eternal punishment and separation from God.

We can work for the well-being of families in our communities; we can protect and care for unborn human lives and their parents; we can zealously steward the environment, and feed the hungry, and heal the sick, and teach children, and make beautiful art and music that touches thousands of hearts – and we can do all these things for love of Jesus and to the glory of God – and yet fail to connect these good callings to the cross and the empty tomb, and in no specific, intentional way hold out the gospel hope of Jesus’ death and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins and the gracious provision of a way of escape from the unquenchable fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

There are so many good things to do, so many pathways of serving and loving and giving, and energetically and faithfully providing public witness to the redemptive realities of the Kingdom. I encourage you in them all. I treasure the opportunities that God puts before me in mercy ministry, in business, in the arts, in community service, in neighborhood concerns, in global enterprise, and in individual acts of kindness. In these ways I believe that I bear witness – public God-honoring witness – to the truth and beauty of our God and the realities of his eternal Kingdom, where we will forever worship and reign.

But I need to remember that these callings are not all there is to my biblical, gospel calling. As I heard someone put it recently, it is certainly true that you can be a farmer to the glory of God, but no one will be saved from the fires of hell just because you are.

As Covenant alumnus Michael Cromartie said in a recent interview: “The dead are not raised by politics” – and neither are they raised by godly business enterprise, nor by economic development, nor by pro-life activities, nor by creation care, nor by medicine or teaching or Christian scholarship. They are raised only by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through faith in him.

Now this does not mean that I need to obsess constantly about witnessing to someone every day. My work as Covenant’s president is Kingdom work; I know that full well, and I can throw myself into all the aspects of my vocational calling wholeheartedly.

But it does mean that I need to understand how my work as president – and my work in my other callings – links up with the specific good news of the gospel by which alone we sinners are saved, both through my own activities and through my enabling of others. And I need actively to pursue those linkages: Kingdom calling and gospel witness, gospel calling and Kingdom witness – always intertwined, always conjoined, always together in faith and obedience to our God.

So here’s my encouragement and exhortation: Remember hell – and heaven!

Remember the eternal destinies that await every man and woman and child.

Believe the gospel and speak the gospel, all along the way of the callings of your lives. Always consider how all those specific pathways can connect to the specific good news of God’s gift of salvation in Jesus, whereby sinners like you and me are by God’s grace transformed into his sons and daughters, and bound for a blessed eternity with him rather than a horrific eternity apart from him.

For this is the hope of the gospel we proclaim, that “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” (1 Peter 3:18).

Niel Nielson is a Ruling Elder in the PCA. He is the President of Covenant College (PCA) in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. This article first appeared in The President’s Blog at http://president.blogs.covenant.edu/ and is used with permission. Source: https://theaquilareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3518:what-indonesian-schools-the-pcas-global-missions-conference-and-my-granddaughter-have-in-common&catid=49:people&Itemid=132