A sermon preached at Covenant Presbyterian Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas on April 19, 2026.
“There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead’” (Luke 16:19–31).[1]
Is there outward evidence of your Christian faith? Or is faith a private matter kept quietly between you and God? Whether quiet or not, the Apostle James asks, “What good is it . . . if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him?” (Jas. 2:14). Of course, James is not disparaging faith by asking, “What good is it?” Rather, his rhetorical intention is to connect the dots between faith and the practical outflow of it, that is, works. In other words, “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (2:17). James’s argument does not deny that we are justified as righteous through faith alone in Christ alone. Rather, faith alone is never alone. It proves itself true through fruit. No fruit, no faith.
And this is of eternal consequence, as we see in our passage today, in which Jesus tells a parable about a rich man and a poor man, and their differing eternal destinations. At first, the parable seems as if it is about problems of social class or wealth and poverty, but these are merely the means of delivering the truth of the parable, directed intentionally at the Pharisees, “who were lovers of money” (Luke 16:14). They were the ones to whom Jesus said, “You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. For what is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15). The Pharisees were more concerned about looking righteous, but while their outward conduct connoted piety, their hearts were far from God. They were then very much like the rich man of Jesus’s parable, living a blessed life here but knowing nothing of God’s saving grace for eternity. Though ethnic heirs of Abraham, they knew nothing of his faith.
Blind to Grace
In Jesus’s parable, let us first consider the juxtaposition of the two characters. An unnamed rich man is clothed in the color and cloth of royalty. He can afford to dress like a king and does. And he eats like one too, feasting “sumptuously every day” (Luke 16:19). He is not only wealthy but self-indulgent. We may imagine him as the most important person in his life, with the daily responsibility of pleasing himself.
In contrast, unlike the rich man, the poor man is named, Lazarus, whose name ironically means, “God has helped.”[2] But at the beginning of the parable, he appears to be anything but helped. He is sick, “covered with sores,” and starving, desiring “to be fed with what fell from the rich’s man’s table,” and suffering, “even the dogs came and licked his sores” (16:20-21). He is a man in pitiful condition yet living without the pity of his neighbor.
We can picture it in our imaginations, the epitome of human suffering feet away from self-indulgent wealth. We are sympathetic to Lazarus’s condition but stunned at the rich man’s indifference. Lazarus lays not at a gate across town, hidden from view but at the rich man’s gate. Every single day, the rich man steps over the desperate need of a suffering soul. He is blind to the kindness of God’s grace, blind to his opportunity to extend grace to another.
In his first epistle, the Apostle John asks, “But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (1 John 3:17). Answer: It doesn’t. Those in whom the love of God abides by faith so demonstrate the abiding love of God through good works. Faith alone is never alone. The rich man’s indifference, the rich man’s calloused neglect of his brother reveals a self-absorbed heart with no room for God.
Aware of Eternity
Then, suddenly and mercifully, Lazarus dies, and perhaps tragically, so does the rich man.In his poem, “Death the Leveller,” James Shirley observes,
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
The rich man leaves behind glorious garments and majestic meals. Lazarus leaves behind his sores and starvation. The rich man is properly buried. Lazarus is presumably given a pauper’s grave. Yet alike, they leave it all behind. Death indeed is the great equalizer.
Yet the juxtaposition of Jesus’s parable continues beyond this life into the next but in reverse. Lazarus is “carried by angels to Abraham’s side,” while the rich man finds himself in Hades, the place of the dead, in torment (Luke 16:22-23). There is no soul sleep, no purgatorial place to atone for sin, not even a stairway to heaven, but a conscious, knowledgeable, suffering, and separated awareness of eternity. The rich man is consciously aware that he is dead, that he is not in heaven, thirsting where he is for a cool drop of water. He is knowledgeable, recognizing both the patriarch Abraham but also Lazarus at his side. He is suffering, “in torment,” confessing, “I am in anguish in this flame” (16:24). He is separated from the covenant people of God, represented by Abraham, the father of our faith.[3] John Calvin observes that one of the rich man’s greatest torments is he now realizes, beyond all denial, that his confidence was false—that he is cut off from the people of God.[4] There is a fixed chasm. No crossing; no second chance.
But the rich man is afforded a plea for mercy, which begins “Father Abraham, have mercy on me . . .” (Luke 16:24). Note, even burning in hell, his appeal is orthodox. While burning in hell, he sounds like the living Pharisees, who believed themselves superior to Jesus because of their heritage in Abraham.[5] They were those to whom John the Baptist said, “. . . do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham” (Matt. 3:8-9). Hell holds heretics to be sure, but those with an orthodox vocabulary and a perfect heritage, too.
But there is another juxtaposition we must not miss, that of the rich man in hell and the other rich man in heaven. For you see, Abraham was a very rich man, too.[6] The key difference between the two is not wealth nor works but this: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Rom. 4:3). For this reason, the Apostle Paul explains in the fourth chapter of Romans, God’s covenant people are not defined by their ethnic lineage back to Abraham but by walking “in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had . . .” (Rom. 4:11-12). Worldly wealth and poverty are not the distinguishing characteristics between the residents of heaven and hell; faith is.
Here is the sobering truth: The rich man has a heritage. He calls Abraham “father.” He understands judgment. He even shows concern for his brothers. But none of these equals saving faith. And this is the great danger for us as well: This life is not ultimate; eternity is. We may affirm heaven and hell, judgment and salvation, Christ and the cross. And yet, we may still live as though this world is all that matters. True faith does not merely affirm eternity; it reorients life around it. Let us not wait to be aware of it.
Sufficiency of Scripture
Finally, the rich man pleas, “‘I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house—for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them . . .’” (Luke 16:27-28). It would seem the “place of torment” made him into a missionary. In his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards says that our current understanding of hell is a “very feeble, faint representation” of the true horror. It’s “boundless duration” would “swallow up your thoughts and amaze your soul” if given but a glimpse of it.[7] Surely, this is the rich man’s sentiment too, because for him it is no longer a thought but a reality.
But we are not given a visual glimpse of the torment of hell. We are given something far better: the Word of God. As Abraham explains regarding the rich man’s living brothers, “‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them’” (16:29). They have the Scriptures given by inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life.[8] As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.”[9] And so, the rich man is told rightly: Let them heed what they have.
But though “All Scripture is breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16), the rich man wants more, revealing that the torment of hell has not changed him. He knows that in this life he did not hear or heed God’s Word. How can he expect his brothers to be any different? “No,” he argues with the man of faith, “but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent’” (16:30). In other words, the Word of God is not enough. But it is, Abraham counters, “‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead’” (16:31). Scripture alone is sufficient for salvation, not experiences, not miracles, not even a resurrection (though, of course, one would soon occur).
Contrary to the rich man’s thinking, the issue is not lack of evidence. It is the hardness of the human heart. Unbelief is not an intellectual deficiency; it is a spiritual one. And therefore, the means God has appointed is his special revelation, his Word.
The rich man’s brothers already had everything they needed, and so do we. We refer to this doctrine by the Latin expression Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. The Word, attended by the Spirit, brings life. “So faith comes from hearing,” the Apostle Paul explains, “and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). And where that Word is truly received, something happens: Faith produces fruit. This is the essence of the Apostle James’s teaching, when he says, “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works” (James 2:18). Works are not the root of salvation but the evidence of it.
So, what is Jesus teaching us today through this parable? He is not saying: “Be generous so that you may be saved.” He is saying: “If you are truly saved, you will not live like this rich man.” The rich man’s life exposed his heart. He had Scripture but did not obey it; opportunity but did not act; knowledge, but no transformation; and, therefore, no true faith. But Lazarus, the parable implies, trusted in God. And that faith, however quiet, however unseen by the world, was genuine saving faith.
Let us examine ourselves, then. Do we see the “Lazaruses” God has placed at our gate, or do we ignore the needs of our brothers and sisters? Do we live as those aware of eternity, or do we live as if today is all that matters? Do we submit to the sufficiency of Scripture, or do we crave something more? Because in the end, the question is not: “Do I profess faith?” But: “Do I possess faith in Christ, the perfectly righteous and obedient one?” Do I look to him alone for my righteousness? Do I live out my faith in obedience to him? For the gospel declares: We are saved by God’s grace through faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone. It is accompanied, inevitably, necessarily, by a life transformed by grace.
[1] Unless referenced otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version
(Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2001).
[2] Philip Graham Ryken, Luke, Vol. 2 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2009), 197.
[3] Rom. 4:11
[4] https://biblehub.com/library/calvin/commentary_on_matthew_mark_luke_volume_2/luke_16_19-31.htm
[5] John 8:53-59
[6] Gen. 13:2; 24:35
[7] https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/edwards_jonathan/Sermons/Sinners.cfm
[8] The Westminster Confession of Faith 1.2, https://opc.org/wcf.html#Chapter_01
[9] Ibid., 1.6
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