Chapter 21: The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31)

“A great chasm has been fixed.” That one line is the reason this parable gets quoted against the larger hope more than almost any other passage in the Gospels. A rich man dies and lands in torment. A poor man dies and rests in comfort. Between them stands a gap that no one can cross. The rich man begs for relief. Abraham says no. The rich man begs for a warning to be sent to his brothers. Abraham says no again. The story ends with the door shut and the chasm firmly in place.

I understand why this passage troubles people who hold the hope I hold. It troubled me for a long time. If the chasm is permanent and no one ever crosses from torment to comfort, the larger hope seems to crash against Jesus’ own teaching. That is exactly the argument the critics make. I want to state it fairly before I answer it.

James De Young, in Exposing Universalism, devotes a section of his chapter on the parables of Jesus to this account. He reads the story as a direct and decisive witness against any hope of salvation after death.¹ In his view, the fixed chasm teaches that God Himself has sealed the separation between the saved and the lost, and nothing can undo it.

De Young draws several lessons from the story. He sees two fixed destinies with no crossover. He argues that the perfect tense of “has been fixed” points to a settled, ongoing result.² He insists that the parable teaches there is no second chance after death. Suffering does not produce repentance, he argues, and even a resurrection will not convince someone whose heart has rejected Scripture.³

That is a serious reading, and I do not dismiss it. De Young is right that the parable carries a severe warning. But is it teaching what he says it is teaching? Is the parable a map of the afterlife, or is Jesus doing something else with it? To answer that, we need to read the whole passage in its setting.

The Text in Context

Let me put the full text in front of you. Read it carefully and pay attention to two things: who Jesus is talking to, and how the story ends.

First, notice who Jesus is speaking to. Luke 16:14 tells us: “The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him.”⁴ This is not a general lecture on the geography of the afterlife. It is a story aimed at a specific audience for a specific reason. The Pharisees loved money, and Jesus was warning them.

Second, notice the structure. De Young is right that the story falls into three clear parts.⁵ The first part (vv. 19–21) paints the contrast between the rich man and Lazarus while both are alive. The second part (vv. 22–23) describes the reversal after death. The third part (vv. 24–31) gives the three pleas of the rich man and Abraham’s three refusals. That third section is by far the longest. Jesus spends the most words there because that is where the point lives.

Third, notice the key Greek vocabulary. The rich man is in Hades (Greek hadēs, the realm of the dead), not in Gehenna (Greek geenna, the final place of judgment).⁶ This matters. Hades in the New Testament is not the same as the final state. Revelation 20:13–14 tells us that Hades itself will one day be thrown into the lake of fire. Hades is temporary. It is the waiting room, not the courtroom.⁷

Fourth, notice the word for torment. The rich man is in anguish (Greek basanos, “touchstone, testing, torment”). The word originally referred to a dark stone used to test the purity of metals. It later broadened to mean any painful testing or examination.⁸ De Young himself notes that in Jewish and early Christian texts the word carried this testing meaning. He writes that it was “often used of a slave being punished in order to elicit confession.”⁹ That is a striking detail. The pain is tied to testing, not simply to punishment for its own sake.

Fifth, and most important, notice where the story ends. The final line is not about the chasm. The final line is verse 31: “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.” That is the punchline. Everything in the parable moves toward that sentence. The point is about hearing Scripture now, in this life, while the chance to respond is wide open.

The Heart of the Case

The question before us is clear. Does the parable of the rich man and Lazarus prove that no one in torment can ever be saved? Does the “great chasm” teach the permanent, irreversible separation of the lost from God? I believe it does not. Here is why.

1. The Genre Move: Reading a Parable as a Parable

The single most important step in reading this passage well is to read it as what it is: a parable.

De Young argues that this account is “probably not a parable in the technical sense.” His reasons: Luke does not label it as one, and one of its characters has a name.¹⁰ He prefers to call it an “example story.” But even on his own reading, it “depicts not a single event of a real individual but a representative one.” He adds that “the conversations need not be real but are literary devices.”¹¹ That is what a parable does. Whether we call it a parable or an example story, the rule of reading stays the same. The story teaches its point. Pressing the stage furniture beyond that point is a mistake.

Think about how we read the other parables. In the parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1–8), Jesus compares God to a corrupt judge who grants justice only because a widow wears him down. Nobody concludes that God is unjust or reluctant. The point is about persistence in prayer, not the character of God. In the parable of the shrewd manager (Luke 16:1–9, just before our passage), Jesus commends a dishonest manager. Nobody concludes that Jesus approves of fraud. The point is about using resources wisely for eternal purposes.¹²

We know how to do this. We read parables for their point, not for every detail of their scenery. The flames, the chasm, the conversation across the gap, Abraham serving as a kind of gatekeeper: these are the furniture of the story. They serve the point. They are not a map of the afterlife that we can pull out and pin to the wall.

And the story has a known background. Scholars have long noted that the tale of a reversal in the afterlife between a rich man and a poor man was a familiar folk-tale form in the ancient world. Versions of it appear in Egyptian stories and in Jewish tradition outside the Bible.¹³ De Young acknowledges this background himself.¹⁴ George Sidney Hurd, in The Triumph of Mercy, identifies the specific folk tale. In the original story, a rich tax collector named Bar Ma’jan and a poor scribe died. The poor scribe went to paradise, and Bar Ma’jan was tormented beside a river, unable to reach its waters. There were at least seven other similar stories circulating among Jews in Jesus’ time.^13b Hurd notes that the scribes and Pharisees would have loved this story, because it placed them in a good light and the tax collectors in torment. But Jesus flipped it. He put the man dressed in purple and fine linen on the wrong side of the chasm.

That context matters. This parable sits in a series of five parables, all aimed at the same audience. The Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3–7), the Lost Coin (15:8–10), the Prodigal Son (15:11–31), the Unfaithful Steward (16:1–14), and this story. All five respond to the complaint of the scribes and Pharisees that Jesus received sinners (Luke 15:1–2). The rich man in the story is their mirror. Jesus takes a story shape his hearers already know and fills it with his own point. That point is not about the furniture of the afterlife. It is about listening to Moses and the Prophets.^13c

Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, summarizes the work of David Powys, which takes this reading even further. Powys argues that the parable is the climax of a sustained attack on Pharisaic life and thought running through Luke 14–16. The rich man is a lover of money (Greek philargyros), exactly the term Luke uses for the Pharisees in 16:14. So the rich man is a Pharisee. And the reversal is devastating. The whole scene conformed to Pharisaic expectations in every way but one. Powys puts it plainly: “the Pharisee was standing in the place meant for the unrighteous, and the unclean and presumably unrighteous beggar was in the place meant for the righteous.” On this reading, the parable is an ad hominem argument. Jesus adopts their own eschatology to undercut their own piety. He uses the Pharisees’ system of rewards and punishments against them.^13d

I want to stress that reading the parable as a parable does not weaken it. It strengthens it. When we stop trying to mine every detail for afterlife geography, we can hear what Jesus is actually saying. He is warning the Pharisees that their love of money and their refusal to hear the Scriptures will cost them everything. That is a sharper message, not a softer one. The parable loses its force when we turn it into a lecture on Hades. It gains its force when we hear it as the warning it was spoken to be.

2. The Point Move: Where the Parable Lands

Every good story has a punchline, and this one is no exception. The climax of the rich man and Lazarus is verse 31: “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

That is where Jesus wants us to land. Not on the chasm. Not on the flames. Not on Abraham’s refusal. On the deadly danger of ignoring Scripture.

The parable is aimed at the money-loving Pharisees (Luke 16:14). They are the ones who have Moses and the Prophets. They are the ones who are failing to hear them. And the final line carries a devastating irony: even someone rising from the dead will not convince them. Jesus is foreshadowing his own resurrection, which the Pharisees would in fact reject.¹⁵

Notice what the parable is not doing. It is not teaching a systematic doctrine about the afterlife. It is not giving a lecture on whether post-mortem repentance is possible. It is pressing one question on a specific audience: Will you hear the Scriptures that are right in front of you?

Consider how Luke sets the scene. In Luke 16:13, Jesus says, “You cannot serve God and money.” In the very next verse, Luke tells us that the Pharisees heard this and ridiculed him, “because they loved money” (16:14). Then Jesus responds with a rebuke and follows it with this parable. The rich man in the story is a stand-in for the money-loving Pharisees. He had Moses and the Prophets. He had everything he needed. And he did not listen. That is the parable’s target, and everything in the story serves it.

De Young does not disagree that the parable is about hearing Scripture. But he stacks additional doctrines on top of that point. He argues that it also teaches no second chance after death. Suffering does not produce repentance, he says, and even the resurrection will not produce faith in those who rejected the Old Testament.¹⁶ Some of those claims are worth considering, and I will address them below. But I want to be honest about what is happening here: De Young is building a full systematic theology of post-mortem destiny on the details of a parable whose own climax lies somewhere else.

3. The “Chasm” Move: What the Fixed Gap Means Inside the Story

Now let me take the chasm itself seriously. Abraham says, “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” (Luke 16:26).

De Young reads this as a statement about the permanent, God-ordained separation of the saved from the lost. He notes the perfect tense of the verb “has been fixed” (Greek estēriktai, from stērizō, “to establish, make firm”) and argues that the passive voice means God Himself set the chasm in place.¹⁷

I grant that the verb is strong. But what does it tell us, and what does it not tell us?

Within the world of the story, the chasm is in place and cannot be crossed. That is clear. The rich man cannot get to Lazarus. Lazarus cannot come to the rich man. No one, on either side, can make the crossing happen. But the story is set in Hades, the intermediate state between death and the final judgment. It is not set in the new creation. It is not set after the resurrection. The parable says nothing about whether the chasm is a feature of the final state.¹⁸

This is a point that several scholars have made. The chasm exists within the parable’s narrative world. It tells us that the rich man cannot cross on his own terms, by his own effort, through his own asking. He still thinks Lazarus should serve him. He still calls on his Abrahamic heritage. He still tries to manipulate the situation. The chasm blocks that. It blocks the self-sufficient man’s attempt to fix his situation on his own terms.¹⁹

David Burnfield, in Patristic Universalism, presses three points that sharpen this reading. First, the rich man cannot cross over to Lazarus now, but the text does not say he can never cross over. The universalist agrees that those who are punished in the next age are separated from those who are not. But when the punishment is completed, they will be together. Second, even if the rich man cannot cross the chasm, Christ holds the “keys of death and of Hades” (Revelation 1:18). What kind of Savior would He be if He could not carry sinners out of their lost place? Third, the rich man’s punishment is already producing change. He is thinking of others, asking that his brothers be warned (vv. 27–28). That is the heart of the universalist claim that judgment is remedial rather than retributive.^19b

But does the chasm prove that God’s mercy is walled out forever? Does it prove that the God who parted the Red Sea, who broke down the wall between Jew and Gentile (Ephesians 2:14), who descended into Hades Himself (1 Peter 3:18–20), cannot bridge a gap within the intermediate state? The parable does not say that. It does not address that question at all. It does not even raise it. The question the parable raises is not “Can God cross?” but “Will you listen?”

Robin Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, has argued that the chasm may be in place within the period of the intermediate state but not necessarily beyond the final judgment.²⁰ McClymond, in The Devil’s Redemption, criticizes Parry for importing a distinction the text never makes.²¹ I understand McClymond’s concern. But I would put the point differently. The parable does not make the distinction because the parable is not a treatise on the afterlife at all. It is a warning to the living. To press the chasm into a permanent metaphysical truth about all post-mortem destinies is to treat the parable’s furniture as its foundation, and that gets the genre backward.

Thomas Talbott, in The Inescapable Love of God, presses two questions about the chasm that sharpen this reading. First, he asks about the time frame. The conversation between the rich man and Abraham takes place while the rich man’s five brothers are still alive. That means it is set before the death and resurrection of Jesus, before any final judgment, and before Death and Hades are cast into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14). It is set before the New Jerusalem descends with its gates always open. The chasm is a feature of the pre-resurrection world, not of the final reality.^21b

Second, Talbott asks a harder question: for how long are we to suppose this chasm remains in place? He points out that not one word in the story says the chasm will remain forever. He then offers a striking reading. One possibility, he suggests, is that the power of the cross has already bridged the chasm, so that the rich man and Lazarus may now live together in a context of repentance and forgiveness. Another is that the rich man remains unrepentant to this day, keeping the bridge from reaching him. But in either case, Talbott argues, the cross has already guaranteed the destruction of death. And when Jesus preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19) and preached the gospel to the dead (1 Peter 4:6), he was, as Talbott puts it, flinging himself into the chasm in order to build a bridge over it.^21c

4. The Whole-Canon Move: Hades Is Not the Last Word

When I read the rich man and Lazarus, I do not read it alone. I read it inside the whole Bible, because Scripture interprets Scripture. And the whole Bible has something important to say about Hades.

Hades is not the end of the story. In Revelation 20:13–14, John writes: “The sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.”²² The realm where the rich man sits in torment is itself going to be emptied and destroyed. Every person in Hades will be brought out of it to stand before God.

That does not by itself prove universal salvation. But it proves that Hades is temporary. The parable is set in the intermediate state, the waiting room between death and the final judgment. Whatever the chasm means, it is a feature of that waiting room, not of the final reality.

And there are other texts that speak of God’s work in and beyond death. Peter writes of Christ preaching to “the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:19) and of the gospel being “preached even to those who are dead” (1 Peter 4:6).²³ The Apostles’ Creed confesses that Christ “descended into hell.” The early church took this seriously. Christ went where the dead were. He did not stay on His side of the chasm.

Gerry Beauchemin, in Hope Beyond Hell, presses this point with force. Christ has already used His keys. He went and preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19–20). He descended into the lower parts of the earth (Ephesians 4:9). Having all authority and power, He has Himself crossed the great gulf. Once Hades and death are destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26; Revelation 20:14), what remains? Life. The absence of death can be nothing other than life.^23b

Elhanan Winchester, in the eighteenth century, made the same argument. The gulf is impassable to human beings, yes. But Christ is not merely a human being. Winchester put it plainly: the chasm was “impassable to all men, but not to him.” He went on to build this claim on the biblical motif of Christ’s descent into Hades, citing 1 Peter 3:18–20 and Romans 14:9.^23c

The full treatment of these texts, and the question of whether God offers salvation after death, belongs to Chapter 24. I will not re-argue it here. But the point for our purposes is simple: the rest of Scripture does not treat death as a wall that God cannot or will not cross. A single parable’s stage furniture should not carry more weight than the whole witness of the canon.²⁴

One more canon-wide point deserves mention. The Old Testament prophets follow a consistent pattern: judgment, then restoration. God tears, then heals. He scatters, then gathers. Ezekiel 16 describes Jerusalem’s judgment in the most severe terms, and then promises restoration (see Chapter 16). Malachi 3:2–3 describes the refining fire that purifies rather than destroys (see Chapter 17). The Bible’s own pattern is that God’s judgment serves His saving purpose. Reading one parable’s chasm as a permanent wall against that pattern gives one passage’s scenery more weight than the whole arc of Scripture.

5. The Constructive Move: What the Parable Does Teach, and What It Does Not

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying this parable is unimportant. I am not saying Jesus was just telling a cute story. I am not waving it away.

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus teaches hard and real truths. It teaches that how we live now matters terribly. It teaches that wealth can blind and damn. It teaches that indifference to the poor is a deadly sin. It teaches that the Scriptures are sufficient for salvation and that rejecting them carries devastating consequences. It teaches that even signs and wonders will not break through a heart that has hardened itself against God’s word.²⁵

But what the parable is not doing is writing a systematic theology of the afterlife. It is not proving that the chasm is a permanent feature of God’s universe. It is not teaching that God’s mercy runs out at death. It is not a treatise on the intermediate state. It is a warning to the living about the danger of hard hearts and closed ears.

I want to add one more observation. De Young draws eight conclusions from this parable. One of them is this: “Suffering does not lead people in hell to repent.”³ He bases this on the rich man’s failure to repent in the story. But look closely. The rich man in the story never encounters God. He never faces Christ. He never hears the gospel. He talks to Abraham from across a chasm. He begs for water. He begs for a messenger to his brothers. But he never meets God face to face. To conclude from this story that no one in the afterlife can ever be brought to repentance is to draw a universal doctrine from a particular narrative that does not raise the question.

Talbott makes a telling point here. He asks: if the rich man were truly in an irredeemable condition, where did his genuine care for his five living brothers come from? He is worried about them. He wants them warned. That concern for others is itself a sign of moral change. In a parable, we can set such questions aside as details that serve the story. But if the story is pressed into a literal account of eternal damnation, the rich man’s compassion becomes very hard to explain.^25b

The hope this book defends does not rest on suffering producing repentance. It rests on the unveiled presence of God, the power of the risen Christ, and the faithfulness of the Spirit to pursue every soul until it is found. None of those are in view in this parable. The parable has its own job, and it does that job well. But it was not written to answer the question we are bringing to it.

The God of Scripture is a God who bridges chasms. He bridged the chasm between heaven and earth in the incarnation. He bridged the chasm between holiness and sin on the cross. He bridged the chasm between life and death in the resurrection. He descended into Hades itself (Ephesians 4:9; 1 Peter 3:18–20).²⁶ To read one parable’s internal scenery as proof that this God is permanently blocked from reaching a soul in torment is to give the furniture of a story more weight than the character of the God who tells it.

Engagement with Specific Scholars

Let me turn now to what the scholars have said about this parable, on both sides.

De Young, as we have seen, reads the parable as a decisive statement against universalism. He draws eight specific lessons from it, including that there are only two destinies, that the chasm has been fixed by God, that people must respond before death, and that suffering does not lead to repentance in the afterlife.²⁷ He also cites Tim Keller’s observation that the rich man never asks to leave hell and never complains that his destiny is unfair.²⁸

De Young also insists that the parable cannot be dismissed simply because it uses imagery from a known folk-tale tradition. He writes that “for universalism to reject this account as something that Jesus did not really believe is without merit,” and he argues that Jesus adds elements to the traditional story form that “validat[e] the seriousness of it.”²⁹ I agree with De Young on this point. Jesus did believe what he was teaching. The parable is not a throwaway borrowing from pagan mythology. Jesus filled it with his own truth. The question is what that truth is, and I have argued that it centers on verse 31, not on the mechanics of the chasm.

McClymond, in The Devil’s Redemption, engages the universalist reading of this parable primarily through his critique of Robin Parry. McClymond notes that Parry interprets the chasm as potentially limited to the period before the final judgment, and he objects that this distinction is not present in the text.³⁰ McClymond is right to push back against reading into the text what it does not say. But I would argue that the same caution applies in the other direction: reading out of the text a permanent metaphysical doctrine about all post-mortem destinies is equally an import, because the parable is not doing systematic theology.

George Sidney Hurd, in A Defense of Biblical Universalism, argues that the parable’s scenery teaches its point, not a map of the afterlife. Jesus’ parables teach their points, and the details of their stories serve those points. The chasm belongs to the story’s setting, not to a systematic doctrine of the afterlife.³¹ In The Triumph of Mercy, Hurd makes a related argument. The parable does not say that the fire is eternal. It does not say the rich man can never cross. Hurd compares the chasm to a prison wall. A prisoner cannot come and go while serving his sentence. But once the sentence is served, he is free. Hurd connects this to Jesus’ own words elsewhere: “You will by no means get out of there till you have paid the last penny” (Matthew 5:26; Luke 12:59). There is a great difference, Hurd writes, between “you will by no means ever get out” and “you will by no means get out until.”^31b

Robin Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, treats the passage as a serious warning that does not formally contradict the universalist hope, since it does not address the question of final destiny at the resurrection.³² Hunter Coates, in Grace Abounds, argues that both Lazarus and the rich man are in Hades, the realm of the dead, separated by the great chasm. The Greek word for “bosom” (Greek kolpos) refers to a kind of sheltered place within Hades, not to a separate eternal destination. The modern concept of “hell” is far removed from the parable’s own setting.^32b I find all of these arguments useful, though I would press the genre point harder than any of them. The parable teaches its climactic point (v. 31), and building a doctrine of permanent separation from its scenery mistakes the genre.

James Beilby, in Postmortem Opportunity, sharpens the argument further. Beilby notes that even if the parable does assume a view of what happens after death, it describes either the final resting places or an intermediate state. In the first case, the passage only rules out the possibility that those in torment can enter comfort on their own. That does not contradict postmortem opportunity at all. In the second case, the statement “you cannot cross from there to here” applies only to Hades, not to the final reality. Beilby agrees with N. T. Wright’s assessment that “the parable is not, as often supposed, a description of the afterlife.” And Robert Yarbrough goes even further: “It is widely accepted that this story is parabolic and not intended to furnish a detailed geography of hell.”^32c

Samuel Jonathan, in Grace Beyond the Grave, provides the most thorough scholarly analysis of the parable’s background and purpose in any of the sources this chapter draws on. Jonathan surveys the debate over the parable’s folk-tale origins, citing Richard Bauckham’s caution against overemphasizing the Egyptian parallels. Bauckham argues the parable is not about human destiny in the afterlife at all but about wealth and poverty. Geldenhuys puts it well: “The Saviour related this parable not in order to satisfy our curiosity about life after death but to emphasize vividly the tremendous seriousness of life on this side of the grave.” Jonathan further notes that even scholars who read the parable as containing afterlife teaching must reckon with a key detail. The rich man was a Jew who had Moses and the Prophets, not an unevangelized person. The parable does not address the question of those who have never heard.^32d

Andrew Hronich, in Once Loved, Always Loved, makes a related point with force. Even if the parable were taken as literal history rather than a parable (which it is not), it describes events prior to the judgment day and the death and resurrection of Christ. Who is to say that such events do not change the landscape? Hronich notes that Christ Himself can cross the chasm, because “with man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). The fixed chasm, he argues, citing Bloesch, “is a gap only in the sense that unrepentant sin constitutes a formidable barrier to salvation.” The chasm blocks self-rescue, not divine rescue. Hronich adds one more observation: if one carefully rereads the text, one finds nothing to intimate eternal conscious torment. Not a word. The most the story teaches, taken at face value, is that certain people will suffer for their sins in the next life, which is something all three major views of final punishment (traditionalist, annihilationist, and restorationist) affirm.^32e

Counter-Objections

Two objections press hardest against the reading I have offered. Let me state each one at full strength and answer it honestly.

Objection 1: “You cannot dodge a teaching just by calling it a parable.”

This is the most common pushback, and it is partly right. Parables teach truly. They are not fables that we can brush aside. When Jesus tells a parable, he means something real by it.

But parables teach their point, and the point of a parable is found in its climax, not in every piece of its scenery. The point of the rich man and Lazarus is named in verse 31: “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.” That is the truth the parable drives toward. The chasm, the flames, the conversation across the gap, the rich man still treating Lazarus as a servant: all of these serve the point, but they are not the point itself.³³

Pressing the furniture of a parable beyond its point is what the genre forbids. We do not press the unjust judge into a doctrine of God’s reluctance. We do not press the shrewd manager into an endorsement of fraud. We should not press the chasm of this parable into a permanent metaphysical doctrine about all post-mortem destinies. Reading a parable as a parable is not dodging its teaching. It is taking its teaching seriously enough to ask what the teaching actually is.

Objection 2: “Jesus chose this imagery deliberately, so the fixed chasm reflects reality.”

De Young makes this argument. He writes that even though the story draws on earlier folk-tale traditions, Jesus adds his own elements and validates the seriousness of the account.³⁴ Therefore the imagery, including the chasm, should be read as reflecting reality.

I agree that Jesus’ imagery is never arbitrary. He did not randomly pick a folk tale and retell it without caring about its content. He chose this story because its shape served his purpose. But what purpose did it serve? The imagery dramatizes the gravity of ignoring Moses and the Prophets. The chasm shows what it looks like when a self-sufficient man discovers too late that his whole life was built on the wrong foundation. The flames show the real anguish of that discovery. The inability to cross shows the helplessness of the man who refused to listen.

All of that reflects reality. But the reality it reflects is the terrifying seriousness of this life’s choices, not a metaphysical proof that God’s mercy is permanently walled out of some corner of His own creation. Jesus’ imagery is purposeful. Its purpose is to warn, and the warning is devastating. But the warning does not prove that the chasm is the last word about God’s dealings with those who suffer in the intermediate state.³⁵

Conclusion

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is a hard passage, and I have tried to treat it honestly. De Young and McClymond are right that it carries a severe warning. They are right that Jesus meant every word of it. They are right that the rich man’s fate in the story is real and terrible.

But the parable teaches its point, and its point is verse 31: hear Moses and the Prophets now, while you can, because a hard heart will not be broken even by a resurrection from the dead. That is the truth I take from this passage. The chasm is part of the story, and the story is true. But the chasm is not a theological treatise proving that the God who descended into Hades is forever barred from reaching those who suffer there.

I hold the hope of the larger salvation humbly here. I do not use this parable to prove that post-mortem escape is easy or painless or guaranteed on our terms. The rich man’s suffering was real. His blindness was real. His failure to hear was real. If anyone reads this chapter and walks away thinking the parable does not matter, I have failed.

The parable matters deeply. It tells us that the choices we make with our wealth, our ears, and our hearts carry weight beyond this life. It tells us that self-satisfied religion is deadly. It tells us that ignoring the poor at our gate is a sin that reaches into eternity.³⁶

But the same God who speaks this warning is the God who reconciles all things to Himself through the cross (Colossians 1:20), who draws all people to Himself (John 12:32), and who will one day be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28). The chasm inside one parable does not outweigh the promises of the whole Bible. The warning stands, and the hope stands beside it. The cumulative case for both is what this book is building, and it reaches its fullness in Chapter 30.

Notes

↑ 1. James B. De Young, Exposing Universalism (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock / Resource Publications, 2018), ch. 12, “The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.”

↑ 2. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12. De Young notes the perfect tense of the Greek verb estēriktai (“has been fixed”), which indicates a completed action with ongoing results, and the passive voice, which he reads as a divine passive indicating that God Himself established the chasm.

↑ 3. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12. De Young lists eight lessons from the parable, including the impossibility of crossing the chasm, the sufficiency of Scripture for salvation, and the claim that “suffering does not lead people in hell to repent.”

↑ 4. Luke 16:14 (ESV). The connection between the Pharisees’ love of money and the parable that follows is direct. Jesus is addressing their specific sin.

↑ 5. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12: “The story breaks down into three simple sections.”

↑ 6. The Greek word in Luke 16:23 is hadēs (ἅδης), not geenna (γεέννα). The distinction matters: hadēs is the general realm of the dead, the intermediate state; geenna is the place of final judgment (see Matt 5:22, 29–30; 10:28; 23:33). For the distinction, see BDAG, 16–17 (hadēs) and 190–91 (geenna). De Young himself notes these distinct senses; see Exposing Universalism, ch. 2, “The Meaning of Hades” and “The Meaning of Gehenna.”

↑ 7. Revelation 20:13–14 explicitly states that Hades will be emptied and destroyed: “Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them… Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.” This confirms that Hades is a temporary state, not the final reality. The full treatment of the intermediate state belongs to Chapter 24.

↑ 8. The noun basanos (βασανος) originally referred to a touchstone, a dark stone used to test the purity of gold by rubbing it against the surface. The term later broadened to mean “testing, examination, torture.” See BDAG, 168. The related verb basanizō appears in the Gospels and Revelation. Its semantic range includes testing and examination, not only punitive torment.

↑ 9. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12. De Young notes that in Jewish and early Christian texts, including 2 Clement 10:4 and 17:7, the word is “often used of a slave being punished in order to elicit confession.”

↑ 10. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12: “It is usually designated the ‘parable of the rich man and Lazarus,’ but it is probably not a parable in the technical sense. It is not labeled such by Luke and its characters have names unlike other parables.”

↑ 11. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12: “It depicts not a single event of a real individual but a representative one. The conversations need not be real but are literary devices to show the reality of what lies ahead in the afterlife.”

↑ 12. The parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1–8) explicitly teaches about persistence in prayer, not the character of judges. The parable of the shrewd manager (Luke 16:1–9) comes immediately before the rich man and Lazarus and teaches about the wise use of worldly resources. In both cases, pressing the parable’s scenery into theological propositions beyond its stated point would produce absurd results. The same hermeneutical caution applies to the rich man and Lazarus.

↑ 13. The folk-tale motif of a reversal in fortune between a rich man and a poor man in the afterlife was well attested in the ancient Near East. The dominant parallel, identified by Hugo Gressmann in 1918, is the Egyptian story of Setme and Si-Osiris. Jewish parallels appear in later rabbinic tradition. Samuel V. Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2019), 78–81, surveys the scholarly debate in detail, noting that Richard Bauckham cautions against overemphasizing the Egyptian parallels and that Ronald Hock (“Lazarus and Micyllus,” 447–63) has criticized the “relative lack of vigorous analysis” in the scholarly tradition on this passage. See also Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014), on Luke 16:19–31; Darrell L. Bock, Luke, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1996), 2:1362–63.

↑ 14. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12: “The idea of reversal in the afterlife occurs in Egyptian stories and even in non-biblical Judaism.”

↑ 15. The irony of verse 31 is hard to miss. Jesus says that even if someone rises from the dead, those who rejected Moses and the Prophets will not be convinced. He Himself would rise from the dead, and many of the religious leaders would reject that too (see Acts 4:1–3; 5:17–18). The parable foreshadows this rejection. De Young agrees that Jesus’ words here allude to His own resurrection; see Exposing Universalism, ch. 12.

↑ 16. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12. De Young lists eight conclusions, including that “there are only two destinies for all people,” that the chasm “has been fixed” by God and “cannot be altered,” that “people must respond to the written Scripture before they die,” and that “suffering does not lead people in hell to repent.” Cf. Darrell Bock, Luke 9:51–24:53, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1996), 1377–79, who similarly argues that “the image is strong and suggests that how we respond in this life is decisive for where we reside in the next.” Samuel Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave, 86, objects that to read a message about one’s ultimate eternal destiny being fixed at death into this parable “would be to read into the parable a concept foreign to its context.” The parable’s purpose, Jonathan contends, “is essentially ethical, focusing on the manner in which one uses one’s wealth to meet the needs of the poor.”

↑ 17. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12. The Greek verb stērizō (στηρίζω) means “to establish, strengthen, make firm” (BDAG, 945). The perfect passive estēriktai indicates a completed action with ongoing results. De Young reads the passive as a divine passive, meaning God is the implied agent who fixed the chasm in place.

↑ 18. The parable is set in Hades, the intermediate state, not in the final post-resurrection reality. Since Hades itself is temporary (Rev 20:13–14), any features described within it are features of the intermediate period. The parable does not address whether the chasm persists after the resurrection and the final judgment. For the temporality of Hades and its emptying, see Chapter 24 and Chapter 26.

↑ 19. The rich man’s continued attitude in the story is revealing. He still addresses Abraham as “Father Abraham,” relying on his ethnic heritage. He still treats Lazarus as a servant, asking Abraham to “send Lazarus” to serve him (v. 24) and then to serve as a messenger to his brothers (v. 27). He has not repented; he has merely discovered that his old assumptions no longer work. The chasm blocks this kind of self-rescue. See Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 607–8.

↑ 20. Robin Parry [Gregory MacDonald], The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), 155–57. Parry makes three points. First, nowhere else does Jesus suggest that judgment precedes the end of the age, so the parable’s eschatology “seems somewhat out of joint with Jesus’ teachings everywhere else in the Gospels” (155). Second, the parable describes Hades, not Gehenna, so it describes an intermediate state, and “the chasm may be fixed up to the day of judgment, but not necessarily afterwards” (155). Third, many commentators read the parable as an adaptation of a Near Eastern folk tale, so its details should not be pressed into systematic doctrines about the afterlife. Parry cites the UK Evangelical Alliance report on hell, which notes, “From a literary critical perspective, most now recognise that it is based on a well-established Near Eastern folk tale” (81). McClymond summarizes Parry’s aim as “the more modest one of showing that what [Jesus] did teach does not formally contradict universalist claims” (The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, p. 962). See also John Nolland, Luke 9:21—18:34, WBC (Dallas: Word, 1993), 829: “Hades . . . comes increasingly to include the idea of a preliminary experience of what is to be the individual’s ultimate fate at the final judgment.”

↑ 21. Michael J. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), V 2, p. 962. McClymond objects that Parry “importing into the text a distinction that it never suggests” when he reads the chasm as limited to the period before the final judgment.

↑ 21b. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). Talbott notes that the rich man’s brothers are still alive during the conversation, so the story is set before the death and resurrection of Christ, before the return of the Messiah, before Death and Hades are cast into the lake of fire (Rev 20:14), before any final judgment, and before the New Jerusalem descends with its gates always open (Rev 21). The setting is pre-resurrection, and nothing in the story speaks to the final state.

↑ 21c. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God. Talbott observes that “not one word in the story implies that this great chasm will remain in place or remain unbridged forever.” He proposes that the cross has already nullified the power of death, and when Jesus preached to the spirits in prison (1 Pet 3:19) and preached the gospel to the dead (1 Pet 4:6), he was, as Talbott puts it, “flinging himself into the chasm in order to build a bridge over it and to bring a message of repentance and forgiveness to all of those in Hades.” In either case, “nothing in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, even if we take its details more literally than we should in the case of a parable, excludes the idea that this rich man will find peace and reconciliation in the end.”

↑ 22. Revelation 20:13–14 (ESV). The passage is clear: Hades is emptied and destroyed. Whatever Hades is, it is not the final state. For the full treatment of Revelation 20 and the lake of fire, see Chapter 26.

↑ 23. 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 (ESV). The interpretation of these verses is debated, but at minimum they show that the New Testament envisions Christ’s activity extending into the realm of the dead. The full treatment of these texts and the question of post-mortem salvation belongs to Chapter 24.

↑ 24. On the principle that Scripture interprets Scripture and that no single passage should be read in isolation from the whole witness of the canon, see the method laid out in Chapter 3.

↑ 25. These are the genuine teachings of the parable, and I affirm all of them. They are compatible with the larger hope because the larger hope does not soften the urgency of hearing God’s word now. It affirms that urgency and adds the conviction that God’s mercy outlasts human stubbornness, as the full canon teaches. See the cumulative case in Chapter 30.

↑ 25b. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God. Talbott asks: “If the rich man were an actual person in an irredeemable condition, then from whence came his genuine care and concern for the welfare of his five living brothers?” He notes that in a parable, we can dismiss this as a detail serving the moral of the story. But if the account is taken as describing actual damnation, the rich man’s compassion becomes hard to reconcile with the claim that torment produces no moral change. The point is similar to Burnfield’s: the rich man is thinking of others rather than only of himself, which suggests the judgment is already producing change in him.

↑ 26. Ephesians 4:9 (ESV): “In saying, ‘He ascended,’ what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth?” Whether this refers to Christ’s descent into Hades or to the incarnation is debated, but the early church widely read it as a descent. 1 Peter 3:18–20 describes Christ going and “proclaim[ing] to the spirits in prison.” The Apostles’ Creed confesses that Christ “descended into hell” (descendit ad inferos). Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, surveys the patristic evidence at length, noting that many early fathers (Origen, Didymus, Theodoret) understood Christ’s descent as freeing not only the Old Testament saints but all captives of death. Hronich cites Didymus (c. 370 AD): “In the liberation of all no one remains a captive! At the time of the Lord’s passion the devil alone was injured by losing all of the captives he was keeping.” So powerful was this doctrine that even the pagan critic Celsus knew of it. See the full treatment in Chapter 24.

↑ 27. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12. The eight points are summarized in De Young’s concluding discussion of the parable.

↑ 28. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12, citing Tim Keller. De Young notes Keller’s observation that the rich man “never asks to be taken out of hell” and “does not complain that his destiny is unfair.”

↑ 29. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12: “For universalism to reject this account as something that Jesus did not really believe is without merit. While there are antecedents to this story, Jesus adds crucial elements, thereby validating the seriousness of it.”

↑ 30. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, p. 962. McClymond critiques Parry for reading the chasm as potentially limited in duration, calling this an imported distinction.

↑ 31. George Sidney Hurd, A Defense of Biblical Universalism: A Biblical Response to James B. De Young’s “Exposing Universalism” (2019). Hurd argues throughout that Jesus’ parables teach their points, not the details of their scenery. On the rich man and Lazarus, he treats the chasm as part of the parable’s setting rather than an independent doctrinal statement about the permanence of the afterlife.

↑ 32. Robin Parry [Gregory MacDonald], The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), 155. Parry notes that in Hades (hadēs), not Gehenna (geenna), the parable “may . . . describe some intermediate period between death and final judgment,” and “the chasm may be fixed up to the day of judgment, but not necessarily afterwards.” McClymond summarizes Parry’s approach as “the more modest one of showing that what [Jesus] did teach does not formally contradict universalist claims” (The Devil’s Redemption, V 2, p. 962).

↑ 33. The distinction between a parable’s point and its scenery is standard hermeneutical practice. See Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, rev. ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 295–301, on reading parables for their central message without pressing the details into allegorical propositions.

↑ 34. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12. De Young insists that Jesus’ use of the folk-tale tradition does not diminish the parable’s authority: “Jesus adds crucial elements, thereby validating the seriousness of it. His teaching in it accords with everything else he taught about the afterlife.”

↑ 35. On the distinction between warning imagery that serves a parabolic point and systematic doctrinal claims about the structure of the afterlife, see the discussion of genre in Chapter 3. Parables warn truly, but the truth they teach is found at their climax, not distributed evenly across every narrative detail.

↑ 36. The parable sits in Luke’s larger context of warnings about wealth: the parable of the shrewd manager (16:1–9), the Pharisees’ love of money (16:14), and Jesus’ teaching that “you cannot serve God and money” (16:13). Luke’s Gospel consistently warns that wealth misused is a spiritual danger. See Luke 6:24; 12:13–21; 18:18–27.

↑ 37. George Sidney Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ (2014). Hurd identifies the folk tale as one involving a rich tax collector named Bar Ma’jan and a poor scribe. The poor scribe went to paradise, but Bar Ma’jan was in torment beside a river, desiring to drink but unable to reach the waters. He cites at least seven other similar folkloric stories circulating among Jews of Jesus’ time. See also George W. Sarris, “The Rich Man and Lazarus” (georgewsarris.com); Edward William Fudge, The Fire That Consumes (iUniverse, 2001), 203.

↑ 38. Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy. Hurd notes that the parable of the Unjust Steward begins the same way (“There was a certain rich man”), and the parable of the Prodigal Son begins as a real story (“A certain man had two sons”). All five parables in the series respond to the complaint of the scribes and Pharisees that Jesus received sinners (Luke 15:1–2).

↑ 38b. David Powys, Hell: A Hard Look at a Hard Question (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998), 218–28, as summarized in Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), 156–57. Powys argues that the parable is the climax of an attack on Pharisaic piety running from Luke 14 through 16, and that the rich man represents the money-loving Pharisees (philargyroi) of 16:14. The eschatology of the parable, Powys contends, is “immediate, automated post-mortem compensation, a commonplace in Pharisaic teaching, but foreign to the teachings of Jesus as reported elsewhere” (225). Its purpose was “not to affirm the reality of Gehenna, but rather to demonstrate the inadequacy of Pharisaic piety” (227). Parry summarizes: “To Powys, the parable is an ad hominem argument by Jesus against the pharisees. Jesus adopts their eschatology in order to lampoon their pseudo piety” (157).

↑ 39. David Burnfield, Patristic Universalism: An Alternative to the Traditional View of Divine Judgment, 2nd ed. Burnfield presses three universalist points on the passage. First, the rich man cannot cross now, but the text does not say he can never cross. Second, Christ holds the “keys of death and of Hades” (Revelation 1:18) and can make the journey. Third, the rich man’s punishment is producing change: he is thinking of others instead of himself. Burnfield cites Thomas Allin, Universalism Asserted as the Hope of the Gospel on the Authority of Reason, the Fathers, and Holy Scripture (1st ed. 1885; revised through 9th ed. 1905).

↑ 40. Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell: The Righteous Purpose of God’s Judgment. Beauchemin argues that Christ, having all authority and holding the keys of Hades, has Himself crossed the great gulf, as Peter and Paul imply (1 Peter 3:19–20; 4:6; Ephesians 4:8–9). He further notes that once Hades and death are destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26; Revelation 20:14), what remains is life. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). If most of humanity were locked in Hades forever, Hades would be victorious, not defeated.

↑ 41. Elhanan Winchester, Universal Restoration (1788), II.A5, cited in Robin Parry and Ilaria Ramelli, eds., A Larger Hope? Volume 2: Universal Salvation from the Reformation to the Nineteenth Century (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019). Winchester deployed the theological motif of Christ’s descent into hell, citing 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:5–6, and argued: “It seemed necessary, that our Saviour should visit men in all situations, that he might redeem them.”

↑ 42. Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy. Hurd’s prison analogy: a prisoner can converse with visitors through a window, but as long as he is a prisoner, a great wall separates them. Once the sentence is served, the barrier is removed. Hurd connects this to Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:26 and Luke 12:59 (“you will by no means get out of there till you have paid the last penny”) and to the graduated-punishment language in Luke 12:47 (“beaten with many stripes” versus “few stripes”).

↑ 43. Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation (2024). Coates argues that the Greek kolpos (“bosom”) is better understood as a sheltered place within Hades rather than a separate eternal destination. He notes that both Lazarus and the rich man are in Hades, the realm of the dead, separated within it by the chasm. The modern Anglo-Saxon concept of “hell” is far removed from this setting. Hart’s rendering supports this: the “bosom” is a hidden place set apart from the rest of Hades.

↑ 44. James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation after Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), 110–14. Beilby argues that the parable does not teach that salvific status is fixed at death. He notes that even Millard Erickson concedes “it is fallacious to assume that the only point that can be drawn from a passage is the primary point,” but counters that the eschatological details are incidental to the parable’s purpose. Beilby cites N. T. Wright, who states that “the parable is not, as often supposed, a description of the afterlife,” and Robert Yarbrough, who affirms that “it is widely accepted that this story is parabolic and not intended to furnish a detailed geography of hell.” Beilby observes that Richard Bauckham argues the parable’s unity “hinges on Abraham’s unexpected refusal of the rich man’s request, directing attention away from an apocalyptic revelation of the afterlife back to the inexcusable injustice of the coexistence of rich and poor.” Beilby is a non-universalist; he represents the case for postmortem opportunity, not the case for universal salvation.

↑ 45. Samuel V. Jonathan, Grace Beyond the Grave: Is There Hope for Those Who Die without Christ? (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2019), 77–87. Jonathan provides the most detailed scholarly survey of the parable’s background among the sources used here, discussing the Egyptian folktale of Setme and Si-Osiris, the Jewish parallels, the debate among scholars (Bauckham, Hock, Forbes, Jeremias, Bock, Nolland), and the genre question. He cites Geldenhuys: “The Saviour related this parable not in order to satisfy our curiosity about life after death but to emphasize vividly the tremendous seriousness of life on this side of the grave” (Geldenhuys, Luke, 427). Jonathan notes that even if the parable is read as containing afterlife teaching, it addresses Jews who had Moses and the Prophets, not the unevangelized. Jonathan is a non-universalist; he represents the case for grace extending beyond death, not for universal salvation.

↑ 46. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: A Trinitarian Theology of Universal Salvation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2024). Hronich argues that even taken literally, the parable describes events prior to the judgment day and the resurrection of Christ. He cites Donald Bloesch, The Last Things: Resurrection, Judgment, Glory (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004), 227, for the claim that the fixed chasm “is a gap only in the sense that unrepentant sin constitutes a formidable barrier to salvation.” Hronich further argues that nothing in the parable intimates eternal conscious torment: “The most that could be said, if this story were to be taken literally (which it is not), is that certain individuals will suffer for their sins in the next life, which is what annihilationists, traditionalists, and restorationists all confess alike.” He also provides extensive material on the early church’s doctrine of Christ’s Harrowing of Hades, arguing that the patristic tradition saw Christ as freeing all captives from death, not merely the Old Testament saints.