Chapter 18
What the Rich Man and Lazarus Actually Teaches
Every time I make the case that God’s offer does not end at death, someone brings up the same passage. Every time. It comes before I finish my second sentence. “What about the rich man and Lazarus?” they say. “What about the great chasm?”
I understand why. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31 is the most frequently cited text against any hope of salvation after death. Berkhof calls it the most important biblical text for proving that the state of unbelievers after death is fixed. Erickson uses it as his main evidence that death ends all opportunity. Grudem quotes Luke 16:26 alongside Hebrews 9:27 as though the two verses together settle the matter.1
It is a serious text, and it deserves a serious reading. But I want to show you that when we read it carefully, in its own context, it teaches something narrower and richer than the objection needs. It describes the intermediate state before Christ’s descent. It confirms that the dead are conscious. And its “chasm” does not prove what the objection claims.
Let me take you through the parable step by step.
The story is vivid and short. A rich man wears purple and fine linen. He feasts lavishly every day. At his gate lies a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores, longing for the scraps from the rich man’s table. The dogs come and lick his wounds. Both men die. Angels carry Lazarus to Abraham’s side. The rich man finds himself in Hades, in torment. He looks up, sees Abraham far away with Lazarus beside him, and begs for relief. Abraham refuses. Then the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to warn his five brothers. Abraham refuses again: “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them” (Luke 16:29, ESV).2
That is the whole story. And the question is: what is it actually about?
Luke 16 is dominated by parables about wealth. The parable of the dishonest manager opens the chapter (16:1–13). In the middle, Luke tells us that the Pharisees, “who loved money,” ridiculed Jesus (16:14). Then comes the rich man and Lazarus. As Nolland observes, the entire chapter addresses the use and abuse of riches.3
Luke 15, the chapter before, groups three parables on a single theme: the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son. All three defend Jesus’s mission to the outcasts of Israel. Luke 16 does the same kind of grouping, this time around wealth.4
This matters because it tells us what the parable is driving at. As Beilby points out, the parables of Luke 16 concern money, not eschatology.5 The rich man’s sin is not that he failed to say a sinner’s prayer. It is that he feasted while a starving man lay at his gate. The afterlife setting exists to drive home the urgency: the way you treat the poor now has consequences you cannot undo later. Jesus is speaking to the Pharisees who love money, warning them about what happens when you ignore the suffering at your door.
Key Argument — The Parable’s Primary Subject
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is not a blueprint of the afterlife. It is a warning about wealth, injustice, and the failure to heed Scripture. The afterlife imagery serves the ethical point. As Geldenhuys writes, Jesus told 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.”6
Is this a historical account or a parable? Several things point toward parable. The opening formula, “There was a rich man,” is identical to 16:1, which introduces the parable of the dishonest manager. The rich man is never named. And the story draws on a well-known ancient folktale about the reversal of fortune after death, versions of which existed in Egyptian, Jewish, and Greek literature.7
Why does this matter? Because we should not build systematic theology on the furniture of a parable. We do not treat the unjust judge of Luke 18 as a portrait of God. We do not treat the master in the parable of the talents as a lesson in banking. And we should not treat the details of the rich man’s afterlife as a map of postmortem geography.8
Now, I want to be fair. Erickson rightly points out that a parable can assume a certain view of reality even when the parable is not arguing for it.9 I agree. The “this is a parable” answer only goes so far. So let me go further.
The most important thing about the parable’s setting is when it takes place. The rich man dies and goes to Hades. Lazarus goes to “Abraham’s side.” Abraham is the one in charge. There is no mention of Christ at all.
This is the pre-Christ intermediate state. It is the two-chamber picture of Sheol or Hades that was common in Jewish thought before Jesus: one chamber for the righteous (Abraham’s bosom, or paradise), one for the unrighteous.10 As I developed in Chapter 14, this picture changed when Christ descended to the dead. At His death and resurrection, Jesus entered this realm, preached the gospel, and led the righteous dead out of their waiting place into heaven (1 Peter 3:18–19; Ephesians 4:8–10). He now holds “the keys of Death and Hades” (Revelation 1:18).
The parable’s scene is set before all of that. Abraham is the authority figure, not Jesus. The chasm is described in a world where Christ has not yet entered the realm of the dead. Whatever the chasm means, it means it in that pre-descent setting.
Insight — A Scene Without Christ
The parable takes place in a version of Hades where Abraham is the highest authority. Christ has not yet descended, died, or risen. The geography of the dead has not yet been transformed. Reading this scene as a permanent description of the afterlife after the resurrection is like reading a photograph taken before the bridge was built and concluding that no bridge exists.
This point is not unique to me. Talbott puts it sharply: the story’s setting is “long before any kind of final judgment takes place.” A Christian might read the chasm as describing an intermediate period between death and judgment that may be fixed up to that point but “not necessarily afterwards.”11 Talbott goes further. He suggests the great chasm may have remained unbridgeable only until the death and resurrection of Christ. The cross destroys the power of sin and death. When Jesus preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19) and proclaimed the gospel to the dead (1 Peter 4:6), He was, in Talbott’s image, building a bridge across the chasm.12
That is a powerful picture. And it fits the two-stage history of the dead that this book defends.
Now let me address the big line directly. Abraham tells the rich man: “Between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us” (Luke 16:26).
This is the verse that does the heavy lifting for the objection. It seems to say the gap between the saved and the lost is permanent and impassable. Case closed.
But is it?
Common Objection — “The Great Chasm Proves Destiny Is Fixed at Death”
The objection: “Between us and you a great chasm has been fixed.” Doesn’t this prove that no one can pass from torment to comfort after death?
Four responses. First, this is a parable whose point is about the living: heed Moses and the Prophets now. It is not a technical survey of postmortem mechanics. Second, the scene takes place in the pre-Christ intermediate state, before Jesus descended and changed the geography of the dead (Chapter 14). Third, the chasm is named as impassable by Abraham and the rich man, not by Christ, who alone holds the keys of Death and Hades (Revelation 1:18). Fourth, the rich man’s concern is to warn his living brothers, which supports the value of the antemortem witness the parable is commending. The parable’s own logic pushes outward, toward the living, not downward into afterlife doctrine.13
Let me press these points. Talbott notes that not a single word in the story says the chasm will remain in place forever.14 The text says the chasm is there now, in the scene Abraham is describing. It does not say it is permanent. That permanence is read into the text, not read out of it.
Beilby strengthens the point with two observations. If Luke 16 describes the final resting places of the rich man and Lazarus, then the chasm only rules out the residents of hell entering heaven. That does not contradict postmortem opportunity. If it describes the intermediate state, the chasm only applies to the conditions of that intermediate state. Neither reading rules out God’s continued pursuit.15
And notice what the parable does not contain. The rich man is never offered a chance to repent and believe in Christ. No one preaches the gospel to him. He is not “unevangelized” in the sense this book has developed; he is a Jew who had Moses and the Prophets and failed to obey them. The parable’s silence on a postmortem offer is, at best, an argument from silence.16
Note — What “Fixed” Does and Does Not Mean
The Greek verb behind “has been fixed” (estēriktai, a perfect passive of stērizō) means “has been established” or “set in place.” It describes a current state. It does not carry an inherent sense of “forever and irreversibly.” The same verb appears elsewhere in the NT with the sense of “establish” or “strengthen” (Luke 9:51; 22:32; Romans 1:11; 1 Thessalonians 3:2, 13; James 5:8; 1 Peter 5:10). In none of these uses does it mean “fixed forever.” The permanence is an interpretation, not a translation.17
I want to be fair to the scholars who read this parable as evidence that destiny is fixed at death. Their reading is not foolish, and I will not treat it as though it were.
Hendriksen represents the traditional view clearly: the parable teaches that “once a person has died, his soul having been separated from his body, his condition, whether blessed or doomed, is fixed forever.”18 Bock is similarly direct: “One message rings clear: once God has rendered judgment, it is permanent.”19
I respect these scholars. But I think they are reading more into the parable than the parable warrants. As Jonathan points out, to suggest that the parable contains a message about one’s eternal destiny being fixed by death is to read a concept into the text that is foreign to its context.20 The parable says nothing about encountering Jesus or his teaching as a basis for one’s ultimate destiny. There is no sinner’s prayer in this story. The issue is ethics: how you treat the poor.
Knight puts it well. The parable does not exist to satisfy curiosity about Hades, hell, heaven, or the intermediate state. It calls for careful use of life’s opportunities. Both Jesus’s first-century audience and every reader since are challenged to be good stewards and their brothers’ keepers.21
And even for those who insist on drawing afterlife doctrine from the parable, hard questions remain. Why do both men seem to have bodies in the intermediate state? Why can Abraham and the rich man hold a conversation across a supposedly impassable gulf? If the rich man is in his final, permanent state, why is he worried about his living brothers? These details sit awkwardly in a portrait of fixed destiny. They sit comfortably in a parable that uses popular afterlife imagery to make a point about life.22
I have been saying what the parable does not prove. Now let me say what it does establish, because that matters for this book.
First, the intermediate state is conscious. The rich man is aware. He sees, feels pain, speaks, remembers his brothers, and pleads for mercy. Lazarus is comforted. Both are experiencing something real between death and whatever comes next. This aligns with everything I developed in Chapter 8 about Hades as a place of conscious experience.23
Second, the intermediate state is morally serious. Choices matter. The way the rich man lived is the reason he suffers now. The parable does not treat the afterlife as a vacation. It treats it as a place where the reality of one’s life is laid bare. That seriousness supports this book’s insistence that the intermediate state is no neutral waiting room. It is a place where the consequences of one’s choices are felt, and where God continues to be present.24
Third, the parable insists on the value of this-life witness. “They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.” The antemortem testimony of Scripture is precious and urgent. Nothing in this book disputes that. I am not arguing that the postmortem offer makes this life’s testimony unimportant. The opposite is true. This life’s witness is the normal, intended, primary means of grace. The postmortem offer is God’s provision for those whom that witness never reached, or reached in broken form.25
Key Argument — What Luke 16 Actually Teaches
The parable confirms three things this book needs: the intermediate state is conscious, morally serious, and real. It does not teach postmortem opportunity. But it does not teach the opposite, either. It simply does not address the question. Its subject is the urgency of heeding God’s word and caring for the poor in this life.
One more detail deserves attention. Forbes offers a striking reading of the chasm. He suggests it mirrors the gate in verse 20. The rich man could have passed through that gate to help Lazarus. He did not. Now Lazarus cannot help him. The gate has become a great chasm, a chasm dug by the rich man’s own choices.26
If Forbes is right, the chasm is not a piece of cosmic architecture. It is a narrative mirror of the rich man’s callousness. He built the wall with his own indifference. That reading fits the parable’s ethical point perfectly. And it tells us something important: the barriers between human beings and God’s mercy are often the ones we construct ourselves.
Insight — The Chasm the Rich Man Dug
Forbes reads the “great chasm” as a mirror of the gate in verse 20. The rich man could have crossed his own threshold to help Lazarus. He refused. Now the threshold has become an uncrossable gulf. The chasm is not a statement about the afterlife’s permanent architecture. It is the narrative consequence of the rich man’s own failure to love.
Andrew Hronich, in his careful study of the biblical case for universal restoration, identifies Luke 16 as one of the top three texts most commonly cited against any hope beyond death.27 He then works through the objection methodically. The parable is a parable. Its point is about wealth. The chasm is described in a pre-judgment setting. The attempt to use this passage to prove death ends all salvific opportunity asks the parable to speak to matters it does not address.28
Hronich also notices something about the rich man that most commentators miss. The rich man shows concern for his brothers. He begs Abraham to send a warning to them. Some commentators read this as arrogance. But Hronich asks the obvious question: how can anyone read “Have mercy on me” (16:24) and “I beg you, father” (16:27) and walk away thinking the rich man is making arrogant demands? These are the words of someone in agony who is beginning to see.29
I find that observation moving. Even in torment, the rich man’s heart is turning outward. He is not cursing God. He is begging for mercy. Whether the parable intends to make that theological point, I cannot say. But I notice it. And it hardly matches the traditional picture of the damned raging against heaven.
Let me state my conclusion plainly. Luke 16:19–31 does not teach postmortem opportunity. I am not claiming it does. What I am claiming is that it does not teach what the objection says it teaches, either.
The parable is about wealth and obedience, not eschatology. It is set before the descent of Christ, in a world where the geography of the dead had not yet been transformed. Its chasm is spoken of by Abraham, not by Christ. Its silence on a postmortem offer is exactly that: silence. And its traditional use as a proof-text against postmortem hope assumes more than the text warrants.
As N. T. Wright has noted, this parable is not a description of the afterlife. Yarbrough agrees: it is widely accepted that the story is not meant to furnish a detailed geography of hell.30
The parable does not threaten this book’s thesis. It supports several of its building blocks. The dead are conscious. The intermediate state is real. Choices in this life carry weight. Those are things I affirm. What the parable does not do is seal the door at death, close the window of God’s pursuit, or tell us that Christ’s descent, His keys, and His relentless love are powerless in the realm He has conquered.
Some readers will grant the parable is about wealth but insist it still assumes fixed destiny. I take that seriously. Yet the parable gives both men bodies in the intermediate state, which few theologians take literally. It allows conversation across the “impassable” chasm. And its two characters are Jews with access to Moses and the Prophets, not the unevangelized. Even if the parable assumes something about destiny, it assumes it about a pre-Christ, pre-descent world. That assumption does not bind the post-resurrection reality in which Christ holds the keys of Death and Hades.31
That case has to be made from other texts. And those texts, as we will see in Chapter 19, point in a very different direction from the one the objection expects.
I want to close this chapter by being honest about what I have not done. I have not proved postmortem opportunity from Luke 16. That was never my goal. This parable does not teach it. What I have done is show that this parable does not disprove it, either.
The book’s case rests on other grounds: the descent of Christ and His preaching to the dead (Chapter 15), the two-stage history of Hades (Chapter 14), the character of God (Chapter 2), the theology of optimal grace (Chapter 23), and the correct reading of Hebrews 9:27 (Chapter 19). The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is a roadblock someone has placed in the path of that case. I have moved the roadblock. The road remains open.
And so does the door of Hades, for the One who holds its keys.
↑ 1. On the traditional use of this passage, see Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 75–76, who documents the reliance on this text by Berkhof (Systematic Theology, 693), Erickson (“Is There Opportunity for Salvation After Death?” 142), Grudem (Systematic Theology, 822–23), Feinberg (“1 Peter 3:18–20,” 326 n. 43), and Packer (“Can the Dead Be Converted?” 82).
↑ 2. All quotations from Luke 16:19–31 follow the ESV unless otherwise noted.
↑ 3. Nolland, Luke 9:21–18:34, 792–833. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 85, confirms: “Luke 16 is dominated by two parables on the ‘Use and Abuse of Riches.’”
↑ 4. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 111–12. Beilby notes that the three parables in Luke 15 each address the same general topic, and Luke 16 does the same with wealth.
↑ 5. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 111–12. Beilby cites Bauckham: the parable’s unity hinges on Abraham’s unexpected refusal, “directing attention away from an apocalyptic revelation of the afterlife back to the inexcusable injustice of the coexistence of rich and poor.”
↑ 6. Geldenhuys, The Gospel of Luke, 427.
↑ 7. The Egyptian story of Setme and Si-Osiris is the best-known parallel. See Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 97–101; Hock, “Lazarus and Micyllus,” 447–63; Gressmann, Vom reichen Mann und armen Lazarus. On the opening formula and genre, see Forbes, God of Old, 184; Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 78.
↑ 8. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 110–11: “We need to be careful not to make theology out of the details of the parable.” See also Wright, who notes that parables use conventional imagery to make their point, not to endorse every detail.
↑ 9. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 112, citing Erickson: “It is fallacious to assume that the only point that can be drawn from a passage is the primary point.”
↑ 10. On the two-chamber picture of Sheol/Hades in Second Temple Judaism, see Kreitzer, “Luke 16:19–31 and 1 Enoch 22,” 139–42; Aalen, “St Luke’s Gospel and 1 Enoch,” 1–13. The connection to 1 Enoch 22, which describes separate chambers in the underworld, is widely recognized.
↑ 11. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, citing Gregory MacDonald (Robin Parry): the story describes “some intermediate period between death and final judgment. If that is so, then the chasm may be fixed up to the Day of Judgment but not necessarily afterwards.”
↑ 12. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God. Talbott argues that the cross has “already guaranteed the ultimate destruction of death and has already nullified its power.” When Christ preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:19) and to the dead (1 Peter 4:6), He was entering the very chasm to bridge it.
↑ 13. See Green, The Gospel of Luke, 610; Trumbower, Rescue for the Dead, 42; Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 85–86. The four-part response draws on Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 110–13, and the two-stage history developed in Chapter 14 of this book.
↑ 14. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God: “Not one word in the story implies that this great chasm will remain in place or remain unbridged forever.”
↑ 15. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 112–13.
↑ 16. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 112. Beilby notes that the failure of the rich man and Lazarus to receive a postmortem opportunity “can be rather easily explained by the fact that they were neither unevangelized nor pseudoevangelized.”
↑ 17. The verb stērizō appears in Luke 9:51; 22:32; Romans 1:11; 1 Thessalonians 3:2, 13; 2 Thessalonians 2:17; James 5:8; 1 Peter 5:10; 2 Peter 1:12. In none of these uses does it inherently carry the sense of “forever and irrevocably.”
↑ 18. Hendriksen, Luke, 785. Emphasis original.
↑ 19. Bock, Luke 9:51–24:53, 1377–79. Bock adds: “the image is strong and suggests that how we respond in this life is decisive for where we reside in the next.”
↑ 20. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 85–86. Jonathan argues that suggesting the parable contains a message about eternal destiny being fixed at death “would be to read into the parable a concept foreign to its context.” The parable says nothing about encountering Jesus or his teaching as a basis for ultimate destiny.
↑ 21. Knight, “Rich Man and Lazarus,” 281–82.
↑ 22. Jonathan, Grace beyond the Grave, 86–87; Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 113. Beilby notes that “some of the eschatological details in Luke 16 are likely to be questioned by most orthodox Christians,” such as the ability of the blessed to observe the torment of the lost.
↑ 23. See Chapter 8 for the full case for a conscious intermediate state, including the other NT texts (Luke 23:43; 2 Corinthians 5:1–10; Philippians 1:21–23; Revelation 6:9–10).
↑ 24. The moral seriousness of the intermediate state is part of the book’s insistence that the postmortem offer is not a “do-over.” The soul carries the weight of its earthly choices into Hades. The offer is a meeting with the God who can redeem, not a way to escape consequences.
↑ 25. This distinction is central to the book’s argument and runs throughout: the postmortem offer exists not to undermine evangelism but to extend the reach of the same gospel to every soul. See Chapter 23 for the full optimal-grace framework.
↑ 26. Forbes, God of Old, 190. Forbes suggests that the chasm “is meant to contrast the gate (v. 20) that the rich man could have passed through to assist Lazarus, but did not. Now Lazarus cannot assist him, for the gate has become a great chasm, a chasm dug by the rich man because of the way in which he lived.”
↑ 27. Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: The Logic of Apokatastasis.
↑ 28. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 113. Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, reaches the same conclusion independently.
↑ 29. Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved. Hronich cites Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News, 167, and D. A. Carson as examples of the harsh reading. Against them, Andy Saville observes that the rich man’s behavior is “far from the traditional picture of the damned cursing God” (“Hell without Sin,” Churchman, 246).
↑ 30. Wright is cited in Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 113; Yarbrough is cited there as well.
↑ 31. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, 112–13; Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God. On the broader pattern of “deadline” objection texts, see Chapter 19.