Five Brothers

July 23

(Luke 16:26-31 NIV) ““… 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.'  {27} He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, {28} for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.' {27} Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.' {30} "'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.' {31} "He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.””

(Joshua 24:15 NIV) “But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

We have a part in Christ’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus. To someone on the other side of death, we are like the rich man’s five brothers who remained here on Earth. The dead in hell would love to contact us and warn us about the eternal horrors there. You might be thinking, as these five brothers undoubtedly thought, "Why worry about that eternity stuff? I'll take one world at a time.” But the point of this parable is that our tomorrow is determined by our today -- our then is determined by our now. We are those five brothers, and no dead relative will be coming back to warn us -- someone already did. His name is Jesus, and He is speaking today through the Scriptures. If we will not listen to Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms, the Proverbs, the Gospels, and the Epistles… we won’t listen even if someone comes back from the dead. Brothers and sisters, we have been warned! -- Friar Tuck’s Word of the Day