Yes it’s the truth, he’s not lying. 
Well, thanks to the grammar nazi, I stand corrected. 
"I stand corrected, " said the man in the orthopaedic shoes.
A couple of points on this. Firstly as a software engineer I am horrified by the tangle of relationships that would in some way have to be unravelled if some people go to heaven and some to hell, and the people in Heaven are kicking up a stink about missing relatives. I tend to throw my hands up in horror and say “Just get the whole lot into heaven.” In fact with infinite time to play with the inhabitants of heaven would, to my mind, find a way of getting everyone out of hell.
Secondly, on the rich man and Lazarus, let me tell a joke:
The thermostat on hell breaks down, the temperature rises until the fumes are coming through the floor of heaven. Gabriel phones Satan and says “If you don’t get it fixed we’ll sue!”
Satan replies, “We can’t fix the thermostat, you’ve got all the engineers, you can’t sue, we’ve got all the lawyers.”
The point is that the joke lives in a space which is the cartoon idea of hell, not something with a precise theology. Similarly we know a lot about the first century Jewish concept of the afterlife, and the Lazarus story subverts this by substituting the cartoon version.
In other words the parable is a Jewish joke, told to a Jewish audience, and it’s a very funny one. It shouldn’t be used as a basis for theology.
Has anyone seen What Dreams May Come? It’s a Robin Williams film in which he and his children die in a car crash and find themselves in heaven: a place of joy and unspeakable beauty (one tiny issue is that God is not…really anywhere). He finds out that his wife killed herself in despair at losing her family and has damned herself…not because God is mean, but because she has trapped herself in a reality of despair (i’m sure there are massive theological issues with that, but it’s not why i bring this up).
Robin Williams decides that heaven cannot be heaven unless all his family is there…he then finds a way to cross over into hell and brave the dangers in order to find and rescue his wife. If i remember correctly, he succeeds.
My point is that which of us, knowing someone was suffering in another place while we were happy…and that the suffering was hopeless and we’d never ever see them again, but we’d always know they were suffering, would be able to be held back by any means from trying to rescue them? Some of us would be appealing to God and trying even His patience, and some of us would be working on building a long bridge to cross that chasm about which the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man tells us. Maybe some of us wouldn’t fight for that, but a lot of us would: enough, i think, to change things.
Knowing that about us, and knowing that that urge to rescue from suffering is strong (and can only get stronger as we are made more like Christ), and seeing the examples from Scripture where Christ does not give up on those lost sheep…how could God be any less in favour of rescuing the damned?
I can see it now:
Us: God…there are people over there in that other place in pain!!! i know they did evil, but so did we…can nothing be done to rescue them? You must be able to do it!!!
God: What took you so long to ask? I was waiting for you! Let’s go get them!!! Come on! Don’t take no for an answer!
I suppose the irony in me bringing up this film is that i deeply disagreed with it for horribly conservative evangelical reasons (mostly) back then.
Now my only issue is that God is not in Heaven…He’s “somewhere up there wondering why we can’t see him” or some other rubbish. but there is a lot that makes me want to revisit the film now.
You made me cry!!! and so I lifted a quote from your post and put it on my facebook page:
''God…there are people over there in that other place in pain!!! i know they did evil, but so did we…can nothing be done to rescue them? You must be able to do it!!!
‘‘God: What took you so long to ask? I was waiting for you! Let’s go get them!!! Come on! Don’t take no for an answer!’’
Yay God!!!