Gehenna
‘Hell’ is not normally the subject
for an after-dinner conversation, is it?
In fact, let me guess! ‘Hell’ is
a subject you generally avoid, right?
You prefer not even to think about it, let alone discuss it with
others. But I want to ask you a
question: which kind of hell are you trying to avoid? Because there’s basically two kinds of hell
that people are somewhat familiar with – and neither of them matches up very
well with the hell that Jesus speaks about in the gospels.
First there is the kind of hell
that was pictured by the medieval Italian poet, Dante Alighieri who wrote a
trilogy of poems entitled, “The Divine Comedy”.
The first of those three poems was called Inferno. It pictured a realm in the underworld that
consisted of nine concentric circles of torment for those who have rejected
spiritual values. Dante’s epic poem
played a big role in shaping our Western Civilization’s thinking about hell. Dante travels through this ‘Inferno’ much as
a tourist might travel through the worst slums of the worst city. Dante’s purpose in writing Inferno
was to recognise and reject sin in all its shapes and forms.
But then there is also the hell of
the comic books. I first came across
this as a teenager at high school where we often swapped comic books with one
another. I came home one day with a
comic called ‘Hot Stuff’. It pictured a
little red imp with a pitchfork and little horns and a tail that ended in an
arrowhead. Hot Stuff had a mischievous
personality (as one would expect from what was supposed to be a baby demon)
although he often did good things that irritated his demonic brothers. Of course the place where they hung out was
Hades. My mother told me to return the
comic and not to bring any more of these kinds of comics home. She (rightly) thought this was too serious a
subject to make fun of.
It’s interesting that out of all
the people in the Bible who mentioned hell, the Lord Jesus Christ stands out most
clearly. As someone once said, “Only He
loved us enough to warn us about this terrible place!”
Jesus sometimes used the word Hades. Sometimes Hades has the connotation of simply
being the realm of the dead – without any implications that it could be a place
of punishment. But at other times it is
clearly that, as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, where Jesus tells
his listeners that the rich man found himself in Hades in torment. So Hades is generally a fairly neutral word
that occasionally has very negative connections with eternal punishment. Hades is often used to translate the Old
Testament Hebrew word, ‘Sheol’, which was simply seen as the realm of the dead.
A more telling word used by Jesus
is the word ‘Gehenna’. It was an
abbreviated form of the term, “The Valley of Hinnom”. In the Old Testament part of the Bible that
was the place just outside of Jerusalem where the idolatrous religion of Molech
carried out its abominable child-sacrifices.
Under the godly king, Josiah, the place was desecrated and became
Jerusalem’s garbage dump. The book of
2kings tells us that Josiah defiled it so that it would never again be used as
a religious place for child-sacrifices. So
in effect the warnings of Jesus about hell are warnings for us to make sure we
don’t end up in God’s garbage dump.
That’s telling, and it’s worth
thinking about. The sobering reality is
that God does not grade on averages.
Jesus made quite clear that God’s standard is extremely high, when he
told his followers, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect!” And there’s the rub… we all readily admit
that we’re not perfect. Yet none of
like to think that we might not be good enough to appear in the presence of a
holy God. So, does this mean we’re all
headed for God’s garbage dump? No. That’s the good news of the Christmas
story. Jesus came to earth in Bethlehem
to live the perfect life we failed to live.
Those who trust in Jesus are now credited with the perfection of Jesus
Christ. It's as if God put that in our bank account. Jesus is now our ticket of
escape from God’s garbage dump.
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