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September 29 - December 4, 2020
Yet Peter fails to seize such an opportunity.
God’s judgments do not inherently indicate an everlasting hell sentence.
“For when the earth experiences Your judgments the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.”
if you have to use the fear of hell to get people into the Kingdom, then what does that say about your gospel? What does it say about your God? If hell is the most
powerful motivating factor for getting people saved, then they are only being manipulated into something out of fear and coercion, not out of love and desire.
The purpose of heaven’s Good News is relationship with our Father through Christ, not fear of Him.
1 John 4:18, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.”
If God is love, and if there is no fear in love, how has the primary doctrine of the most widespread religion on our planet become all about fear? How could such a fearful place as hell truly exist?
Remember that even Jesus lived an unhurried pace.
Throughout the OT, both good and bad people end up in Sheol at death.
Sheol is the concept people devised in ancient times to imagine and describe the afterlife experience that they had no knowledge about.
KJV translates Sheol as hell whenever they want to convey it as the particular destination of the wicked. However, when portraying the fate of the righteous, they translate it grave.
In the rest of the popular modern versions, the literal translations, and the Hebrew and Greek texts, there are NO references to hell in the OT, or of the concept of everlasting tormenting flames—not one.
There are essentially three different Greek words that translators inconsistently pick and choose to translate as “hell”—Hades, Gehenna, and Tartaroo, but not one conveys hell as we know it and teach it today.
Hades (The NT equivalent to the Hebrew word, Sheol)
Tartaroo is only ment...
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Tartaroo is a verb meaning, “to cast down,”
In this valley, some Israelite parents sacrificed their children in real fire to their false god Molech (Hebrew: “king”), an act that God referred to as “evil, detestable, and an abomination”
One should wonder why Jesus would refer to a literal valley that the Jews were familiar with just outside their city gates, and expect them to infer that it really meant a place of eternal torment.
At the very least, if Gehenna truly equates with the notion of hell, Bible translators should have been more consistent, using the word “hell” in the OT whenever the Valley of Ben Hinnom or Topheth occurs.
Wouldn’t it be totally wrong and irresponsible of someone like the Apostle John, and especially the Apostle Paul, not to include any mention of hell or eternal torment in their books? And even moreso in the book of Acts, where the Good News is being proclaimed to Jew and Gentile alike?
both Gehenna and the Promised Land symbolize temporary, cyclical conditions of judgments and rewards in Jewish thought, not eternal destinies
with the influence of Persian thought and the passing of time, the notion of ‘hell’ crept into Jewish tradition and became associated with the biblical word Gehinnom or Gei Hinnom, the valley of Hinnom
fire as burnt offerings to Baal,[†††††] a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind;
as long as there is something that reeks of impurity, death, and destruction in us, we will be subject the Refiners fire,
let’s entertain the idea that Jesus was referring to hell as we know it—some kind of never-ending conscious torment after death. Most Jews of that day would have been completely perplexed since there had been no warnings of such a place in the Torah and the Prophets.
JewFaq.org
MyJewishLearning.com,
The period of time in Gehinnom does not exceed 12 months, and then [a person] ascends to take his place in Olam Ha-Ba [afterlife].[6]
even most of today’s Jews who may associate Gehenna with punishment in the afterlife still believe it’s temporary. Shouldn’t those to whom it was addressed as a warning be most familiar with what it represents?
if Gehenna actually represented eternal hell when Jesus came along, wouldn’t it have been pretty troubling to the Jews if somehow God changed the stakes and suddenly sent Jesus to warn them about a place of everlasting conscious torment when they had never heard of such a place before?
if hell is real, and God really doesn’t want anyone to go there,...
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great pains to explain it in repetitive detail through Mose...
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Gehenna: bitter regret.”
I have personally asked several orthodox Jewish friends about their concept of hell, and they had none because, as stated, it has never been a part of their traditional teachings (though certainly some Jews in the modern world have adopted the notion from Western Christianity, especially Messianic Jews).
there are only ten potential references to everlasting destruction
they also held no concept of “eternity.”
Jewish Virtual Library
Paul never mentions Gehenna. Paul never mentions hell.
In 1 Cor. 3:11–15, Paul does teach that our works will be tested with fire, and he certainly mentions a corrective process for sin, but he never claims anybody is going to burn forever. “If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.”[††††††]
the doctrine of eternal torment was not a widely held view for the first five centuries after Christ, particularly in the early Eastern Church, the Church of the early apostles and Church fathers such as Paul, Clement of Alexandria, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and others.
the expansion and proliferation of pagan myths about the afterlife, repackaged as eternal, fiery torment, originated in the Western (Catholic) Church, namely by Latin theologians and Church leaders from Rome, most likely because of political expediency and as a means to control the masses with fear.
The first person to write about “eternal hell” was the Latin (West) North African Tertullian
the main person responsible for making hell eternal in the Western Church was St. Augustine
it is his misunderstanding of Greek that cemented the concept of eternal hell in the Western Church.
book,
The advocacy of hell came primarily on the scene with Augustine:
Samuel Dawson,
Most of what we believe about hell comes from Catholicism and ignorance of the Old Testament, not from the Bible.
The Vulgate’s influence throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Early Modern Period is even greater than that of the King James Version in English; for Christians
