Part2
Hell to the world
At the turn of the 21st century various surveys show that in America about half of the population believes in a hell of some sort.
Some believe in the basic, popular hell of Catholic and Protestant Christianity—an ever-burning place of torment and punishment for the immortal souls of wicked people. They're firmly convinced that the Bible teaches that kind of hell—even though it was not part of Christian doctrine until nearly two centuries after Christ!
Others can't conceive that a loving God would administer such a heinous punishment for eternity. They reason that since God is so loving, everyone, no matter how evil and demented, will receive eternal life and no one will go to hell—never mind that such a philosophy has no basis in Scripture, and its logical conclusion would be that nothing is really wrong or evil.
Hell in the Bible
The truth is, there are actually three "hells" mentioned in the Bible as it is commonly translated into English—and not one of them matches either of the above schools of thought. The confusion arises when the usual Christian theology swirls the three "hells" together into one great muddled mass. Let's look at each as the Bible explains it and sort out fact from fiction.
Hell #1: Hades or Sheol. Hades is the Greek word often rendered as "hell" in the New Testament, and sheol is the corresponding Hebrew word used in the Old Testament. Both words simply mean "the grave."
The classic example drawn from the beautiful, Shakespearean—sounding King James Version is in Acts 2:27: "Because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption." The word translated "hell" is the Greek hades.
This verse is a direct and inspired quotation from one of King David's psalms in the Old Testament—Psalm 16:10. There the Hebrew word translated as "hell" is sheol. Both passages refer to the fact that Jesus as Messiah would not remain in the grave, but would be resurrected.
We will all go to this kind of "hell," for it is appointed for all men to die once (Hebrews 9:27). But the grave is not a place of constant conscious torture and torment!
Solomon wrote of the grave like this: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave [ sheol ] where you are going" (Ecclesiastes 9:10). The grave is simply a place of very dead sleep until the resurrection, which itself is another story. You will find no Popsicles in this hell.
Hell #2: Tartaroo. This Greek word, found and translated only once in the New Testament as "hell," has a very clear and specific application: "God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down to hell and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved for judgment" (2 Peter 2:4).
Fallen or sinning angels do exist. They are called demons and the chief one is Satan the devil. God has justly prepared a condition of spiritual restraint or imprisonment for them today. This is the idea behind the use of the term tartaroo in this passage.
However, there are no human beings who will experience the hell of tartaroo. Yet much of Christianity thinks that the traditional ever-burning hell will be like tartaroo, where they think the immortal souls of bad human beings will suffer forever.
Here's the bombshell—they're wrong because human beings have no such thing as an immortal soul! But that is a huge, other story.
Hell #3: Gehenna. Now we have arrived at the business end of the biblical hell. God will offer the gift of eternal life in His great Kingdom to every last human being. But to accept the sacrifice of Christ for our sins—and to live God's way of life of overcoming—forces each of us to make a choice. Do we want to live forever or not? The answer should be obvious, right?
But "should be" sometimes gets slippery. The bottom line is that those few who ultimately rebel against their Creator and refuse to change their ways to embrace His ways will die in the true hell of the Bible. God means what He says: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23, emphasis added), not eternal life in some bad place.
Completely contrary to the hellfire of many religions and certainly most of Christianity, the hell of the Bible simply ends the life of the wicked—it does not torture and torment them forever. After all, how could an average 70-year life of a sinner equal a never-ending eternity of heinous agony?
The true hell reflects both God's justice, by enforcing His divine laws of life, and His mercy, by swiftly ending the existence of the unrepentant few who choose to be the evil, the covetous, the thieving, the cowardly, the unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters and liars (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Revelation 21:8 ).
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