Today I will cover how Jesus used the term Gehenna, which came to be translated as hell in our English Bibles, and the reasons he gave for why you could end up there.
Many might say, “Well that’s easy- believe in Jesus or you will burn in hell when you die.” But, in fact, Jesus never says that once in any of the Gospels. Jesus certainly knew his scripture (the Hebrew Bible; aka the Old Testament), and in that scripture, the valley of Gehenna (the valley of the son of Hinnom) came to be associated with fire because it was there that people practiced child sacrifice by fire.
So, did Jesus use Gehenna literally as a cursed place you did not want your body to be buried in? Did he use its burning fire as a metaphor to refer to the suffering you would incur if you lived a life of sin? Or did he use it as a symbol for a place of eternal fire to which you could be sent upon judgment from God?
Most of us are familiar with yet another option- that hell (Gehenna) is the name of an actual place of eternal torment existing in another dimension (or, as some believe, in the great depths of the earth) where you could go after you die. This is a belief or doctrine that began to be taught as a fact roughly a century after Jesus died and has remained with us since. It is a doctrine of fear: Believe or burn.
Seven out of the eleven times Jesus uses the word Gehenna, he tells you that being a sinner is what could land you there. Six of the verses all say basically the same thing: He says either ‘cut off your hand, cut off your foot, or pluck out your eye if it causes you to sin, for it is better to enter eternal life maimed, than for your whole body to be thrown into Gehenna.’[1] In the Gospel of Matthew, he says that even calling your brother or sister a fool could land you in Gehenna.[2]
This means that more than half the verses in which the word Gehenna is used have nothing to do with your belief in Jesus, but whether you were a sinner. This should be very important shouldn’t it?
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[1] Matthew 5:29, 30, 18:9; Mark 9:43, 45, 47—48.
[2] Matthew 5:22.
just ordered the book. Amen
the fact that people totally ignore the part about being a sinner and just preach ‘believe or burn’ is BEYOND me… yes, it should be very important!
Yes, I think to make matters worse, some believe that you can just sin all week, confess them and be forgiven, and back to sinning the next week! However, I discuss a definition of sin in my book that, to me, is more in harmony with God’s love: sin is anything that separates us from God, or in different words, from our higher selves. It would seem refreshing to know that God is truly love. Love doesn’t know what sin is. We have been caught up in a paradigm of a vengeful, judgmental God since ancient times—one who will roast sinners in a fire for all eternity. But while God sits eternally in the center—love like the sun—it is only we who create our own misery by living in any away that keeps us from being our best selves.