What in the Hell? Part 2

Several years ago I worked for a man in Washington state, he was a good guy and had all the best intentions in the world... he was a Christian and was not afraid to share his faith. At work there was a 20 something coworker who was not a believer. One day I came into work and found my boss trying to convince my coworker that a group of scientists had actually drilled a hole into the center of the earth, lowered a microphone and recorded the screams of those below suffering in hell... I wanted to curl up in a little ball in the corner and pretend this had been a bad dream, I was embarrassed. I remember going home that day and looking up this claim on www.snopes.com found that it was a scam that a guy had actually used to swindled a local church out of several thousand dollars to get more money to "keep drilling", and "keep the research going". I printed out the papers and took them into work the next day and ever so humbly shared what I had learned. My ex-boss looked at me like I had just slapped his mamma... It wasn't long after that that he fired me.

This experience brought up a really good question though... where IS hell?
for this blog I want to focus on one of the words that I mentioned in my last post, Gehenna (ghe-hen-nah).

Gehenna is the Hebrew gê-hinnom(Nehemiah 11:30), or the longer form gê-ben-hinnom(Joshua 15:8), and gê-benê-hinnom(2 Kings 23:10) "valley of the sons of Hinnom". Hinnom seems to be the name of some lucky mystery guy.

Whoever this guy was, he had a valley that was SO bad they use the name synonymously with hell.

This Valley of Hinnom is south of Jerusalem and is now called Wadi er-rababi. It was notorious as the scene, in earlier days, of the horrible worship of Molech. For this reason it was defiled by Josias (2Kings 23:10), cursed by Jeremias (Jeremiah7:31-33), and held in abomination by the Jews.

The reason why the history is important is because Jesus made it important. Jesus was a master story teller and he used every day object lessons to drive home spiritual concepts. In the N.T. Jesus refers to "hell" just under a dozen times.

In the King James Versionof the Bible, the term appears 13 times in 11 different verses as "valley of Hinnom," "valley of the son of Hinnom" or "valley of the children of Hinnom."

The traditional description of the valley is that it may have been the town dump and had fires burning all the time to consume the trash and even cadavers that were thrown into it.

There is evidence as shown in the picture that it was a graveyard and had tombs... bottom line, really creepy valley.

When speaking of hell, Jesus uses the term Gehenna 11 times to describe hell. It would have been a powerful word picture in the mind of the Jewish listeners and also helped them understand that hell is a real deal.

Soooo, am I saying that THAT is where hell is located? No. But, I think it does illustrate for us that fact that hell is not only a spiritual realm, but it can in fact be here with us now, right here, right now.

A few years ago I took a group of teenagers on a mission trip to Matamoros, Mexico where we built small homes for people who lived IN the dump.
Not by the dump or near the dump, IN the dump.

These people lived in and by the dump, the dump provided everything they needed, it was their mother... it was disgusting.

I will NEVER forget the smell of that dump, the children playing in bare feet, the maggots, the families digging through the trash to get food and things they could recycle or sell for money.

I will NEVER forget the garbage truck pulling up and dropping a load in the "front yard" of one family so that they could pick through the trash.

I will never forget the rabid dogs with mange wandering around with gnashing teeth. I will never forget the fires that would randomly start and burn day and night there from all the decomposing trash... it... was... hell.

We have all seen different pictures of hell, stories that we could tell that would fill up this blog.

Jesus point was simple, hell is a very bad place and we should do all that we can to make sure we are living in the kingdom of heaven now, that we are bringing the kingdom of light here and that we are pointing the way to His kind of living not only in THIS age but in the AGE TO COME!
Pastor Willy