Biblestudy: Disproving Hell
#BS-111514
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 15-Nov-14; 58 minutes
description: Most of mainline Protestant and Catholic theology is hopelessly immersed in the pagan concept of hell reinforced by Dante's Inferno. The Hebrew word sheol simply means a pit or a hole where dead bodies are placed. Errant connotations evolved from this, including a void and a haunting, mysterious place, influenced by Greek myths of Hades. Realistically, when a body goes to sheol, it corrupts and is broken down by bacteria. Often, translators render the Hebrew word sheol (the pit) into the English word hell (connoting flames and pitchforks). Jonah referred to the belly of the fish as sheol. In the Greek language, Hades is equivalent to the Hebrew word sheol, without any reference to flames or torment. When Christ went into the tomb, He was in Hades, the storage place of the dead. Hades and death are equivalent terms. The term tartaroo refers to a place or condition of restraint for fallen angels or demons, not humans. The Bottomless Pit was reserved for Satan, symbolized as a fiery dragon. The term Gehenna (of Hinnom), referring to the valley of the sons of Hinnom, was actually a place of refuse, at one time used for child sacrifice. It was consecrated by God as a burial ground, and later the city dump of Jerusalem, with a fire burning the trash. Jesus used this venue as a symbol of the Lake of Fire—eternal Judgment (where the trash and garbage are burned up.) When one dies, the body decomposes and consciousness ceases; the spirit (the record of our life experiences) goes to God for safe keeping. When Christ returns, He will resurrect those who have believed and eventually all either to life or condemnation (depicted in Malachi 4:1-3). The soul is not immortal; the soul that sins shall die; the wages of sin is death. The gift of God is eternal life for those called by God.
transcript:
I thought I would give you a little bit of hell today. I have not done that in a while, so I thought it was about time. (Just kidding.)
In the evangelical world, the subject of hell has been discussed a lot over the past couple of years because one of their up-and-coming lights, if you will, I believe it was Mark Driscoll, came out and said he did not believe in hell anymore, that there was no truth in the Bible about hell in terms of how they believe it as an ever-burning place. You know, Milton Dante, that sort of thing. And that hell was not part of God's divine justice. And, I would not say that his belief is exactly like ours, but he is going in the right direction as far as his understanding of hell.
So today, I want to give you three approaches on the subject of hell to disprove the modern Protestant and Catholic doctrines of hell. I do not know if you will ever be faced with having to defend our belief on the doctrine of hell, but it might be helpful to have something in the background or something in the back of your mind so you can formulate an answer because it does say in,
I Peter 3:15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.
This is why we call one of the sections of the Forerunner "A Ready Answer," because that is what we are doing. We are trying to equip you with answers that you would be ready to give should someone ask you about that particular question. So I am going to give you three different arguments that you can use, you can pull out of your mind to help you in giving an answer on the subject of hell.
Now, the three arguments are the lexical argument referring to the words that are used in the Bible for hell. The second one is the prophetic argument, that is, how prophecy is shown in the Bible to reveal that hell is not part of God's plan, at least the ever-burning hell. And finally, the theological argument. That would be just a strictly doctrinal way of approaching the idea of hell. So that is the lexical, the prophetic, and the theological, three different arguments. Any one of the three will work. I think there is maybe one that will be a little bit easier to show than the others. But any one of them or all three in course would be helpful.
We are going to look primarily at the lexical argument. And maybe it is because I like words so much, but it is the one that works for me to show that that hell, even though the word exists in the Bible, does not describe what most people think of hell. And so if you show them that the words that are used in Old Testament and the New Testament do not mean that, then they have to begin to think of hell in a different way.
The lexical argument, this approach deals with the meanings of the words used in the Bible for hell. Now, the biblical writers use four different words, one in the Old Testament and three in the New. So one Hebrew word, three Greek words. We will start with the Hebrew word, and that is sheol. Sheol is used 66 times in the Old Testament. And this one I believe is probably the most important of the three because it is the one that the New Testament idea of hell is based upon. So it all goes back to the Old Testament.
This word in its derivation begins with the idea of a hole, a pit, something that is dug into the ground. Now, when a person dies and you dig a hole and put the body in, it becomes not just a hole, it becomes a grave. And that is one of the main meanings of the word sheol. It started with just a hole, but then it moved to a pit which is a much bigger hole and then it goes to grave, which is a hole where a body is placed.
So you have this movement of an idea that goes from one thing to another and becomes a little bit more abstract as you go. Once it got to the idea of grave, then it took on a broader meaning of place of the dead because a grave is where you place a dead person. So you see how it is expanding out. And once it got to the place where sheol came to be understood as a place of the dead, then it took on mystical meanings beyond just where the body is, but where this person's soul is, or where his spirit has gone.
And so, think about this, and we are going to add a little bit of a layer to this. When you dig a hole, what do you create? You create an empty place, you create a void, because a hole is nothing more than an empty place. It is a void. It is now void of the dirt or the stone, the rock or whatever that you pulled out of it. And so thinking of the concept of void, along with the place of the dead, then there were elements of things like wasteland that came in because that is what a wasteland is, it is a place void of life. And if you think of being void of life, that is where the dead then are, because the dead are dead, they do not have life. Where else would they go than to this void where there is no life? It became therefore a place where the dead dwell. That is where they go after they cease living.
You see the progression of the ideas that led to the idea of sheol being this place where mysterious dead spirits go and live after they have lived their physical lives. But that idea is never found in the Old Testament. The idea in the Old Testament always clings to the original idea of a hole. It is a pit, it is a burial place for the dead and does not go beyond that.
The idea of it being a void or a place like Hades or hell or something like that did not come until after the Old Testament was finished. And it may even have not come until the Hebrews, the Jews of the time, had contact with places like Babylon and certainly Greece because it is the Grecian idea, the Greek idea that became the idea that crept into Judaism about hell. So in the Old Testament, if we confine ourselves to the understanding of what is actually in the Bible, that those ideas are not there. The Bible's idea is pit, hole, grave, and no further.
Let us look starting in Psalm 16. This is an important verse, kind of the basis for the whole thing. This is a psalm of David and this part that we are going to be reading is the Messianic part of this particular psalm.
Psalm 16:8-9 I have set the Lord always before me; because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices; my flesh also will rest in hope.
We are beginning to see that he is looking forward to his death, that he is very confident that he will rest in hope of what we understand—the hope of the resurrection.
Psalm 16:10-11 For You will not leave my soul in Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption. You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Here, the translators decided to leave it untranslated so we get sheol in its raw form. And it simply means what you think it means: that he would not leave his soul in the grave. Then the next line gives us a pretty good indication what he means in the Messianic sense, especially that He would not allow His body to see corruption. He would not allow His body to start to consume itself and disintegrate. And that is what happened with Jesus Christ. God did not leave Him in His grave long enough for His body to begin to rot.
And so we have the idea here. That is exactly what it is talking about. It is a hole, it is a pit, it is a place where the dead go. That is what exactly it means.
Let us go on a few pages over in Psalm 30, verse 3. Just this one particular verse.
Psalm 30:3 O Lord, You brought my soul up from the grave [the grave there is sheol, and then look at the very next part of the verse, the next couplet, if you will, or the next pair of the couplet]; You have kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.
So it is parallel here. Sheol, the grave, is parallel to the pit. Sheol means the pit. And so the psalmist here, which is also David, used another Hebrew word that means the pit to define sheol, which also means the pit. So we are seeing that the Bible, the Old Testament especially here, is defining its own terms. Sheol means the pit. It means the grave. It is where you put a dead body.
Now, let us expand this a little bit. Let us go back to Numbers the 16th chapter. If you know your chapters, then Numbers 16 pops up in your head and says that is the story of Korah's rebellion. And it is an interesting use of the word sheol in this particular episode. We will just read verse 30. This is toward the end where Moses is explaining what is going to happen. And he is saying that God is going to do a certain thing and if it happens this way, then they should know whose side God is on.
Numbers 16:30 "But if the Lord creates a new thing, and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into the pit [there is the word sheol], then you will understand that these men have rejected the Lord."
If we were to go on, we find out that many, many, many people were consumed in this. The families of Korah and of Dathan and of Abiram were swallowed up in this pit. And so this opening of the earth, this void in the earth that God made, a great crack maybe by means of an earthquake or something like that, became their grave. Sheol is a pit, an opening in the earth where dead bodies go. And that is exactly what happened here. Sheol, the pit, is a grave. So it is the destination of physical bodies when they die.
Let us look at another one. Psalm 55, verse 15.
Psalm 55:15 Let death seize them [he is talking about his enemies here]; let them go down alive into hell [Now, if you have a New King James, like I do, with a center column reference, you will find that this word is sheol.], for wickedness is in their dwellings and among them.
Here the translators decide to translate it into hell. I do not understand why. It is very clear that he is asking God to allow them to die. Because he had just said that: let death seize them. And he is paralleling it with the next line: Let them go down alive into the pit, into the grave. And it very may very well be that David in writing this is referring back to Numbers 16:30 where we just were, because that is exactly what happened. Korah, Dathan, Abiram, and their families that were all in there went down alive into the pit that God opened up. So they went down alive into the grave where rebels go. Did I not say that it was the rebellion of Korah?
Well, something very similar is happening here in the life of David. It is a rebellion of his son Absalom and Ahithophel and all those others, against David, against the king, God's anointed, just like Moses was God's anointed at the time, His prophet, the leader of Israel. And so he is asking for the same punishment to be on these people as was on Korah. Specifically he wants it for Ahithophel because of what he has done in his hypocrisy and betrayal.
So here we have another usage of it where it is translated as hell, but it should very well be the grave, or the pit. There is no idea of an afterlife here. He is just talking about going down into the grave.
Proverbs 5:5 has a similar one; we do not need to go there. But let us go to Jonah the second chapter. And this is a very interesting use of sheol. We all know what happens with Jonah. God tells Jonah, "Jonah, I want you to go to the Assyrians, go to Nineveh. I want you to preach to them repentance." And Jonah says, "No, I don't want to go." So he runs away to the coast there, Jaffa. He gets on a ship. He starts going for Tarsus and there is a great storm that comes up. They figure out that Jonah is the one that is causing this. God is on his tail. God has caught him and so he says, "Throw me into the ocean, throw me into the sea and your problem will be solved." So they chuck him into the ocean and then you have Jonah's prayer in Jonah 2 where he is praying to God for deliverance.
Jonah 2:2 "I cried out to the Lord because of my affliction, and He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice."
Jonah 2:6 "I went down to the moorings of the mountains; the earth with its bars closed behind me forever; yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God."
Both of these are sheol. Obviously they left it untranslated in verse 2 and verse 6 they translated it as the pit. But think of it. What was it? It was the stomach of the great fish. That was his sheol. That was the place where his dead body was going to be. It was not that he was going to any kind of hell where he would live forever as this disembodied spirit. He is saying very specifically that he was going to die in the pit of the stomach of this fish. So maybe that is where we get our expression that I felt it in the pit of my stomach or it hit me in the pit of my stomach. Well, this is the pit of the fish's stomach and it was a place of the dead. It was sheol for Jonah because that is where his body was going to be unless God performed a miracle.
So we see here that by Jonah's day, which is about 800 BC, the idea had evolved to the point where sheol was wherever the dead body was. So it did not necessarily have to be a hole in the ground. In this case, it was the belly of the fish or it would have been the bottom of the ocean that would have been sheol for his body.
That is how this word has evolved through the years. But once we read the whole Old Testament and see all the uses of sheol, which obviously I have not done, I have only gone to about a half dozen of them, but they are all describing a grave or a pit, a hole in the ground, a place where a body is after its life is gone. That is it. There is no idea in the Old Testament of any kind of life after death in terms of hell. You know, we think that a person's spirit just goes wherever. A lot of Christians believe that it goes to heaven or it goes to hell. But that idea is not in the Old Testament, not at all, especially not in the idea of the word sheol.
Let us go to the Greek. Now, Greek has three words that have come to mean hell in our society and in Christianity. The first one is the word hades, which we are probably the most familiar with and believe it or not, this is only used 10 times in the entire New Testament. And if you want just the short version of hades and what it means, it is the exact equivalent of sheol. Hades is the exact equivalent of sheol in the New Testament.
Now, if you go outside into other Greek texts, it does not mean that. Obviously, by this time, the Greeks had this idea of it being the place ruled over by Hades, by Pluto, as the Romans looked at it. It was the place of the dead. They no longer had bodies, but they went there, their spirit or soul went there, and they were ruled over by Hades. Unless there were some great personage that came in and took them out, they could never leave. And usually when they came in, the great personage was allowed to talk to somebody, but he could not leave with anybody and he just barely escaped with his own life.
But that idea is not in the New Testament. Hades, in the New Testament, is used just like sheol is in the Old Testament. In the Greek it means the state or abode of the dead. Very plain and simple: state or abode of the dead. In other words, it is the grave. Again, just like sheol. So biblical Greek makes no mention at all of any state of purgatory or anything like that. No idea in the New Testament of there being any kind of consciousness in death, or in hades. It is just, again, the grave, the place where the dead are after they die, where the body goes.
Let us go to a few of these.
Matthew 11:23 "And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, will be brought down to Hades; for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day."
Here, Jesus is castigating the people of Capernaum for their failure to appreciate Him, to accept Him, to see His miracles and say, this is a teacher from God, and repent. And He is saying that they would, even though they, it says here, who were exalted to heaven. They were exalted to heaven because they had the heavenly Messenger among them. This was an exaltation of them. This was a great boon, a great grace to them that they had Jesus Christ there among them, giving them the truth. But because they rejected Him, He says they would be brought down to hades.
Now, what this means is that they would die. But what it means is that they would go to their graves without turning to Christ because they had rejected Him, that their rejection of Him was their own judgment upon their own lives. They had not judged Christ properly and so they would die in their sins, as it were.
Let us go to another one. Acts 2. And in this one, we kind of come full circle between hades and sheol because in this particular verse that we are going to go to, Peter quotes David from Psalm 16: 8-11. But here we are in Acts 2, verse 27. Remember hearing this from earlier.
Acts 2:27-28 "For You will not leave My soul in Hades [it was sheol in the Old Testament], nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life; You will make me full of joy in Your presence."
Let us just drop down to verse 31 where it is used again.
Acts 2:31 He foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades [in the grave], nor did His flesh see corruption.
So Peter here in the New Testament takes Psalm 16 and he translates it directly into Greek. And for sheol he uses hades and he means for us to understand that there is an exact correlation between hades and sheol. So we understand that hades is supposed to be used in the same way.
Let us see, there are several others. Let us go to Revelation 1, verse 18. Jesus is speaking here to John and He is describing Himself. He says,
Revelation 1:18 "I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death."
Here, Jesus explains this and we are referring back to, of course, the same idea that was in Psalm 16 and that was in Acts 2. But here Jesus is using this same thing, that He was alive, but He was dead too. He did die. But now He is alive again because He was resurrected. Remember, God did not allow His soul, His body, His life to see corruption. So He was resurrected. And so He says, "I have the keys of Hades [the grave, sheol] and of Death."
Now, what is interesting is that every time the word hades is used in the book of Revelation, it is used in conjunction with death so that we understand that hades and death are supposed to be thought of in the same way, in the same vein. They mean the same thing. One is just the place and the other is the state. When a body is dead, it is in the state of death. And when a body is dead, it is put in a place of death, which is the grave. So we are supposed to look at these things in the same way.
You might want to jot down Revelation 6:8 where it is also used in the same way, death and hades together. Chapter 20, verses 13 and 14. It is actually used four times throughout the book of Revelation, all with death defining, as it were, or used in parallel to define the word hades so that we see them as pretty much equivalent terms.
Let us go on to the next word, and that is the word tartaroo. Now, sheol and hades are both nouns. Tartaroo is a verb and it is only found one place in the Bible. Let us go to that one. It is in II Peter 2, verse 4. Now, I wanted to make sure you understood that this is a verb because it is very important. There is a noun form in Greek, but that noun form is not used in the Bible. And so we see in the way that this verse has been translated, that the translators have interpreted what was written and made it into a noun. But it is not a noun in the Greek, it is a verb.
II Peter 2:4 For if 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.
Now, you would think that the word hell there was Tartarus, which is the noun form, Tartarus. And if you know any Greek mythology, you know that Tartarus is one of the, you might call it, the levels of hell. Tartarus was the place where the giants, the Titans were held when Zeus took over. I do not know how much you know about Greek mythology, but the Titans, in the mythology, ruled everything. Pluto, Saturn, who was the other one, there were three main Titans, but Zeus rose up in in rebellion against the Titans and he imprisoned them, and he imprisoned them in Tartarus. Now, we are getting a little idea of what tartaroo, which is the actual word that is used in the Bible, means. Now, if you look here in the New King James, the way it is phrased is "but cast them down to hell."
Well, that is not what the Greek said. All it says is "cast them down." That is what Tartarus means. Tartarus means to cast down and it has the connotation of being imprisoned. And that is why the Greeks, then, use Tartarus as a word that means a prison or a place of restraint. So the actual word tartaroo means to cast down. But Tartarus is the place where they were cast down in Greek mythology, but not in the Bible.
In the Bible Tartarus really does not exist. Catch my meaning? Tartarus does exist though in its effect. Because you know where Tartarus is? See what we are talking about here, the angels who sinned. Where does it say that God cast the angels who sinned down? Where were they cast down? To earth. Earth became Tartarus and we are living in their prison, their place of restraint.
There is an important point that we need to understand here in terms of the concept of hell. And that is that this has nothing to do with people, not one thing at all. Tartaroo has to do with angels, angels who sinned. And so really, this is just a nonstarter in terms of any kind of doctrine of hell, because this has to do with sinning angels and what God did in restraining them. So it does not affect us at all. This is purely about demons. So you can really kind of scratch it off in terms of the idea of hell altogether because it does not talk about hell. It talks about the earth and where the angels who sinned were cast down. This is their place of restraint.
Just one little addendum. The closest noun that comes to Tartarus that is in the Bible is found in the book of Revelation in three different places. Revelation 11:7, Revelation 17:8, and Revelation 20:1. I want to go to that one.
Revelation 20:1 And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain was in his hand.
Now the bottomless pit there is the Greek word abyss, "having the key to the abyss and a great chain was in his hand." Now what was he going to do? He was going to take this key and he was going to open the abyss and thrust in Satan the Devil to be restrained. And so a synonymous term to Tartarus, which is not in the Bible, is abyss, the bottomless pit. So if you want to say that the idea is there in the Bible, yes, it is. It is in the idea of the bottomless pit, but it is a synonymous term. It is not Tartarus, it is abyss. So just so you understand that the idea is there but not the word. Tartarus, if you want, is synonymous to the abyss, of the bottomless pit.
The final of the four words that we are going to go over is gehenna. That is 12 times in the Bible. There is actually more instances of gehenna than there are of hades, which only had 10.
Literally, this word is a Greek mispronunciation of the Hebrew term gey' hinnom. It is hard to say, the Greeks found it just as hard to say as we do even though they had some pretty hard words to say themselves. But gey' hinnom is very difficult and so they pronounced it ga-henna. They changed the [sound] into a "ga" and the other [sound] into a "ha" and it became gehenna rather than gey' hinnom. And the word actually does not describe hell or any abode of the dead in terms of some sort of mystical place. Gehenna was actually the Valley of Hinnom outside of Jerusalem. It was an actual geographical place. It was a valley on the east side of Jerusalem. And Jesus is the one who uses the term exclusively in the Bible. He uses it as an illustration of the Lake of Fire.
Now, there is an interesting story of why He did this. Let us go to Matthew 5, verses 29 and 30 just see one of these examples. This right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus is expanding some of the commandments. He expands the sixth commandment in verse 21. And by the time He gets to verse 27 He is expanding on the seventh commandment. Then he says verse 29,
Matthew 5:29 "But if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you, for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be cast into [gehenna]."
In the New King James, they translated it as hell. Why they did not leave it as simply gehenna I do not know. They interpreted that He meant hell when He actually meant gehenna. And verse 30 is the same.
Matthew 5:30 "If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you, for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into [gehanna]."
He was pointing them to an actual place where they could go and see what was going on in the Valley of Hinnom. So, why would He do this? Well, the reason is that the Valley of Hinnom, gehenna, was the city dump. Jerusalem had a population of, I do not know how many people, 50,000, 100,000 people. And it produced its fair amount of trash, just like any accumulation of humans will do. We tend to make a lot of trash. And so you have to have a place to put your trash. And the people of Jerusalem chose the Valley of Hinnom, gehenna.
Well, what is the easiest way to get rid of trash? You burn it. And so because there were so many people putting so much trash into the Valley of Hinnom, and because they burned their trash to get rid of it, there was always a fire burning in the Valley of Hinnom. And so it became a symbol that Jesus Christ was able to use to help people understand what the Lake of Fire was like. It was an ever-burning place where trash is burned. He wanted them to get the idea that the Lake of Fire was a place where you put all your undesirable things that you are going to throw away and you never want to see again.
Now, add to this that when criminals were judged worthy of the death penalty, and they died by execution one way or another, that they were not allowed to be buried like normal Jews or others were allowed to be buried. Their bodies were thrown into gehenna to be burned. They did not have an oven at the local cemetery or whatever where you would cremate a body. They did not do that in Jerusalem. They would actually throw the corpse onto the trash, symbolically showing that this was a worthless person who was not worthy of burial. Not worthy of any honor, that they would burn the body. He would be cremated in the Valley of Hinnom.
And that is the idea that Jesus wants to get across. That if you do not follow the way of God, if you reject God, then that is what is going to happen. The person is going to be completely consumed by the fires of the Lake of Fire and his existence would be totally wiped out. Is that not a perfect illustration of what is actually going to happen?
Well, there is a reason why the Valley of Hinnom became this place in Jerusalem and it all fits in with this idea of the Lake of Fire, rejecting God, sinning horribly, and being totally removed from existence for all time in the wrath of God.
Let us go back to the book of Jeremiah in chapter 7. See, we are not Jews who have a historical knowledge of everything that went on in previous times as many were in the first century. His audience had a, you would not call it necessarily a living memory of this, but it was a cultural memory of these things being passed down from generation to generation through their teachings. And this idea of the Valley of the Son of Hinnom or the Valley of Gehenna was one of those cultural memories and they perpetuated it by making it the city dump. Here is why.
Jeremiah 7:28-31 [This is God speaking to Jeremiah] "So shall you say to them [meaning the Jews of Jeremiah's day], 'This is a nation that does not obey the voice of the Lord their God nor receive correction. [Notice that these are people who are unwilling to be corrected. They are people who will not repent.] Truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth. Cut off your hair and cast it away, and take up a lamentation on the desolate heights; for the Lord has rejected and forsaken this generation of His wrath.' For the children of Judah have done evil in My sight," says the Lord. "They have set their abominations in the house which is called by My name, to pollute it. [So they have been making abominations in the Temple.] And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into My heart."
So now we see that the Valley of the Son of Hinnom or the Valley of Gehenna was the place where they had set up their idols for child sacrifice. And they had committed these horrible abominations right there outside Jerusalem. And God said this idea never came into His head, it never came into His mind that they should do such things to Him, which is kind of an interesting indication that they were worshipping God, they thought, through these horrible practices, and God was horrified.
That is not what He wanted. And He had sent prophets and others to tell them that this was not the way it was supposed to be. He had sent Josiah to knock all these places down, but they continued to do this, they would not repent. So it says here,
Jeremiah 7:32-34 "Therefore behold, the days are coming," says the Lord, "when it will no more be called Tophet, or the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter, for they will bury in Tophet until there is no room. The corpses of this people will be food for the birds of the heaven and for the beasts of the earth, and no one will frighten them away. Then I will cause to cease from the cities of Judah and from the streets of Jerusalem the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride. For the land shall be desolate."
What He is prophesying here that in the next few years has happened, that Babylon would come and they would decimate the people of Judah, the people of Jerusalem. And where do you think they put the dead bodies? In the Valley of Slaughter, in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, in Gehenna. And this became a symbol then of God's wrath on the people of Judah. And they covered their shame, as it were, by making this place the city dump. But this memory passed on from generation to generation that the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, Gehenna, was the place where the bodies of the people were put who had come under the wrath of God.
Perfect illustration of the Lake of Fire. And so that is what He is talking about. This has nothing to do with hell in terms of how the people of the world consider hell now, as a place where the spirits of dead people go, bad people go, where they are tortured by demons and stuck with pitchforks and made to swim in lava, and all the other ideas that they have. That is not it at all. The idea of gehenna is complete immolation by fire of those who have rejected God. And then that is it. You are completely burned up, or the person who has sinned is completely burned up, and they are gone.
Malachi 4, verses 1 through 3, which we will get to, shows this that this is what the idea was at the end of the Old Testament. And it is obviously the idea that Jesus brings up in the New.
That is the lexical argument. I have spent most of my time on it because I felt that it was the most interesting. But I think it is the one that, to me, is the most damning, as it were, for the whole argument of hell.
I do not want to take very much time on the prophetic argument because we hear that every year, especially in the fall holy days. And that is the one when Jesus comes on the Day of Trumpets. He comes, He establishes His Kingdom, He separates the sheep from the goats, that sort of thing. And we see that in the way that it is described in the holy days. He sets us up His Kingdom and we have the Millennium, which we see in the Feast of Tabernacles, and people are converted through that period of time. And then we have, of course, the Great White Throne Judgment where everyone is raised who has not had a chance for salvation up to that point.
And then what happens? When we go through Revelation 20, if you want to put that down, we see it very clearly. That those who accept Jesus Christ live eternally. And as you get to verses 13 and 14, what do you find out? It is very clear there. Why do not we just go to those verses. What happens to the people who reject God?
Revelation 20:12-14 And I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God, and books were opened. And another book was opened, which is the Book of Life, and the dead were judged according to their works, by the things which were written in the books. The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. [Death and Hades, the grave, the pit, wherever people were buried, where their bodies went.] And they were judged, each one according to his works. Then Death and Hades [again] were cast into the lake of fire. [God does away with death. God does away with the graves. He does not need it anymore.] This is the second death. And anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.
That is it. They do not go to hell. They are cast into the Lake of Fire, which we saw in our discussion of gehenna, is where people are completely burned up.
Now let us go to Malachi 4.
Malachi 4:1-3 "For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, and all the proud, yes, all who do wickedly will be stubble. And the day which is coming shall burn them up," says the Lord of hosts, "that will leave them neither root nor branch. [He is saying they are going to be completely destroyed, mothing left.] But to you who fear My name the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings; and you shall go out and grow fat like stall-fed calves. You will trample the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day that I will do this."
Exactly the picture that Jesus uses in His idea of gehenna. That they are put in a place where the bodies are burned and they become ash.
That is pretty much the prophetic argument that the prophecies of the Bible do not contain any place where hell can be. It is just not there. I will not go into Luke 16, which is the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. I took a whole Bible study to do that a few years ago. It is a little bit more involved for the time I have. But I can just say here, just as kind of an offhand comment, that Jesus was never intending in this parable to preach any kind of doctrine in terms of hell. He had an entirely different approach or different reason for giving that parable. He was not talking about hell. If you want to, you can go to that Bible study, which I gave a few years ago.
The theological argument, the final one, falls into place once you understand the words lexical argument and the prophetic argument, which is the plan of God, and the fact that there is no place for a hell like that in the plan of God.
Let us start at the very beginning. We will take this quickly. In Genesis 2 we see God's first words on the subject. And you remember that when the Pharisees came up to Jesus and said this man was married, and he died, and the woman had to go to the brother, and then that man died and she had to go to another brother. And she ended up having so many marriages, all to these brothers. Which one is she going to be married to in the Kingdom? And Jesus said, you guys do not understand. In the beginning it was not so. This is not what He had originally planned to do. He gave the levirate marriage laws because of the hardness of their heart, not because of what He was planning from the beginning. This is the same idea here. This is what He has said from the beginning and this is what He wants.
Genesis 2:16-17 The Lord commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."
What He is saying here is that people—men, humans, men and women—their souls, as it were, will die if they sin. Sinning incurs the death penalty. Let us go to chapter 3. Right away Satan tried to argue this.
Genesis 3:1-3 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, "Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, 'You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.'"
Well, she repeats it back. She understood, she added a little bit there, but she understood the basic gist of it was that disobeying God would incur the death penalty.
Genesis 3:4-5 Then the serpent said to the woman, "You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day that you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
So what it comes down here to is that either men die after they sin or men do not die after they sin, they have an immortal soul. God said that men can die after they sin. But Satan is the one that says, men do not die after they sin, they have an immortal soul. So the question comes down to, in its most basic form, which do you believe: God or Satan? And Satan is the author of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which is what the idea of hell is based on. The idea of hell is based on the "fact" that the human soul cannot die, it is immortal. And so after death, the soul has to go somewhere. And so it either goes to heaven, in the way they look at it, or it goes to hell if it has been bad. But the Bible is very much against this idea of the immortality of the soul. We all know Ezekiel 18, verse 4. Let us go ahead and go there.
Ezekiel 18:4 "Behold, all souls are Mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine [God is speaking]; the soul who sins shall die."
Ezekiel 18:20 "The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son."
Each one bears his own guilt and whoever sins dies. So we see again, God is saying that the soul can die. What happens? We know what happens. But I want to go through this quickly. Let us go to the book of Ecclesiastes 3. Solomon pretty much takes us right through the process here.
Ecclesiastes 3:19-20 For what happens to the sons of men also happens to beasts; one thing befalls them: as one dies, so dies the other. Surely, they all have one breath; man has no advantage over beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust.
And so what Solomon is saying here, to put it very simply, is that man has animal life. Man is an organism. Man breathes air, his blood circulates. And when man dies, that body disintegrates, and just like a dog, just like a lion, just like whatever, the body goes to dust, it disintegrates just as theirs does.
Ecclesiastes 9:4-5 But for him who is joined to all the living there is hope [you are still alive], for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they will die; but the dead know nothing, and they have no more reward.
So we see here that Solomon is saying that changes can be made in one's life as long as you are alive. But once you are dead, you do not know anything. And we just saw from chapter 3 that your body is going to disintegrate. So there is no more chance of a reward there once you are dead. So he says,
Ecclesiastes 9:10 Whatever your hand finds to do [while you are still alive], do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.
This is Solomon's way of saying that "when you're dead, you're dead," nothing happens. Notice how he puts that. There is no work. You cannot accomplish anything. Or device, there is no devising anything. There is no making of any plans. You cannot do anything with any kind of purpose. Knowledge; he just said, you know nothing. Wisdom; there is no skill in living because you are not living, you are dead, in the grave. Once a person dies, he has no consciousness whatsoever, no ability to affect anything—he is dead. A person is dead.
Ecclesiastes 12:6-7 [he is on the same theme here] Remember your Creator before the silver cord is loosed, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the well. [These are all illustrations of death. So he says, remember your Creator before you die. Why? When you die. . .] Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.
What he is saying here is that when a person dies, his body disintegrates into the dust and everything that he was is reduced, essentially, to the spirit. And this spirit—remember Solomon already told us there is no consciousness, no device, no work, nothing of that sort goes on—but the spirit is a record (who knows how God does it) of our lives. Everything we have done, everything we have said, all the character that we produced, is somehow recorded on the spirit and it returns to God and He files it away for the resurrection from the dead when He gives us a body, puts the spirit in, gives us life, and we work again.
But the idea that I wanted to get across here is that when a person dies, he is not a disembodied soul or spirit that can talk, see, understand, work, or know anything. That is gone. A life needs a body and a spirit and life itself, a breath. Some spark from God to make it work. If you do not have all three of those things—body, soul, and spirit, as Paul put it—then there is no person.
Now I want to go to Psalm 146, back just a few pages.
Psalm 146:4 His spirit departs, he returns to his earth [that is, the body returns to his earth]; in that very day his plans perish.
Here, we have this psalmist basically backing up what Solomon said.
In Genesis 3, verse 19, let us go back to the beginning. God tells us right there what happens and it is very clear. This is in the curse to Adam.
Genesis 3:19 "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return."
So we see that throughout the Bible there has been very consistent understanding of what happens when we die. Our bodies disintegrate and the spirit goes back to God. But there is no immortal soul, the soul who sins shall die.
Let us put a capstone on this in terms of the theological argument.
Acts 2:29 "Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David [Now, of all people from the Old Testament who would you expect to be alive and in heaven, if that were the case, he picks out David here], that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day."
Acts 2:34 "For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself, 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at My right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool."'
So David is not in heaven, nor is he in hell, unless you consider it sheol, the pit, in the tomb, in the grave.
A couple more little things of a more theological nature. You might just want to jot down Romans 6:23. It is a memory scripture, "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord." Did you catch that? Sin happens because of something we do, but eternal life is a gift and it only happens through Christ. So what use would there be for Christ if everybody already had eternal life? That is what an immortal soul is, is it not, basically eternal life, living forever. But Paul shows very clearly here that eternal life is a gift and it only comes when one becomes Christian and continues as a Christian.
The bottom line here is in Matthew 10.
Matthew 10:28 [Jesus says] "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."
What is the word? Gehenna. What is He talking about? The Lake of Fire. Fear the One, He is talking to His disciples here, your physical death is not something that needs to be feared. What we really need to fear is God who is able to destroy any hope of eternal life in the Lake of Fire. That is what we should have, godly fear, true godly fear, so that we do what God says, because He does have the power to destroy us completely and totally and forever in the Lake of Fire.
I hope these points give you confidence in answering this doctrinal question should anyone ask about it. We should understand that we have not been chosen for such a destiny. We are in Christ, and this idea of being killed in the Lake of Fire is not for us.
But I want to end with that idea in I Thessalonians 5, verses 4 and 5 and then 8 through 11. This is the hope that we have. We can go forward understanding that God has not put us in this way or put us in danger of that because He has called us to something far greater.
I Thessalonians 5:4-5 But you, brethren, are not in darkness, so that this day should overtake you as a thief. You are all sons of light and sons of the day. We are not of the night nor of darkness.
I Thessalonians 5:8-11 But let us who are of the day be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet the hope of salvation. For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep [he means dies], we should live together with Him. Therefore comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing.
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