Father, keep us safe and help us to wait patiently for the coming of your Son.
We've sort of touched on this subject a few weeks ago when we looked at mortality. So what exactly is hell?
If we went out onto the streets and asked people what they thought hell was we could build up a picture of a hot place, fire and brimstone would feature as would tormented souls and all sorts of nasty creatures, but that is nothing like the Bible's teaching.
Like the popular concept of Heaven, hell takes its root directly out of mythology and was promoted by the medieval church as a 'bit of a money spinner'. Obviously no one would want to go to such as horrible place so it became popular to pay something to the church, either in a person's will or in (a very public) collection so the priest in question would give God a nice recommendation to save the person from this torment. The church was happy, because it got loads of money and could live in even posher houses and the parishioners were happy because they'd not bothered to please God during their lives yet had got the priest to put in a good word (and they couldn't spend their cash when they were dead anyway). So the church happily let people go on believing this sort of thing.
But what does the Bible teach of hell and the grave?
There are more than one word used in the Bible translated as hell. The one which most fits the above description is Gehenna. This is the one associated with fire and torment. The thing is that Gehenna was a place just outside Jerusalem. Basically it was the communal rubbish dump, but in order to prevent disease spreading it was kept permanently burning. The reason why this was associated with death and punishment was because the bodies of criminals where cast their so they couldn't have a proper burial.
Most references to hell simply mean the grave. A place where a body goes when it dies. Just to highlight how different the Biblical concept of hell is to the above, Jonah records that he spend 3 days and 3 nights in hell, meaning the belly of the great fish. Now you can't get much more different to fires and brimstone than a fishes belly!
The tomb that Jesus was laid in was also refered to as hell. In this case it was a simple tomb carved out of rock.
In simple terms hell is the grave, where those who have died wait for the coming of Christ and a glorious resurrection.
What happens to us when we die?
Why was hell such a popular teaching?
What happens to our bodies on resurrection?