Trail Lessons - There is Life Under the Ice

These are some of the Scriptures which inspired the thoughts I recorded at the reservoir: 

Unveiling the Myth of Hell and Eternal Torment, Part 5

Part 5– Gehenna: Its Purpose in the Past and Future

Prior parts to this series about hell are as follows:

Part 1: A BriefBackdrop of My Journey

Part 2: The Hebrew WordSheol

Part 3: The Greek WordHades

Part 4: Gehenna: The Place Jesus Mentioned

In this part of the series, I will cover the following points:

--In the past, Gehenna was a place of death and burial
--What did the apostle Paul say about Gehenna?
--Was Gehenna ever a garbage dump?
--In the future, Gehenna will be a place of death and burial
--What does Gehenna look like today?

What did God’s chosen people, the Israelites, understand about Gehenna that seems totally neglected in Christian teachings today?  Let’s look at the Israeli prophets for answers and their revelation to us that Gehenna has been a place of swift judgment in the past and will also be again the future.

In the past, Gehenna (hell?) was a place of death and burial

Jeremiah, a prophet of Israel, was the son of the priest Hilkiah, the same priest who found the scrolls of the law and gave them to King Josiah.  (Hilkiah and King Josiah were mentioned in Part 4 of this “Myth of Hell” series.)  Through the prophet Jeremiah, God warned of the impending destruction to come upon Jerusalem and of the impending death and/or captivity and dispersion of the people for all the evils they had committed and for their unfaithfulness.   

The Eons Explained

In a previous post of a year and a half ago called God, The Savior of All Mankind, I mentioned the following words:

aiōn – Greek noun

aiōnios – Greek adjective

owlam – Hebrew noun

Those words have been translated “eternal”, “everlasting”, “forever” and various other ridiculous words in the majority of today’s English Bible translations. However, they truly mean no such thing. It has taken me a long time to get back to the subject of God being the Savior of all mankind and addressing the meaning of those words, but the day has finally arrived. Those two Greek words and one Hebrew word mistranslated into our English language have become the cause of great confusion and a foundation to the false belief that THE God of ALL things, YHWH, will doom a great majority of mankind to an eternal and terribly painful torment as a price to pay for not believing in His Son, Jesus Christ, during their earthly life.

God's Eonian Purpose - Chapter I

God’s Eonian Purpose was written by Adlai Loudy. The book is published by the Concordant Publishing Concern, 15570 Knochhaven Road, Santa Clarita, California 91350. The first edition was published in 1929, with a second edition printed in 1974, and a second printing in 1991.

Chapter I is titled “The Sacred Scriptures”.

In beginning this chapter, Loudy ventures to answer the question “Are the Scriptures of God or man?” and to address the question whether God truly inspired their writing or if they are merely collections of man’s own efforts.

“If they are simply a collection of man’s writings, without divine guidance, then they are no more reliable than fallible man. But if God wrote them, they must be true and we can depend on their admonitions and teachings, prophecies and promises.” (pg.9)

God's Eonian Purpose - Introduction

God’s Eonian Purpose was written by Adlai Loudy. The book is published by the Concordant Publishing Concern, 15570 Knochhaven Road, Santa Clarita, California 91350. The first edition was published in 1929, with a second edition printed in 1974, and a second printing in 1991.

The introduction to the book is a basically a foreword written by the author in October 1929 when the first edition was published. Loudy states in his first sentence that he will offer no apologies for the book. He calls it:

“…an earnest heart response to the vast number of appeals from truth-lovers to correlate and progressively present a concordantly constructive series of expositions unfolding God’s Eonian Purpose as revealed in the Scriptures. The work is designed for and will appeal to the thoughtful man or woman who has met difficulties in the study of the “Bible” according to the conventional ideas of Christendom. The controverted questions of creation, sin and evil, salvation, baptism, the new birth, death and hell, immortality, eternal torment, and others, have been dealt with frankly and clearly out of the spirit of love, energized by a strong conviction coming from a fresh concordant translation of the Sacred Scriptures conforming to a pattern of sound words at all times.”

Chapter Summaries on God's Eonian Purpose

In the year 2005 God began to take me on an incredible and deep journey into the depths of His character. That time of my life can be described as something extraordinarily similar to Neo’s decision regarding taking the blue or red pill in the movie The Matrix.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arcJksDgCOU

The following two links are the first two entries I posted on this blog when I first created it.

GOD, The Savior of All Mankind

I cannot remain silent any longer…

I cannot remain silent about all that God has been and continues to reveal to me because it might mean that my character and my Christian faith will be questioned or attacked by those who may disagree with what I proclaim. This life is not about me anyway, it is all about HIM, YHWH.

For too long I have lived as M.A. – Mary Ann who is Much Afraid of what man shall be doing to her. A few months ago God lovingly and firmly spoke to me and said that I was no longer to live as Much Afraid. He said that instead I was to live freely and securely in Him, abundantly and victoriously, as M.A. – Mary Ann, the Master’s Apprentice. He assured me that now I was to live life standing firm with Him as the verse in Hebrews 13:6 says: