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Last week I revealed how every person has a belief about Hell which triggers a variety of reactions. As such Hell is the unconscious assumption behind a million different things which are shaping our lives. The purpose of this series is to liberate each of us from our personal hell, but before that is possible, we need to be able to see what most people cannot see. Hell’s captivity has only 3 walls (identity, experience, and belief), but blindness keeps us clutching the bars. Disbelieving in Hell is not freedom from it, but merely another chamber for captives.

The image above is part of an experiment that most of us have participated in. A class is divided into two groups. Group A is told the image is of a young woman looking away, and group B is told the image is an old lady looking sad. When the two groups come together they argue as they are shown the exact same picture. Eventually, everyone concedes the image contains both, and we learn something from each others perspective. We also learn an important lesson on the preconditions which shape what we will see.

Church history, fictional books, Hollywood, and 80’s rock album art have established the preconditions for our beliefs about Hell. I wanted to do this series because this is among the first stops along the un-coaching journey when people write me with questions. If we are to truly see Hell and be liberated from it, we must learn to see both the old and young lady in the picture. When it comes to Church history and the endless distortions of the Gospel which have piled upon it, the deconstruction process can be full of deep seated fears which bubble to the surface. Hell has so highjacked the lives of religious people, that liberation from it seems sinful. The fundamentals of belief are so deeply set, that questioning them means questioning every person who ever taught us, and when comparing our ideas against all of history, we see ourselves as errant, and inevitably halt the freeing process.

I’ve seen it thousands of times. The Baptist, Mormon, Adventist, Jew, Muslim, or scientist on their first day where they cease to participate in the system feels rebellious, alienated, disconnected, and the self-doubt sets in. Just behind the self-doubt emerges the fear of Hell and that is when love and freedom take a back seat to institutional propaganda. I forewarn you in case your heart be awakened and you seek the freedom promised in the gospel. Below are the Bible verses which are foundational to understanding the Gospel.

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…” (Isaiah 61: 1-2)

For those of you who know this passage well enough to notice that I didn’t read the last half of the verse, I want to remind you that when Jesus started his ministry, he unrolled the scroll in the temple, and read these same verses, and stopped exactly where I did prior to the religious leaders running him out of town. (Luke 4:16-21)

Let Isaiah and Luke rewrite your understanding of the Gospel. This is among the most biblical verses of the éuaggelion or gospel (Good News). The good news is that God’s favor (not judgement) has come (as Jesus proclaimed) and it’s effect is to bind up the broken hearted, liberate captives, open prison doors, give sight to the blind, and offer liberty to the oppressed. In other words, God has freed us from our Hell.

Biblically, if Jesus is to be believed, then all of this is already fulfilled…which none of the religious minded surrounding him believed. Thus, they sought to destroy him because only the Messiah (anointed one) could do or even say such things. This belief that God has already done it, for each of us, apart from any world religion, without conversion, without ritual, with no contingency, is the only belief that can free us from our personal Hell. I say all of this up front now so that when I take a sledgehammer or a scalpel to your belief system, you have something to lean into, without which, you will get sucked right back into religious hell. I am not your deliverer. I am the concierge of the wasteland of our minds pointing you in the right direction.

Now that you have the only flotation device capable of keeping your head above the depths, I invite you to strap it on tight. The “you” whom you discover on the other side of this process, is whom you’ve always longed to be, but could never reach, despite a lifetime of trying things.

You are in good company. Freedom from Hell doesn’t mean no Hell. It means seeing Hell and stepping into freedom despite it.

The term for Hell in the Bible is called géenna (Gehenna). The term is used 13 times in the New Testament. If you do a concordance search, it’s important to realize that the term “Hell” is sometimes inserted in English when other Greek words are actually being used. Such as “Tartarów” from the Greek mythology of Tartarus (2 Peter 2:4). This happens numerous times when translators superimpose the word Hell over the Greek word Hades. Hades and Gehenna are not the same thing, and did not have the same connotation in the original context. There are also terms such as “outer darkness, gloomy darkness, or places of weeping and gnashing of teeth” that people immediately import a modern assumption of Hell. I’ve addressed some of these idioms in my first series which you can explore HERE.

For today, we will only touch upon the word Gehenna. This is Greek term for “The Valley of Hinnon” which was the city dump, right outside the walls of Jerusalem to the South. This is where all refuse was dumped and burned. It was where the marginalized who were not ceremonially clean were forced to live. Bandits, lepers, foreigners, criminals on the lam, and all those labeled as the city’s deplorable by the religious rule. Inside the walls was safety, provision, social safety nets, economic vitality and life. Outside the city walls was Gehenna, where the fire never goes out, the stench never goes away, and people are isolated, cast away, and left to survive like animals.

Gehenna is the biblical Hell. When Jesus uses the term Gehenna, he means this. When he uses other terms he is referring to something else. Gehenna means Hell is an immediate reality of exclusion and marginalization. Now, pay close attention. Many people take this local and contextual understanding of Hell and completely dismiss the existence of a bigger, darker, more dire, spiritual Hell because, because this word doesn’t point to it. That is a popular, but foolish overcorrection. While Gahenna may be the city dump, Jesus and the Bible have something more to say about Hell, and this is where the idioms and other terms begin to unearth the wider story. We’ll explore that next. Importing the wrong view of Hell into Jesus’ teachings about Gehenna, is religious manipulation, not liberation.

Ready to cut the strings?

For now, start by relearning Hell from its biblical context, and not from Dante’s Inferno, or the movie “Constantine” or an Iron Maiden album cover. Do not over or under appraise this. Resist the urge to put Hell into a binary of the local dump or an eternal destination. Hell, as I’ve illustrated is both he old and the young lady. Hell comprises all dimensions, and is more integrated into our way of thinking than we can appreciate. It’s impossible to avoid, and that is by design.

When Hell is the dump, the teachings of Jesus take on a new shape. This is important because it is actually the work of following Jesus’ words and teaching which lead us out of the Hellish captivity of 2000 years of church history. The Bible doesn’t say what preachers like to say it says, but it doesn’t mean everything we’ve learned is completely mistaken. Wisdom will lead us through and we must not break faith with our awakened heart. Our extraction from Hell has more to do with who we become as we are shaped by it. Dissociation from Hell is our most common state of Hell. We do not need eternal fire to torture us when we live completely consumed by distraction and dissociation of a surface level life. The masses of pseudonyms abounding represent Hell’s greatest chamber of captivity.

I invite you to go back and re-read the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5-8), or the gospels of Matthew, or Luke and see what changes for you with a culturally and biblically correct context of Gehenna. Yes, you were deceived by your religion…so was I. We must be prepared to trust Jesus’ words, because if we don’t, we will never liberate from the Hell we perpetuate for ourselves and others.

I invite you to write or contact me so we can discuss your version of Hell’s captivity.