More entertainment at the well of the mistaken

If any of you were curious enough to read Val's response to last night's post, I would like to clarify things for you.  Val, if you are still listening, I'm not so much directing this at you since your post answered for me exactly what I am dealing with in you.  I will be praying for you, you poor deluded dear.  I will also pray for any of those gullible enough to swallow the snippets of coherence you actually show.

For the rest of us, let us take a look at some of the major and many misinterpretations about the Word that Val's response contained.  In order of appearance, we start with the claim that no one goes to Hell, a claim posited from Gen. 3:19.  This is the "man is dust and to dust he shall return" verse.  What Val skips merrily past here is that God is talking to a pair of people who have just lost their glorified, immortal bodies they were created with because of their sin.  God is explaining the rules of their new mortal existence to them.  It has nothing to do with their spiritual future.

Second, the continuing adventures of the woman of Revelation 12.  When I said last night that I had no clue where she was going with this ( which is why I didn't bring any of it up in last night's post- I was too confused), I had no idea that the answer would be that SHE (Val) is this woman, who she believes will be (or she is, it's kinda hard to tell since Val keeps going from first to third person) a prophet who will bruise Satan with the truth.  (And we'll get to THAT sidelight later.)  Anyway, she claims to be the Prophet that Peter referenced in his sermon as being like Moses.  Even a cursory reading of the entire passage shows us that Peter believed Moses (and rightly so) was talking about the coming of Christ.  For someone who chides me more than once in her response as not looking at the whole story, I have to shake my head here.

Third, another example she gives trying to prove that no one goes to Hell is the verse where Christ, in prayer to His father, says that He had lost none of those given Him save the Son Of Perdition.  Val, Jesus was making SPECIFIC mention of His twelve Disciples, and the Son of Perdition was Judas Iscariot.  This is not a passage that you can generalize to fit your purposes.  Do you know the guys over at Wecanknow.com?

Fourth, Val would like to believe that she is the second coming of Elijah prophesied in Malachi 4.  Uh, Val, Jesus Himself says in Matt. 11:14 that this prophecy referred to John the Baptist.  I don't recall Him saying, "And next time around, Elijah will be reincarnated in..."

Finally, a pair of references used to show her authority as this Woman.  Jeremiah 31:22 mentions that " How long will you gad about, O you backsliding daughter? For the LORD has created a new thing in the earth—
A woman shall encompass a man.”  That is the NKJ translation, and Val says it means that she will have power over the man (Which is Satan).  The NIV translation swaps "encompass" for "return to", and adds the note that another possible translation would be "will protect"- either one far from Val's interpretation, which also misses the point that the passage is the end of an allegory having the unfaithful woman (Israel) returning to her Husband (God).  The other is a favorite of Val's- the idea she gleans from Gen 3:15 that she, as the Woman will "bruise Satan in the Heel of time."  OH, how many things are wrong here?!!?  For starters, the woman's ( Eve, not any coming woman prophet) OFFSPRING is the one who will battle with the serpent.  HE (not she) will crush his (the serpent's ) head while "you" (speaking to the serpent) will bruise HIS heel.  So let's see- the wrong woman; the woman's offspring, not the woman herself; the serpent does the bruising rather than getting bruised (although he might sustain theoretic bruises whilst getting his head mushed).

Like I said, I don't suspect that any of this will influence Val, as it is notoriously hard to convince a prophet they are wrong- Check 1 Kings 22 for a good example.  For the rest of you, consider this a PSA in the interests of those who want you to read and learn for yourself.

And now, for the other side...

I admit to being confused and bemused when a customer going by the handle of "val" seemingly responded to last night's "What Is Hell" post on the comments to Friday's Time Machine.  As I read the response, and the website He/she linked to, I can see how it made "perfect sense" to put it on Time Machine ( ;<0 ).  Here is the response:

val said...



I would like to invite you to read a special gift from the wilderness Rev 12:6...Not one child of God will be put in a hell fire no matter what their sins. It never entered the heart or mind of God to ever do such a thing and I prove it by the word of God at http://minigoodtale.wordpress.com. The true Gospel (Gospel means Good Tale) now delivered Rev 12:5, 13 sets all free as a witness.

  Yeah, just about as confusing on this website as well.  The gist of the website starts with the logical fallacy I show you here:

John 3:16 all will believe, each in their own order 1 Cor 15:23.



*Rom 14:11-12 For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God. 12 So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.


*1 John 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.


ALL WILL CONFESS! All will be cleansed from all unrighteousness each in their own order (Isa 1:18).




Get it? If at the coming of Christ every knee shall bow and every tongue confess, and confession merits salvation, then this final confession lets everyone into heaven.  Failing to take into account that, according to Revelation 22, by this time their confession falls on deaf ears:

10 Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near. 11 Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy.”


But building on this misconception, he/she totally verges off the original meaning of the scripture:

*Ps 89:46 How long, LORD? wilt thou hide thyself for ever? shall thy wrath burn like fire?.



God’s emotions are as a fire. Our emotions burn inside us also. All souls will be consumed by the word of God. Everyone will be very emotional when they are in front of the judgment seat of God. They will be in the hot seat. They will be devoured in Love, understanding, forgiveness and mercy because he has directed all of our lives Pro 16:9.

Because we are all going to heaven, the fire that the wicked are to be burned in is a fire of emotions.  Val, I hate to tell you, but treating the Word Of God as an allegory when it is meant to be interpreted literally is what got Harold Camping looking like an idiot.  Re-read- if indeed you read it- my original post on the subject.  I researched the the word meanings through Strong's concordance to see what I would find (rather than "finding" what I was looking for, as you appear to be doing).  God's word leaves absolutely no doubt on two points.  The first you are correct on- there is no condemnation and no second death for the Child Of God.  The second, in which you are sorely mistaken, is that some will alienate themselves from God and merit eternal damnation- a damnation that is called "the second death" and will include the fiery emotion you spoke of, but it will be righteous anger and not love, as well as physical and mental punishment beyond our capacity to understand.

Anyone can find a group of random and misapplied verses such as you have to make any twisted point they want.  As an example, I point out to you that you WILL NOT FIND A LIE in what Satan said to Eve in Genesis 3:4.  And in Matthew 4, he never misquoted scripture.  Do yourself a favor and research the subject of Hell and Eternal damnation, as I did.   Then perhaps it would behoove you to take a heartfelt look at Galatians 1:8:

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!

Or Rev.22:18:

18I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. 19And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.



God is indeed a God of Love.  That is why He sent His Son, a part of the totality that is Himself, and suffered Him to die on the cross for our sins.  If your theory is correct, then God intends to lower the bar and Christ died for NO REASON.  Jesus does not forgive our sins in the sense of, "you pushed me down in the playground, but that's okay";  He forgives them in the sense that HE PAID FOR THEM.  Thus, when an actual Child of God goes before the throne, God opens the ledger and finds the account marked paid.  God DOES NOT FORGIVE SINS AT THE JUDGEMENT SEAT, as you suggest; if you are a child of God, those sins were wiped away at Calvary.  And if you are a sinner at the end of time, you can bow all you want and Christ will say," 'I don't know you or where you come from. Away from me, all you evildoers!'" (Luke 13:27)

And the woman of Revelation 12 (which is expressly described as a sign, or allegory) is the Hebrew people, and the travails they will face after the Church is raptured;  what you were getting at, I haven't a clue.


(BTW, my friends:  "val" neither has a public blogger profile nor any attempt at one on his/her page.  Makes me wonder why he's/she's hiding under a basket.)

What is Hell?

Let me start off by defining this as a musing, not a "lesson"  or a "sermon."  The subject of what awaits the damned was brought to my curiosity this morning by my reading at the beginning of 2 Thessalonians, and with the recent discussion as to Hell's existence, I thought it wise to see what, if any evidence there was for a final damnation of utter annihilation.  I found none.

What I did find gave me a clearer- and curious- picture of the idea of Hell we might glean from the Bible.  I'm not going to put references in, other than to say that I was cross-checking words to Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, and if you want raw numbers, that is the place to go.  I recommend downloading E-Sword to help you in this and many other things (although this particular task I did low-tech).

First off, Hell is basically connected in the Greek to Hades and in Hebrew to Sheol.  There I found the base word had, among its uses, the concept of inquiring, demanding, even lusting.  As if Hell was a place designed to suck a sinner in, like a demonic black hole.  As I went on, I began to see how ironic that interpretation was.

Job gives us the concept of Hell being a place extreme from Heaven (11:8) as well as being linked to the almost-physical place called Destruction (26:6) which could be interpreted (by someone with a comic book mind) as the "death of no escape". 

In Jeremiah's description of the judgement in the Valley of Hinnom, we divine that is a result of the utter alienation of oneself from God through idolatry, human "logic", and pleasure seeking. (Chapter 19, if you will.)  It's attributes include the failure of human wisdom, the complete loss of dignity and hope, and utter desolation and despair, made a "hissing"- a mark of derision- by all who escape.

I found that Matthew's references to the outer darkness ( or "obscurity") meshed with a word he used for Hell which carried among its meanings the concept of "unseen".  The parable of the rich man and Lazarus gives us a Hades that is remote and cut off from Paradise; in the final analysis, it will also be cut off from sight.  Not surprising: if our reward is to involve the end of our tears, then it would seem to involve the cutting off of contact from that (or those) which made us cry- or would give us reason to mourn.

Unlike those who claim there is nothing but atomization for the damned soul, the Word gives us plenty of examples of physical punishment, all of which are prefaced with the phrase "everlasting" or "eternal".  Among them is the concept of eternal incarceration in 2 Peter 2, eternal punishment (translating to "infliction") in Matthew, and the lovely thought of "the worm dying not" and the never extinguished fire.  And significant here is the term "fire". 

The word commonly used for "fire" as relating to Hell (as opposed to the one for the common campfire) has a specific use in "lightning".  What does that mean for the damned?  Consider:  the run-of-the-mill blow torch hits around 2400 ° F.  The surface of the sun is in the 10-12,000 ° F range.  Lightning tips the scales at about 60,000 ° F.  In other words, there is a vast conceptual difference between Hell fire and earthly fire.

And before I get into the physicality of things, I want to step back to that word "everlasting".  Both it and "eternal" as used here carry the (possible ) interpretation of reaching both endlessly into the future AND into the past.  Is rejection of God a retroactive thing to beyond even creation and genesis?  A valid philosophical question, but I suspect a moot one to the damned.

And finally, I'd like to look at the description of Hell given by Paul in Romans 2:8-9, to wit:

8But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath,

9Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile;


Note two sets of two words in the description.  First, Indignation and Wrath.  When you look up the various words used elsewhere translated thus as well as the two specific words, you see that they are very nearly interchangeable; in fact each one is translated as the other word in other verses.  The specific for indignation has a strong tie (through the use of breathing in its extremity) to an anger that directs itself from God to the soul of the damned, in fact, the concept of immolation also ties in in a way that you could (facetiously) say that God was so mad at the soul He was "breathing fire".  The specific of wrath somewhat loses the soul/breath connotation but picks of more of an anger of the mind- an abhorrence so fierce that the root for such a passion gave rise to (the non-sexual meaning of) our word "orgy".  Thus this first part of the description deals with the mind and the soul of the damned.

The remaining pair are quite different.  Linked by meaning like indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish turn to the physical aspects.  (And if you haven't been making a list since I mentioned irony before, start taking notes.)  Tribulation comes from a root that connotes a pressure, or a crowding.  Anguish- and this is not the same word used for when a run of the mill person has anguish- is a combination of roots, combining to the concept of having a narrowed room to move.  Specifically, unlike other forms of the word that imply restraint being used to do the narrowing, this words specific narrowing is caused by the presence of surrounding obstacles, narrowing to the point of physical crushing.

Am I saying Hell is a literal or figurative black hole?  Though you might draw that from what I've found, it's not my point.  My points are these:

Hell is an actual place where actual sinner are body-and-soul punished.

Hell is as separated from Heaven and the eyes of the blessed as it can be.

Hell has no escape.

Hell is the consequence of alienation from God.

Hell is not annihilation; it is incarceration and punishment.

The scale of said punishment is beyond earthly comprehensions of pain and time.

The punishments will have spiritual, mental, AND physical aspects.


If those points sound a lot like a black hole, then here is yet another lesson learned from the evidences all around us (Romans 1:20: "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse") :  The bright and shiny molecules, the particles of light, escaping from the demanding clutches of the event horizon, whilst the others, turning from the light, are sentenced to an eternity of crushing, in a place where man's theories no longer apply, and are lost to sight forever.