mordinvasnormandy - Jesus and his followers have been mocked and despised for centuries. I expect nothing less on a forum like this which attracts mockery and scorn for anyone who stands up to share the biblical accounts of what Jesus taught and the Gospel accounts.
I suppose firefighters who carry people from burning buildings ‘get off’ on it too?
And lifeboat rescue workers who pull people out of the sea?
How about paramedics who give life saving first aid? Doctors, nurses, surgeons, ambulance crew who work tirelessly to save the dying?
How about all the worldwide Emergency Relief Aid charities? Are we all just ‘getting off’ on trying to save people from suffering and death?
There is so so much importance in the world on saving people from physical death. All these life saving services, professions and individual heroes who’s passion is to save people from dying. Physical death is all around us everyday. Probably the greatest humans efforts globally are geared around trying to save lives and extend them due to compassionate concern.
Jesus taught there is a second (spiritual) death. This is much worse. It is what so many of us Christians are trying to warn our loved ones about and even total strangers, as we don’t want anyone to end up there. Jesus’s warnings about hell are so dire and scary because it is a terrifying diabolical place! The physical body dies and decomposes but the soul is eternal, it is going one of two places after death.
There are many bible verses recording Jesus teachings on heaven and hell.
Judge me all you like, only judge Jesus’s own words for yourself and chose whether to believe them or reject them.
For those who are interested in what Jesus taught, hell cannot be easily dismissed. In fact, no other biblical figure speaks about hell more often than Jesus Christ.
As the one who was God in human flesh, no one knows more about hell than Jesus. We can look at the different terms and images Jesus uses to describe hell, and explore what he actually says about it.
The two most common words for hell are hades and gehēnna. Hades was the Greek word for the realm of the dead, but Jesus uses it more specifically to refer to a place of torment (Luke 16:23), a place that is the opposite of heaven (Matt 11:23). Originally gehēnna referred to Hinnom Valley south of Jerusalem, where centuries earlier child sacrifice was practiced (2 Kings 23:10; Jeremiah 7:32). By the time of Jesus, gehēnna was a picture of hell, such that Jesus warns "fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell [gehēnna]" (Matthew 10:28).
Fire Imagery
Jesus often combines this word with fire, a very common image of hell. As such it communicates the horror of the place, as in Matthew 5:22 when he warns "whoever says, 'You fool!' will be liable to the hell [gehēnna] of fire."
Darkness Imagery
Another common picture of hell is darkness. Jesus warns that those who refuse to enter the kingdom of God by repentance and faith "will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matt 8:12).
Jesus makes it very very clear we have one life here on earth in physical bodies to make our choices, about how we live and what we believe. It is up to us once we have heard about Jesus to chose for ourselves - is He Lord and Saviour? Or a madman, liar or demon? There is no scope in his teaching to pass him off as ‘ just a great teacher’, the late great CS Lewis said it best:
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”