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Mark 4:38 (New American Standard Bible)
Luke 9:55-56 (New American Standard Bible)
Romans 8:18 (New American Standard Bible)
Most people are familiar with the old 'three tier' idea of the world: we live on the Earth; God lives in Heaven, above the clouds; and Satan lives in Hell, in the ground beneath our feet. Unfortunately, this picture belongs to the Middle Ages more than it does to Biblical times.
The Biblical writers, in common with much of the ancient world, recognised a basic distinction (but also a basic connection) between earthly things and heavenly things: together, they make up all of creation.
Which is why the author of Genesis says that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (1), when he means that God created everything.
The same basic understanding can be seen in the Greek myths, where all the gods we are familiar with are descended from the union of Ouranos ('heaven' or 'sky' – we know him better as Uranus) and Gaia ('Mother Earth'). And in Ancient Egypt you had the same pairing with the sexes reversed: Geb (the male main deity of the earth), whose consort was Nut (the female sky).
The world view of the Biblical writers is entirely consistent on this subject. In the Bible, as with other ancient literature, there are two fundamental aspects of reality: Heaven and Earth, the spiritual and the physical.
It is this context which gives significance to the story in Genesis about the creation of the human race.
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (2)
The Hebrew makes the connections even clearer: the word for 'man' (as in human) is 'adam' – the name of the first man; the word for 'ground' from which the adam is taken (and to which he will return (3))is 'adamah'.
The human race, uniquely in all creation, is a combination of the physical (the dust of the ground) and the spiritual (the breath of God, the breath of life). This combination defines us. This is why our destiny is not to be disembodied spirits floating around with etherial harps, but as spirits in resurrected bodies inhabiting a new Earth.
In Hebrew 'ruach' can be 'wind' or 'breath' or 'spirit' (either God's or man's); the Greek 'pneuma' has the same range of meaning.
In the Old Testament, the grave ('Sheol') is the place of the dead. It is sometimes translated as 'Hell' or 'death'. It is a dark, shadowy place, where nothing much happens and nothing much can happen – certainly not torment. And torment would not be appropriate in any case: both the righteous and the unrighteous go there.
If you think of Sheol as being the grave, in quite a modern sense, you won't go far wrong. Even today, people talk about the dead 'sleeping in the ground' when there is actually no suggestion that they are doing anything other than slowly decaying. ('Sleeping with the fishes' is a familiar maritime equivalent.) Sheol is under the ground because that is literally where the dead bodies were put.
So Sheol is about as unlike the traditional Hell as it is possible to get. Satan, who is not a dead person, has nothing to do with the place: he can be found, with the other spiritual beings, in Heaven. At least, when the angels 'present themselves before the Lord' (4), Satan comes with them. He has come 'from roaming throughout the earth' (5)
In the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament in common use in Jesus' day) 'hades' occurs over 100 times, most of them translating the Hebrew 'Sheol'. In Homer, 'Hades' is the name of the god of the underworld; in much of the rest of Greek literature, Hades is the place where the dead go.
There are three main words used in the New Testament: 'hades' (the underworld, the place of the dead); 'abyssos' (the pit, the abyss); and 'gehenna' (the rubbish dump). In one place (Ephesians 4:9) we get 'katoteros' (lower), which might be a reference to the underworld, or perhaps simply a reference to this world as lower than Heaven.
The usual word used by Greek speakers in new Testament days for the place where the dead go was 'hades'. In the period between the old and New Testaments, the idea of the immortality of the soul was introduced, and this changed the concept of hades from the resting place of all to the pleace where the ungodly remain while the godly enter some form of heavenly blessedness.
This was a ongoing theological battle in the time of Jesus. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the body and eternal torment of the wicked, the Saducees remained faithful to the Old Testament and believed in neither. Jesus was not afraid to voice an opinion on difficut subjects, so it is very odd that He had nothing to say about this important debate. Or it would be odd, if He sided clearly with one side or the other, as most Evangelicals believe. But if he believed both sides were wrong – the Saducees for denying the resurrection, the Pharisees for believing in eternal torment – then His reluctance to side with one group or the other in this debate makes perfect sense.
So hades is the place that dead people go. In contrast, abyssos is primarily the place of demons. When Jesus encounters the Gerasene demoniac (6) the demons beg to be sent into the 'abysson'.
The other main word for 'Hell' is 'Gehenna', which is the name of a place: it is the Valley of Hinnom, immediately to the South-West of Jerusalem (ge'hinnom in Hebrew) where the city's rubbish was dumped and burned. The fire there never went out because people were always bringing new rubbish to be burned.
Just as 'eternal' is not always about time without end, so 'destruction' is not always about totally ceasing to exist. We have already made to point that words have to be understood in context, and the Biblical writers were as sophisticated in their use of language as we are today. They frequently used words in a non-literal way.
So 'destruction' in the Bible has as wide a range of meaning as it does today – like when a football supporter says after a match, "We totally destroyed them!" and means that we scored a couple of goals more than the other team.
In Mark 4, the disciples are in a boat with Jesus and a storm is raging. In terror, they cry out, "Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?" (7) In this context, they clearly mean (as the NIV shows, along with many other translations) they are afraid of drowning.
The word used in this passage is 'apoleia', which is the main term for destruction used in the New Testament, occurring over 100 times.
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