Program transcript …
Well, good morning everybody, glad to have you with me this morning here at the Digital Cathedral. It’s a wonderful Easter Sunday morning, I’m hoping that you’re having a great resurrection day to spend it with some family or believers and get to celebrate the resurrected Jesus Christ. I’m not going to do a typical resurrection message this morning, although what we’re talking about in this series on the illusion of hell should bring a lot of resurrection to our life every day and everyday living.
So we’re going to delve just a little bit deeper and go just a little bit further in this third part on hell’s illusion. Now, I hope up to this point through the first two teachings that you’ve learned a couple of things. First thing that we learned the first week is that you and I have come by this deeply ingrained idea of hell because it was the linchpin of the only two theological streams that you and I were acquainted with.
All of us that are watching, 99.9% of everybody comes through either a Calvinistic theological stream or an Armenian theological stream, both of which have the centerpiece, the idea that if you don’t do what you need to do according to whatever that theological stream and that branch of the theological stream dictates as necessary, that you will spend an eternity consciously tormented in hell. And we heard that over and over and over and over all of our lives, if not directly taught. Because I think in the latter years, I don’t know too many pastors that really actually spent an entire message or series teaching on it, but it was always intimated that if you don’t pray the prayer, if you don’t jump through the hoops, if you don’t do what needs to be done, you’re facing an eternal consequence of torture in literal fire.
So I wanted to just cement down in that first teaching, I hope you’ve learned that you shouldn’t feel bad believing this because that’s all there was to believe. That’s the only way that we knew to come. And we didn’t question it.
We didn’t doubt it. We didn’t study it out for ourselves. We were just brainwashed and made continually fearful if we didn’t do the right things.
Now I think that it’s pretty ironic. This is very ironic to me, that the world has no idea about the love of God. You talk to 15 people down at the mall, the local mall, and ask them to tell you about the unconditional love of God.
They have absolutely no idea about it. They could not put it in good terms. And yet I’ll guarantee that all 15 people that you talk to have a concept that has been imparted by the church to our culture on what this message of hell is all about, which is really a shame.
It tells us how perverted the message has become that the church has sown into our culture to where we know nothing culturally about the love of God, but we have a pretty good idea that if we aren’t good people, at least, that’s probably what you’d hear from a lot of people at the mall, that if you’re not a good guy, if you do more bad, if your bad outweighs the good, that you’re going to be in a lot of trouble with God. So they do have a concept of hell, but not much of the love of God. So I hope the first thing that you’ve learned from that first teaching was that this idea has been deeply ingrained into you.
It’s all you were taught. It’s all you knew, because that’s all the pastor knew. That’s all his pastor knew.
That’s all the school that he went to knew. Those were the streams that we came through. So we came by it rightfully.
That’s what I want to say. It was pushed into us rightfully, and we all bought it hook, line, and sinker. Second thing I hope that you learn from last week is that the word hell is not in the Bible.
It’s a mistranslation that was brought into the Latin Vulgate, which was the official Bible of the Catholic Church for years and years. The Latin Vulgate took the words sheol from the Old Testament, which means simply grave. It took Hades from the New Testament, which coincides with sheol from the old.
It’s a place of burial. It’s the home of the dead. It took Hades, Gehenna, and Tartarus and mistranslated it and pulled a word out of mythology, actually Norse mythology began with the word hell, and the translator of the Vulgate, St. Jerome, pulled that word out of mythology and assigned hell, which is, there’s no Greek or Hebrew word hell.
He pulled it out of mythology, assigned the place of the dead or the Gehenna, and made that into a place of eternal conscious torment. Tertullian is actually the one that adopted it before Jerome. Tertullian adopted it, and then later on, Tertullian made it, let me just say this, Tertullian made hell a place of conscious torment for the wicked, for the wicked.
Now a couple of centuries later, Augustine extended the idea of hell to non-Christians. So it started with just the place of torment of wicked, then Augustine, St. Augustine brought it into the place to where if you weren’t a Christian, that would also be, if you weren’t a convert, that would also be your eternal dwelling place. Now it’s really interesting how modern Protestant evangelicalism, how the evangelical church tries to distance itself from the teachings of the Catholic church.
I think we’ve all had this idea, if you’re an evangelical Protestant, that Catholics really aren’t Christians anyway. They have this thing for Mary, they talk to dead saints, they do all this stuff. So when the evangelical Christianized, Catholics aren’t even Christians, and yet so much of evangelical theology came out of the councils, came out of the doctrines and the creeds that were established by the early Roman Catholic and Latin church.
And we have considered them orthodox. Now the word orthodox, let me just define that for you, orthodox is defined as conforming to an established doctrine. And so mainstream Christianity, the church that you and I grew up in, wanted you to think that its doctrines have always been this harmonious consensus that everybody has accepted down through the ages, from the very beginning, the inception of the church, there were accepted doctrines that were brought right up till today and everybody believed the same thing because it was orthodox.
So that if you oppose what has been considered orthodox, which really wasn’t the case, if you oppose what is considered orthodox, you’re going against 2,000 years of those in the right following what the spirit of God taught them as absolute truth. But such is not the case, especially in this doctrine of hell. I’m just going to stick on that since that’s the series we’re in.
That’s not the case. In the case of hell, if you question it, you’re supposedly opposing centuries of established truth, and that’s just not so. Eternal conscious torment was not widely held by the first, listen, first five centuries.
That’s 500 years. It was not embraced by Paul. It was not embraced by church fathers like Clement, Alexandra, Gregory, Origen, and the list could go on and on and on for the first 500 years.
This was not an established doctrine. So when we’ve been led to believe that all of these things, these things that we believe are just orthodox, I mean, they’ve always been accepted. They’ve always been truth.
They were revealed as truth in that if we go against it, then we’re going against all this established doctrine from history, and that’s just not so. Hell as a place of eternal conscious torment is actually an invention of the Roman Catholic Church, and then writers came along like Dante with Dante’s Inferno, John Milton, Paradise Lost affirmed it and brought literature and plays that further ingrained into the psyche of people that this thing of hell was actually true. It was St. Jerome who translated hell into the Latin Vulgate, which was the main resource for the King James Bible in 16, 16 or four was completed in 1611.
The King James Bible, in case you didn’t know it, was, was translated by 47 Church of England, which are Catholic light Church of England bishops. And the main source of, of, uh, resource of, of translating the King James version of the Bible was the Latin Vulgate. So a lot of the, the, the heirs of the Latin Vulgate translated over into the King James Bible earlier.
As I said a couple of minutes ago, Tertullian in Augustine developed the idea out of mythology from which the word hell originates. And that word then was imposed on the mistranslation of three Greek words, Hades, Gahanna and Tartarus. And so when you read the King James Bible or you read the Latin Vulgate, where you see Gahanna or Hades, or in the Old Testament, Sheol, sometimes it will say Hades, sometimes hell, sometimes Sheol, sometimes hell.
But what, what the translators did was to take those three words and impose a wrong translation, making it this mythological word called hell. So we have the mistranslation, not only of, uh, Sheol, Hades, Gahanna and Tartarus, we also have three other words and one concept that form what I’m going to call the building blocks of this doctrine called hell. And none of these three definitions that I’m going to work through today and next week, none of these three definitions or the one concept are found in the teaching of Jesus to the Jews or Paul to the Gentiles.
And so these four form what we’re going to call the building blocks of our belief in eternal conscious torment. And the three words that have been jerked around in the one concept that has been totally installed, instigated, developed by man. The three words are Ion, Gahanna fire, Apollo me, and the concept of free will.
So if you can just grasp the Greek of these three words, Ion, Gahanna fire, and Apollo me, uh, and then we’re going to get to the concept of free will. Those four things are the, are the building blocks of this doctrine of hell. And these, these words have been hammered.
The translations have been absolutely hammered by the Latin Vulgate and the King James version. Now, if you come to some of the more modern translations, uh, and of course, uh, the literal translations like Young’s literal, uh, or the concordant literal, they, they, they get the words plugged in correctly. But when you move back to what was the mainstay Bible in our day for, for generations was the King James.
Uh, you find that these definitions have been totally blown, have been totally mistranslated, but because nobody told us and we didn’t have enough sense to study it out, we didn’t know how to study it out for ourselves. We just grabbed what we were told and what we heard week after week after week after week until it was so deeply ingrained in us that when somebody comes and says, wait a minute, let’s examine this. Let’s look at this.
I think we, we have, have some error here, some mistranslation we’re looked on as being some kind of false teacher or heretic. When in fact, we’re just trying to get to the truth. The spirit of truth is active today.
In case you haven’t found it out yet. The spirit of truth is active today in the hearts of the people, all kinds of people, regular people like you and me, and he’s shining light on error to lead people into freedom that they’ve never known before. So we need to be like the brains in Acts chapter 17 and verse 11, where it says they searched the scriptures daily to see whether these things are so.
Now let me say this about searching the scriptures. Searching the scriptures is far more than taking a translation like the King James version of the Bible and reading it and gobbling it all up and saying, well, this, this, I I’m studying, I’m studying scripture. When you do that, what you’re going to get is the skewed mistranslation in the King James or in any translation you need.
You need to do some, some homework. You need to do some research. You need to get yourself.
Let me just give you a couple of suggestions. First of all, you need to get you a good literal translation like Young’s or the concordant. I mentioned Young’s literal translation or concordant.
Those are good ones. Second thing is you need to get away from the Strong’s concordance. Get a good one like Young’s literal or the Bollinger concordance on New Testament words.
Get rid of the Strong’s concordance. I’ll tell you why. The Strong’s concordance is keyed to the King James version of the Bible, right? There again, Strong’s concordance has been the mainstay of concordance.
It’s been a go-to concordance all of my life. But I’m telling you, the Strong’s concordance made their bread and butter, sold millions of concordances by bringing the definition of the words in a favorable fashion to the way that the King James version translated. It is the concordance of the King James version of the Bible.
So if the King James mistranslates a word, the Strong’s concordance is going to affirm that and is going to make you think that what is in the King James is actually literally true. So you need to get a good Bible, a literal translation, a good concordance, a dictionary, good Bible dictionary. Spend a lot of time.
Have some patience. And just work at it slowly. So we’re going to look at one word today.
We’re going to look at one word. I want to spend the entire teaching on one word. The first word of these four building blocks that have propped up and have formed this doctrine of hell that you and I have bought into.
We have believed it. It has been ingrained into us. We had no idea.
I had no idea until a few years ago that the word hell was not in the Bible. I didn’t. I was a pastor, ordained, advanced degrees.
I didn’t know that. I kind of picked up on Gehenna and Hades. But I just thought that was hell.
So we’re going to look at three words and one concept. I’m only going to cover one word this week. Next week I’ll hit the other three words and the concept that has formed these building blocks upon which we have formulated this doctrine of hell that most Christians believe in.
Most Christians believe in hell because they’ve read a verse here. They’ve read a verse there. That seems at first glance to support this concept of without end.
It supports this idea of eternal, everlasting punishment in a place called hell. So I want to introduce these four to you so that when we go deeper into them in the weeks that are ahead, and I’m only going to do, I’ll do six messages in this series. I’ve decided I can cut this off at six.
But at some point when we go back and we make reference to these words, I want to, in this series, give you the foundation so that when we come back and talk about them, you’ll have something that you’re able to draw on. Fair enough? So let me just introduce one of the four, one of the three words, and I’ll get to the other three words and the concept next week that form the building block of hell through a simple misunderstanding of words. Now, the first word that I’m going to give you is the one that has been mistranslated to where when we read it in the King James or sometimes in the New King James, although the New King James did straighten some of it out, but it’s a word that we look at and it has been translated as everlasting or eternal or without end.
All right? Now, let me just tell you this. In the Greek, there is no such word that would correlate to the English eternal or everlasting. There’s no such word.
The word that has been translated into that is the Greek word ion. It’s spelled A-I-O-N. Ionious is the adjective form of the noun aion.
We get the English word eon from the Greek word ion. All right? So when you think in terms of eon, do you think in terms of everlasting and eternal or when you say eons of time, do you think that there’s indeterminate, but there’s a start and there’s a finish to it? Now, depending on the context of the verse, ion can mean a period of time that never ends, forever and eternal, or depending on the verse, the context, it can be a period of time that begins and ends. So the word aion, A-I-O-N, the Greek word ion either means everlasting or it means an age.
And let me just say it again. There is no Greek word like the English word eternal or forever. So ion depends on the subject for its longevity.
It depends on the subject that it’s attached to. For example, in 2 Peter chapter 3 and verse 8, it says that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years. So the one day ion for the Lord is a thousand years.
That’s the measurement of time. It’s not an eternal. There’s a time element to that ion.
So it’s set. The ion of a human life is 70, 80, 90, 100 years old. It’s indeterminate.
But the ion, the age, enduring, the life expectancy, there is a beginning and there is an end. Now let me demonstrate. Let me give you a couple of verses to show you how the meaning of ion varies depending on the context and the subject to which it is attached.
If you attach an ion to a human life, then it is an amount of time. It is an indeterminate amount of time depending on the longevity of the person’s life. If we use ion in relation to God who has no beginning and no end, then it means eternal and without end.
You got it? So ion in itself does not mean eternal. So let me just give you a couple of examples. I hope I haven’t lost you so far.
1 Timothy 1 … 1 Timothy 1 and verse 7 says this … We’re going to look at the subject of this … 1 Timothy 1 and verse 17 … It says, “Now to the king eternal, to the king ion, immortal, invisible to God who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever.” And the words “forever” and “ever” are the words aion. Now since the subject of this verse is God, then the aion is considered without end.
It is eternal. Not because of the strength of the word ion, but because of the subject that it’s related to. It’s like saying, I could eat ice cream forever.
Well, the fact is you’re not going to eat ice cream forever. Sometime you’re going to have a hamburger. You’re going to have a hot dog.
You’re going to have pork chop, right? But we understand when you say, I could just eat ice cream forever. I understand what you’re talking about. You’re talking about you could eat ice cream until you were full, but there’ll be a time that you’re not going to eat ice cream.
You’re going to stop eating ice cream. So that’s a temporary sense. And that’s what we get in Matthew chapter 24.
Do you understand what I’m saying in 1 Timothy 1 verse 17? It’s speaking about God. God alone who is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. And the words ion, ion after ion.
It is without end, right? Because it’s tied to the subject of God. Now watch over in Matthew chapter 24 in verse 3. Matthew chapter 24 in verse 3. Excuse me. It says, Now as he sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately and saying, Tell us when will all of these things be and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age.
Now that word age in the Greek is the word ion. A-I-O-N. Now you can see from that verse in Matthew chapter 24 in verse 3, he said, What is the end of the ion? So he’s correctly interpreting it as an age that at some point will come to an end.
It’s not particularly a set amount of time. It is an indeterminate amount of time. And they were asking Jesus, When will the end of the ion come? So in that context, we see that ion is age enduring.
It has a beginning. It has an end. Where when the subject is referring to God who has himself no end, then ion is a description of the subject.
And that’s what ion does. It depends on what it is relating to. All right.
Are we together? Now let me give you another example. 2 Peter chapter 2. And let’s look at how the interpreters of the King James and the New King James didn’t pick up on it. Let’s see how they misinterpreted it.
2 Peter chapter 2 and verse 17. I’m not concerned about the subject here. I just want you to see how the word is used.
The verse is talking about false teachers, but forget what the subject is. I want you to see how the word ion is used. 2 Peter chapter 2 verse 17.
Speaking about false teachers, he said they are wells without water. They’re clouds carried by a tempest for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness. And the New King James says forever.
Now there again, the word is ion. Now let’s look at what the subject of this is. The subject is false teachers who are going to be held accountable or reserved in darkness.
He said they’re like wells without water. They’re clouds with no rain. He said what they’re doing is, according to the New King James or the King James, they’ll be held in darkness forever.
Now the word is ion. Now here’s how the Young’s literal translation, I want you to see when you get a literal translation, how it changes into a correct understanding of how ion is used. Young’s literal says they are wells without water and clouds by a tempest driven to whom the thick doom of the darkness will last to the age until the age has been kept.
So what is Young’s literal? Young’s literal puts it in an entirely different light. It says that the darkness that they are in will come to an end at the end of the age. Whereas the King James says the darkness that they are in, it will last forever.
Now that’s an entirely different meaning there. So we looked at how it’s used right, how it’s used wrong. Now let me give you one verse of Scripture where it’s brought together, where in one part of the verse it’s used correctly because it’s referring to God.
Another part of the verse it’s used incorrectly because it’s speaking to a subject that is of temporary existence. Matthew chapter 25 and verse 46. Matthew chapter 25 and verse 46.
All I’m trying to do is to lay down for you the necessity that when you read the Scripture and if you’re just picking up a King James Bible or New King James and you just think you’re studying the Scriptures because you’re reading what is there. I’m telling you, you’re going to get hoodwinked because you’re going to continue to ingrain mistranslations into your psyche, into your thinking which is going to develop a belief system that is incorrect. That’s why you need to study.
You need to get a literal translation, a good concordance, a Bible dictionary. You need to understand who Jesus was talking to. There’s a lot that goes into studying Scripture rather than just sitting down and reading it.
That’s not really studying it. All right, watch this. Matthew chapter 25 verse 46.
Now watch. In part of the verse, aion is used correctly. Part of the verse it’s not used correctly.
But the translators in mistranslating it incorrectly always have a motive and that is to fit the doctrine of the church that they were translating for. In the case of the Latin Vulgate it was the Catholic Church. In the case of the King James Version it was the Church of England which is a Catholic lay.
But it’s certainly not evangelical slanted or true biblical slanted interpretation. All right, so let’s read this. Matthew chapter 25 in verse 46.
Let me just turn one page over here. Matthew chapter 25 in verse 46. Watch.
And these will go away into everlasting. The word is ion. And these will go away into ionian punishment but the righteous into eternal.
And again, it’s aionion, a-ion, a-i-o-n … aionion life … So we’ve got two, we’ve got an everlasting and we have an eternal.
Now if you read this and you just are looking at your Bible it looks like they would be the same. That one is going away forever into a bad place and one is going away forever into a good place. Now, I’m not going to take time to get into it but the word for punishment in verse 46 is the word colossus.
Colossus means corrective discipline or a corrective punishment, right? Again, it throws an entirely different light when you say eternal punishment. It looks like this guy is entering into a punishment that is without end when in fact what he’s saying is there is “aionian corrective discipline” they will enter into. Do you understand the entire difference there? But when he talks about eternal life it is tied to God.
It is tied to the life of the Father. But the righteous into eternal life. The word life there is zoe. It’s the life of God so when it talks about everlasting and it ties it to God then the ionian or the iron means without end … not because of the strength of the iron, but because of the strength of the subject that is tied to.
Now let me just again read this verse as it should be. Here’s how it should read … “and these will go away into age-lasting effective punishment, but the righteous into eternal aion life. It’s the zoe life of God … the life of God … no end. Therefore, aion in the last part of the verse is without end … but the corrective discipline … the corrective discipline the first part of the verse is talking about … he uses aion, but the corrective discipline is a temporary measure … so it does not mean eternal.
Do you understand how … Can you see how this just skews the way that you read your Bible … so that you begin to read things into the Bible that are not there … why all of this confusion … why the confusion … why has aion been taken and used incorrectly? Why?
Why has it been changed … and why has it … in some of the newer translations … why has it been corrected … but in King James, it was not corrected?
We have to understand this? When the scripture was translated from the Septuagint, which was a Greek translation of (Hebrew) scriptures, that’s what the early church used. That was the Bible of the day … and I’m talking about the … you know … first 3-4 hundred years of the church … when it was translated into the Latin Vulgate the Catholic Bible in the 4th century, aion was used at the translators discretion … The translators made what aided the doctrine of the church so that it would read in favor of the doctrine of the church … and the doctrine of the Catholic Church was eternal conscious torment and purgatory. And why was that an advantageous doctrine … so that now you could pay money to get out of eternal conscious torment … or pay to have prayers made to get you out of that predicament … and so we interpret the scriptures to affirm what was being taught in the church … and the King James version of the Bible followed the suit of the Latin Vulgate. It took the words that we studied last week — sheol, hades, gehenna, tartarus — and it pulled the word from Greek mythology and slapped it on there … which was hell. And that word hell, out of Greek mythology, was a place of torment for the wicked. Then it uses aion, which means age-enduring or indeterminate time and made aion to mean everlasting or without end … and so, with the mistranslation of sheol, gehenna and hades as being this mythological place of punishment that mistranslating aion into eternal … I think that you can see how this doctrine of eternal conscious torment evolved. It doesn’t take rocket science. Right?
Don’t it … let me … let me show you … let me just show you 3 examples out of scripture. Alright. Matthew chapter 25 … I think we … read this … Just let … let me just look at it again.
Matthew chapter 25 and verse 6 … “and these will go away into everlasting punishment” … the word everlasting is the word aion. It does not mean eternal, without end … but when it’s translated everlasting, then we have the concept of “forever” because the word is used wrong. Right.
Hebrews chapter 6 … Just let me let me show you some more here … Hebrews chapter 6 and verse 2 … Hebrews chapter 6 and verse 2 … It says that “the doctrine of baptisms, of laying out of hands, of resurrection of dead and of eternal judgment” and I’m not going to concentrate on “judgment” … I just want you to see that eternal is the word aion.
So … why didn’t … Why didn’t the original translators just put age-enduring judgment? Why did they use the word eternal? Because they wanted to instill within the followers the doctrine of the church … that if you missed out, what faced you was eternal judgment.
Alright … let me give you another one … Matthew chapter 25 and verse 11 … Matthew chapter 25 and verse 11 … all of these words are translated aion or aionion. Alright … it means “age-enduring” … set age … the amount of years can vary … but it’s not “without end”. It is not “eternal” … It is not “everlasting”. You got it.
Alright … look at this Matthew chapter 25 and verse 41 “then he will say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed … into aionion fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.’ ” Now and again the word is not “everlasting, without end” … it is the word aion … it means “that amount of time” and I’m not going to get into the fire … or get into the fire … next week … of course second thessalonians Chapter 11
Second Thessalonians Chapter 11 … and I’m not dealing with all of the verse … I just want to take one word out of there … so that you’re you’re able to … see this and and pull apart the one word … Second Thessalonians chapter 1 and verse 9 … This is a big one … “these shall be punished with everlasting destro” … here again, it’s the word aion … “they shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his power.” Boy, what … what a mistranslation … that puts into our mind this word “everlasting destruction” from the presence of the Lord when you just read that out of a … out of a Bible that is mistranslated. The word “everlasting” … is the word aion … and it’s not connected to God. Therefore it’s not eternal. Listen … “these shall be punished with everlasting destruction.” Have you ever the … the destruction … and I can’t wait to get to that word “destruction” next week … because it’s one of the the pillars that this doctrine is built on … and it’s going to be something entirely different than what you’ve ever dreamed. If you’ve always thought of destruction as either annihilation … or it’s tied up that you’re … destroyed forever … that “destroyed” put you in the pit … you can’t get out … we’re gonna see what it really means. But what I wanted you to see … whether it’s everlasting punishment … eternal judgment … everlasting fire … everlasting destruction … those are all gross myths … translations … of the word aion … the word aion again means “age-abiding” … “age-enduring” … indeterminate amount of time … but it never means “eternal”, “everlasting” or “without end”. Those are serious mistranslations … and what those mistranslations have done to us … they have positioned us to where we can’t see the gospel … we can’t see the good news … we can’t see the finished work of a father that never fails. Right? And it’s caused stress in people. I’ve been dealing with one man … I’ve been dealing with a man that has had anxiety … I mean he’s had to get on meds because of his fear of being thrown into a torture chamber … and burned with fire forever. He feels like he just cannot do enough to make God happy … to please Him … and he’s filled with fear and anxiety … all because of this doctrine.
We’ve been manipulated … we’ve been controlled … by religion. I mean, honestly … it’s not been that long that the majority of people could not even read. It’s when you’re living in an age when people aren’t literate … all they can depend on is what the priest or the preacher tells them … and what the priests … or the preacher … tells him … it’s … it’s in the book … there it is … alright. Correctly understanding aion, the noun … and “aionios”, the adjective … it changes everything. It brings to light the truth that the Father corrects for an eon … but He does not torture eternally. Does God correct us? Absolutely! He’s a good father. Does He discipline us? Yes … but He’s not a torturer of His creation. In fact, look at this … Jeremiah chapter 19 … Let me just give you one verse out of the Old Testament … We could run a bunch of these … Let me just give you one … Jeremiah … and this is God’s heart … Jeremiah chapter 19 and verse 5 … Here’s what was said … Jeremiah chapter 19 and verse 5 … he says, “they have built an altar to the high places of Baal to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings, to Baal … and God says, “which I didn’t command this or speak it ….” He said that kind of thing … He finishes the verse … He said that kind of thing … offering people in fire … never even came into my mind.
If God wouldn’t think of burning as a sacrifice which you know what burning is a pretty quick destruction … and we’ve all seen probably some of those ISIS videos where they’ve set people on fire. It doesn’t take long to burn somebody to death. That’s destruction. If it wouldn’t even enter God’s mind to sacrifice anybody with fire … which is a vast destruction … how could it ever enter our minds that that would ever enter the Father’s mind … to eternally torture people in a fire chamber. You know what? We really missed the boat on this because … if our … if our original King James Version … if those translators … if those Church of England bishops had of translated the King James fully out of the Greek … and not relied and leaned on the Latin Vulgate so much … it’s very probable that this whole doctrine of eternal conscious torment would have never surfaced and found its way into our modern Bibles … and into our theology … and been ingrained in our thinking. If they had just taken the time to interpret it straight out of the Greek … instead of relying on what had already been done previously … out of the Vulgate. In fact, there are a lot of words in the Vulgate that are Latin translations … that there’s no Greek word for … like eternal, redemption, justification, punishment, torture, damnation. Those words were coined by Tertullian … They’re foreign to the Greek language … Then Augustine comes along … and makes them darker … and more punitive … and more heinous … in their expansive torture … to involve, not just the wicked that Tertullian was willing to throw into this mythological hell … Augustine comes along … and, if you ain’t Christian, you’re going there too. Then … ooh, this is really amazing … I gotta go down this rabbit trail … Then Augustine attaches the doctrine of inbred sin … that you’re born a Sinner … you’re born with it … in that endemic nature, headed for hell … if you don’t change. So now, he’s developed this doctrine of eternal conscious torment for Christians … and he says when you’re born over here you’re not a Christian … you’re not a son of God … you’re not a child of God … you’re headed for hell … unless you meet the stipulations … that your chance … Now do you understand why Catholics are in a rush to baptize the baby, as fast as they can go … because they believe that if that baby’s not baptized, it’s going to hell. Now it’s hell like called purgatory … but it’s going into a fire … Augustine spent the whole deal up so when if you don’t get that baby baptized, then it goes it goes to it goes to hell. What are you gonna do? You’re gonna pay money? You’re gonna … you’re gonna ask for prayers … you’re gonna have to … get that child out of there … as fast as you can go … So you mortgage the house … you’ll do anything you can do … to get that child. What the hell? You think you love that child that much … but God loves it less. This is such a perversion … such a perversion … We think that hell and damnation … and cast into a fiery pit … we’re there from the very beginning … that this is orthodox theology … and I’m telling you it’s not … because … for the first several generations, all the church carried was the message of reconciliation … All the early church carried was the message of the gospel of the crucifixion … the burial … the resurrection … the ascension of Jesus … the message of the inclusive love of God … And, so, what we find now, in 2019, is that the spirit of truth is taking us back to such a beautiful message of the simplicity of Jesus plus nothing … in their marvels that Jesus alone is the savior of the world … and people are rising up and they’re saying you know what … if this hell thing is really true … if all this stuff that’s been pushed down my throat all my life is really true … if God loses the majority of his creation … then we would have to say that good has been overcome by evil. Is that what your Bible says? No! Evil would be overcome by good. If, in fact, God loses the majority of his children the majority of creation to a fiery pit of torture, darkness has drowned out the light … and God loses the tug-of-war over his creation. God made a fix … here, in Romans Chapter 11 verse 32, here’s what he says … Romans 11:32 … the verse says that “God has counted all men and disobedience” … if you back up to verse 25 (Romans 11:2), it shows how He worked the Jews into a position of disobedience … then he worked the gentiles into a position of disobedience … so that by the time he gets to verse 32, it says that God put everybody in the same hopper … He said you’re all disobedient and you know why the rest of that verses … so that he could have mercy on all.
There’s none of us that can stand up and say, “Well, I did the right thing. I prayed the prayer. I signed the card. I’ve tithed. I’ve been a faithful person. I’ve done good deeds.” … and we just pull ourself above everybody else. God says “No! Wait a minute.” I’m putting you all in one category — disobedient … But He said the good news is I have mercy on all. Isn’t that good news? So love wins … Death, in every form, is swallowed up in victory.
So, now, we’re making progress … We’re making some progress … We’re three weeks into this … and we’ve seen that we’ve come by this doctrine, rightfully … because it was drilled into us.
We’ve seen the mistranslation of four words that meant “grave” or “garbage pit” and those 4 words were mistranslated words from mythology … pulled out … slapped on them … and said that’s hell … and then … this morning, we’ve seen that the word aion has been made going to being eternal as in no way end when, in fact, it’s an eon … It is age-abiding, age-enduring … an indeterminate time. So “conscious torment” comes out of mythology … “everlasting” or “eternal” comes out of a mistranslation of the word aion.
Now, can you see how this new scripture … so that when you read the good news, through those lens, the words that were purposely mistranslated enforce the doctrine that the church has held … and the Bible translators translated … to help a ferment the good news if you’d read it that way only comes when all the stipulations of the bad news are met.
The bad news … you’ve come into life a messed up Sinner … with a depraved nature … and you gotta get saved … to miss eternal punishment. The fact is, guys, there’s no hell in the Bible. There’s no Greek word for eternity as we define it. That’s the first word … that’s the first building block.
Now, next week … hope you’re resurrected on that one, this morning … I hope you walked out of the tomb, on this resurrection morning, with that one word.
Next Sunday morning, I want to look at at two more words … three more words … We’ll look at words … two … I’m sorry … two more … words two and three … and then I want to look at a concept that has been embedded to us. It’s not found in the Bible … but we’ve accepted that makes the four legs that this doctrine of hell stands on.
Have a wonderful day. I think that’s enough teaching for one morning. I know you got something that makes some comments. Share the message. Wednesday night … Wednesday night, I’m going to take the question that a lot of people have … and that is … What about the unpardonable sin? What about the sin that can never be forgiven … that Jesus made reference to? What’s that talking about … and is there such a thing? I want to deal with that Wednesday night … so we’ll see you then. Have a wonderful day. Next Sunday morning, we’ll continue on with #4 in Hell’s Illusion. God bless. We’ll catch you next time.