Strange, the people you meet at the rubbish dump. It seems that most people go there sooner or later.
Not that the dump is a place you would pick for a reunion. Its smelly fascination is best left to the scroungers who pick over the community’s unwanted leftovers. Despite modern landfill methods, a rubbish dump remains a place of pollution – a “dump” in every sense of the word.
Gehenna was the name of the ancient world’s most notorious dump. Located outside the walls of Jerusalem, it was first a valley named after a man’s son. Later the scene of idol worship and inhuman sacrifice, Gehenna became notorious for the foul smell of its accumulated garbage. So offensive was it that it became a picture of everlasting destruction. Gehenna, in English, is Hell, a word most people are familiar with.
Is there a Hell? Jesus Christ said there is, many times. Heaven wouldn’t be the same without one, for evil humans must be deposited somewhere after death. We each go, like Judas, to our “own place”, and it’s quite appropriate that we do. (Hitler would be unhappy in Heaven.)
Genghis Khan, Caesar Nero, and many lesser-known (and countless unknown) identities are its occupants. Hell was not created for mankind, and can only be entered by the rejection of Jesus Christ, and the free pardon he offers all of us.
None of us like to think much about Hell. Like the local rubbish dump, it’s “out of sight, out of mind.”
Yet we cannot accuse God of being unduly harsh in preparing such a place, for we have jails for lawbreakers – some of who are “never to be released” – and maximum-security institutions to protect us from the criminally insane.
God takes no pleasure in the death of sinners. Jesus came to save, not to condemn. What a tragedy that many neglect him, and in so doing, reject him.
“Hell? I couldn’t care less. At least I’ll have plenty of friends there!”
No doubt. But isn’t that what I said at the beginning?