Hell for people does not exist as commonly thought, Hell was made for the devil and his angles.
The place that people go to is better though of as Sheol, basically a vieled Hell where the full fury is not experenced, as we can’t take the full fury. This form of Hell is what we live in today, the pain tha we suffer. One of the markers of this vieled form of Hell is the pain of childbirth that women go through, it is a aspect of the devils realm that is made known to us for a short time.
If you look at Revelation it is clear that only 3 beings (the devil, the false prhohet and the beast) will be tormented for ever and ever (or ages of ages) the for the rest only the smoke of their torment will be for ever and ever (or ages of ages), whicb seems to indicate a difference.
Who decides what the Word Of God is? Isn’t it just another flawed humans thoughts or ideas? One can believe that pereon or not; sadly people are too eager to grasp something another says as the truth. Con men existed in all generations of man.
Not necessarily. If part of one’s Heavenly state is to have see everything perfectly as God sees it, then one will know fully why a loved one wasn’t there & how that absence is a result of the Perfect Justice and even that Perfect Love upon which everything hinges. A loved one will not be there because that loved one refused to be there. C.S. Lewis dealt with this in THE GREAT DIVORCE- that the Happiness of the Blessed can’t be held hostage by the Selfishness of the Damned. It’s also shown quite ruthlessly in the last scene of THE RAPTURE in Mimi Rogers’ last talk with her daughter at the Gates of Heaven.
I don’t buy that for a second. I especially don’t buy that those who are “damned” are necessarily selfish, or even bad people. Sincerely not believing in God (or sincerely believing in the wrong God) for instance, cannot be called selfish or immoral, nor can it be called a “refusal” to be there.
Are we talking about “The Damned” as defined by myself or by some religious tradition? I’m hopeful that millions of people who identified as unbelievers or other-religious in this life will look upon Lord Jesus in love & surrender as they realize that He indeed is Lord & Savior.
But I also think there will probably be some, including perhaps some who identify as Christians in this life, who will see Him with terror & hatred, because to fully embrace Him as Lord & Savior will then require them to admit they were wrong. And instead of throwing away what hold them back, they’ll cling to their Precioussss selves & shrivelled into little Gollums screeching “The Light! It burnses!” as they fade out of significance, hopefully for them, out of existence.
And as much as I’ve elaborated on that, I’ll say that it will be really great if EVERYONE- including people I really loathe like users/abusers of people & tyrants & child molesters- did melt in surrender before Lord Christ.
My response here threatens to get perilously off-topic, but: “realise that He indeed is Lord & Savior.” Savior from what?
It doesn’t seem like sins have anything to do with this - in your example people aren’t shriveling up because they’re too ‘dirty’ (though there’s certainly biblical precedent for that) - they’re shrivelling up because they don’t…lose their identity? (Surely you don’t mean that - losing one’s identity is death, even if a changeling appears in your place.) Rather you seem to think it just comes down to whether one bows face-to-the-floor or not. If you bow, you’re good; if you don’t, you’re fried, completely independent of what sins you do or don’t have. Be you an honest Christian or a horrible child molester, it’s all the same to God.
So - We should respect Jesus as Lord & Savior because he’s saving us from the consequences of not respecting him as Lord & Savior. Seems to me that he could get the same effects by just not requiring people to accept him as Lord & Savior. Well, aside from him having a lot fewer servants to Lord over, anyway.
Savior from our sins, certainly. And every person has some area of their life where they are not the best they could be. Yes, there will be a judgment for what God in the Bible calls sins. But even setting that aside, we each have some area of our life, however petty, where we fail to live up to what we know is right.
Savior from ourselves, also. And the self that will stand in the Presence of God/Christ and not melt in adoration is the toughest thing to save. It may be that humanity’s monsters will realize their monstrosity & want to be saved from that. If so, they may be easier to save that the self-assured “righteous” automonous souls who will have no other Gods but themselves. (I really doubt such monsters will be so repentant- I’m just using an extreme example.)
Also, I don’t see Heaven as some reward that God CAN give apart from Himself.
By that time, I believe that all will be in God/Jesus and God/Jesus will be in all.
Wanting to enjoy Eternal Life without Father God/Lord Jesus/Holy Spirit will be impossible as They ARE Eternal Life. YHWH/Jesus God will be the Light, the Food, the LifeBreath of Existence. Wanting Heaven without Him/Them will be like demanding He make other light, other food, other air just because you refuse to acknowledge Him. And if God made other light, food, air & another place for those who will not accept Him, then well… welcome to Hell.
I still find the idea of my self “melting” to be quite disturbing - most things that melt aren’t in any way the same thing afterwards. Death and dopplegangers, death and dopplegangers.
Anyway: regarding sin, the idea here is that people decide they don’t like being evil after all and request god to rewrite their hard drives to remove the evil inclinations and the feelings of guilt for past actions too? I guess that makes sense and sounds okay, as long as it’s voluntary. I’m not sure what this has to do with accepting God as “Lord”, though. Or why the mere lack of desire to accept somebody as “Lord” over you is the worst sin of all.
So the theory is that god is incapable of creating a world that is neither melted subservience to him, or Hell? What’s wrong with the current world we live in? Unless you’re suggesting that this world is hell, which sounds a mite extrabiblical to me (or at least it doesn’t resemble the content of the OP.)
Pick a name and stick with it, please. “God/Jesus”, “Father God/Lord Jesus/Holy Spirit”, “YHWH/Lord Jesus God”-I know know this deity you worship wears a lot of hats, but this just muddies the waters and makes a reasonable conversation next to impossible.
Savior from our sins? And who created the concept of “sin” in the first place?
What does this mean, exactly? What are my sins going to do to me, and how is it a sin not to believe in God withput any evidence?
So what? I’ve never understood why this is supposed to matter. Even if I accept th premise that everybody is a sinner (and this is is a religious belief, not an objective fact. I would actually dispute that all humans are “sinners,” or that moral “perfection” has any definition), I don’t see why petty misdemeanors really matter or why God can’t just ignore them and accept people regardless. After all, humans don’t require perfection of each other, so why would God be any less accepting than humans?
Respectfuully, this kind of talk is too poetic for me. I don’t know what it means. If God doesn’t want to melt anybody, he doesn’t have to. I don’t see how he can shift the blame to the victim.
This is too abstract for me to get any kind of a handle on. Religious people talk this way a lot, and it always just strikes me as gibberish. What does “life” even mean in this context, or “food,” or “light,” and why does it matter if God is “accepted?” Why does he care?
How does one knowif they should melt in surrender before Lord Christ, when it is just some other human’s idea or believe that what they believe as true? Isn’t God smart enough to put the truth in one’s mind?
I cannot accept the fact that People know what God wants because for centuries some people passed on the writings of some human’s word, are the word of a God, any more than the people who follow what Muhammad wrote that God wanted, and now are used by some radicals as truth. Why would a good loving father (or son in this case), approve of killing people who are also His children, even making someone like David, as His favorite to lead His people.
According to Genesis the wages of sin was death, no mention of an eternal soul suffering for all eternity. It is contradictory to what a loving father would do!
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A picture is worth a thousand words so no hell is not real if you cant see the words of the earth start with taking a long hair pushing it in at the center it makes a s then you will start to see the hairs make words then if you cant see the words of the earth if you have plastered walls feel the indentations and the walls spell words so the straight dope is there is no hell
Some churches (and here I mean specific congregations, not necessarily entire denominations) teach that the torment one undergoes in Hell is bodily; that the [del]victims[/del] inmates have glorified bodies like those of the redeemed in Heaven which do not age and can never perish, but can suffer eternal torture of burning and whipping and being eaten by worms, presumably for the [del]sick amusement[/del] [del]mastubatory pleasure[/del] greater glory of [del]the sadistic fuck they worship[/del] God. I can think of two specific ministers in the Church of God in Christ whom I have heard preach this; at least two are still active.
No, I DON’T like COGIC even a tiny bit. Why do you ask?
Is it too late into the thread to still ask a serious question?
I would like to know about when the transition to either Hel or Heaven became to be understood as “after you died”.
I think that most Christians believe their deceased loved ones to be in Heaven now. That they went there just after they died.
But this doesn’t seem to be the idea as described in the bible. It states there that it is decided ,who will go to Hell and who will go to Heaven, after the apocalypse. After Jesus’ return (or when the Messiah comes).
Is this idea, that the dead are in Heaven or Hell right now, sort of a continuation of the pre-Christian/Indo-European ideas about death?
Where when you died you either went to Hel (in the germanic meaning as the underworld, the place where the dead dwell) or, if you had been Good (as in died in battle) you would be taken straight to “a good place” like Walhalla or Sessrumnir.