Posted on 10/03/2012 10:14:57 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
There is a Hell and it is for the unbelievers, but it isn’t an eternal torment. Revelation talks about the Great White Throne Judgement in chapter 20 and there you find the dead are taken from Hell judged according to their works and them and Hell are cast into the Lake of Fire and destroyed. The Second Death is the death or destruction of the soul.
Here is a good read on this:
http://www.jeremyandchristine.com/articles/eternal.php
Judas is one of the most difficult persons to understand in the New Testament. I often wrestle with understanding his apparent transformation and sometimes doubt that a person that meets Jesus, lives with Jesus, spends three years with Jesus could ever be an enemy of Jesus.
Frank Schaffer exemplifies for me a modern day Judas. He apparently was exposed to scripture, Christian teachers and others who love the Lord. Yet, he rejects Jesus.
Without at least the possibility of Hell and damnation, how can there be any ultimate justice?
This is all the more reason people need to hear the truth, not drivel and wishes like this guy is peddling.
There are actually a string of questions wrapped up in this.
To start with, Hell, or Heaven for that matter, are not seriously at issue as physical places, because spiritual beings without physical form do not need physical places, except when living vicariously through others who are still physical.
But Hell or Heaven can most certainly be spiritual places, with spiritual rules. One theological description of the difference being based on the presence or absence of God.
That is, Hell for a spirit is a place where they would be without a spiritual connection to God.
And this can also work as a definition of life on Earth, when it is either hellish or heavenly, because it can be a subjective state of being for a man. That is, two people could share circumstances, that for one of them is hellish, as they have no connection with God, yet for another it is heavenly, despite pain and torment, because their connection with God is more important than their Earthly discomforts.
There is no great dispute in this with a physical conception of Heaven or Hell, because the physical world is just a small subset of the spiritual world.
“26 years of data involving 143,197 people in 67 countries.” That’s only a couple thousand people per country over 26 yrs...is that a very good number to use? Doesn’t sound like much to base this on.
Perhaps there isn’t any ultimate justice. Would that really matter?
This would have more of an impact if I believed such a place existed, of course.
RE: So Hitler is in heaven with God?
Those who don’t believe in Hell would claim that Hitler has been annihilated. HE NO LONGER EXISTS.
An ecological fallacy (or ecological inference fallacy, also referred to as the fallacy of division[1][2][3][4][5]) is a logical fallacy in the interpretation of statistical data in an ecological study, whereby inferences about the nature of individuals are based solely upon aggregate statistics collected for the group to which those individuals belong. In epidemiology, the ecological fallacy is committed when a correlation observed at the population level is assumed to apply at the individual level.[6] This fallacy assumes that individual members of a group have the average characteristics of the group at large. However, statistics that accurately describe group characteristics do not necessarily apply to individuals within that group. For a mathematical explanation of this see how variability of individuals is much greater than the variability of their mean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy
The lake of fire is where unbelievers will be, and yes, it is eternal.
“And if your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it from you; it is better for you to enter life crippled or lame, than having two hands or two feet, to be cast into the eternal fire,” (Matt. 18:8).
“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:46).
•”And these will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power,” (2 Thess. 1:9).
“And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also; and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever,” (Rev. 20:10).
I don’t believe in hell, but I think after we die, God isn’t really concerned with what we did here on earth for our 70 or 80 so years.
If there’s no ultimate justice, what’s the argument against just doing whatever you can get away with in this life? You won’t need to answer for it to anybody.
Don’t people already do that? I think it has more to do with the person and how God created him, than the potential for punishment.
Would you go out and commit murder and rape if it wasn’t illegal?
I have felt for a long time that heaven was eternity in God’s presence and that hell was eternity separated from God. Descriptions of heaven and hell are by people who had no real frame of reference - as none of us would have - to put into words the wonder, or horror, of what God had revealed to them. They did their best using images from their experiences most closely related to their “revelations”. I believe that someday we will find out that they were true, as far as they went - heaven will be much better than described and hell will be much worse.
As for who goes to hell...I would say that those who actively separated themselves from God’s love in their life should expect to be likewise separated in the afterlife.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.