17th May 2009

Speaker: Bob Jones

Text: Mark 9.33-50

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would strongly be tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations... There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.'

- C. S. Lewis,The Weight of Glory

Jesus' warnings about hell were meant to shake his hearers out of their moral laziness. They [the religious] were thinking, 'The Gentiles [non-religious] will burn in hell.'

Jesus turned it around, 'you will suffer in an awful place like Gehenna [Jerusalem garbage dump] if you live in a way that causes other people to stumble through your bad example...' -Ralph Martin New Testament scholar

'The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. '-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

The fourth part in our series: Choice Not Chance: Heaven and Hell & Why We Need Them

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