If your hand makes you sin, cut it off! Better that you should be maimed but obtain eternal life, rather than keep both hands and go to hell [Gei-Hinnom], to unquenchable fire!*
As someone who doesn’t believe in hell, or in the kind of God who would send people there, what do I do with this word? Everything I love about Jesus is at odds with what seems to be this thinly-veiled threat of divine punishment.
Fortunately, there is so much more to the word translated as “hell.” Gei-Hinnom was a real place. In Jesus’s day, it served as Jerusalem’s dump, where the city’s trash was taken to be burned. For centuries before that, it was the site of ritual sacrifices, where people were burnt alive, to the deity Moloch. To me, it is apparent that those fires, however hellish, have nothing to do with God at all.
Instead of a threat, then, I hear Jesus pleading: Cut your losses! Better to forfeit what is already ruined than throw yourself into an ACTUAL DUMPSTER FIRE as a sacrifice to whatever not-God is trying to destroy you!
It doesn’t matter what the not-God is. Bad decisions become destructive spirals simply because we are too proud, or too silly, or too fearful to come clean. We throw good money after bad; we drink too much to drown the shame of drinking; we deal with our fear and hopelessness by retreating into cynicism; we lie to a loved one to hide the thing we ought not have done, doubling down on betraying their trust — digging the hole deeper and deeper, because coming up into the light feels unbearable.
But that is the call: Come into the light, deal with the consequences, however awful they may seem. Stop clinging to what is already lost so that you might be free. It’s terrifying, up until the moment you realize who is calling: the One who can heal all things.
There is no consequence so painful that God cannot heal you of its sting. There is no shame so great that it runs deeper than God’s love. We can be brave enough to cut our losses because we have so much more to live for.
–Erica Lloyd, Seekers Church
Questions for reflection:
- Are there any not-Gods are stoking fires in your life right now? What are they?
- What might you need to cut loose to be free?
