Have you given much thought about your destination after death? On Judgement Day, Jesus will determine the place every person will spend eternity… either Heaven or hell! It’s a surprise to me that not many people today give much thought about dying… their minds are absorbed with the temporary ‘here-n-now,’ not the eternal ‘then-n-after’. Solomon, the writer of the Ecclesiastes said, “Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties. After all, everyone dies—so the living should take this to heart” (7:2).
 
The Bible teaches that Heaven is the place of Divine Promise, and hell is the place of Divine Punishment. It may surprise you to know that of the thirty-nine Books of the Old Testament not one says anything about hell. The first mention of hell came from the lips of Jesus. Early in the Book of Matthew, Jesus said… “If you curse someone, you are in danger of the fires of hell” (5:22) … And, two chapters later, He said… “You can enter God’s Kingdom only through the narrow gate. The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide for the many who choose that way” (7:13). Yes, you read correctly, many will choose hell!

Each one of us has a picture of hell as being a place that is dark, gloomy, depressive, hopeless, and so on. Ten years ago, a visit to Auschwitz in Poland, one of six WW2 German extermination camps, gave me and my wife a frightening close-up view of hell-on-earth. At Auschwitz, 6,000 bodies were incinerated every 24 hrs in 52 crematorium ovens! Such is the wickedness of the human heart.
 
During His public ministry, Jesus gave His followers a vivid picture of hell… It was a place that was nearby – a place that was widely used – a place they could easily visit. Jesus called that place Gehenna. It was also known as the Valley of Hinnom.

In 1999, a reporter of The Washington Post newspaper wrote: Below the Old City walls of Jerusalem there is a ravine that begins as a gentle, grassy separation between hills, then quickly descends south into the rocky earth. Eventually the ravine becomes a steep, craggy depth, scarred on its far side by shallow caves, hollowed-out chambers, and narrow crypts.

Everywhere you see scorches and smoulder from trash fires. Rivulets of urine trickle down from open sewers at the cliffs above, watering thorn bushes, weeds and unexpected clumps of grass among the outcroppings. You smell the stench of decaying offal, the congealed stink of putrefied garbage and the absorbed reek of incinerated substances seared into the rock face. Crows circle low. Worms and maggots slither throughout.
 
Listen. Imagine. Some cannot help but hear the tormented screams of babies being burned alive, the macabre incantations of the idolatrous in gruesome celebration, the agonized cries of helpless victims, and so many echoes of death and disconsolation that dwell here so pervasively not even the centuries can silence them. Welcome to Hell… Jerusalem’s Valley of Hinnom… so named a thousand years before the Christian era, and was established as a place of abomination. Eventually, it became known as Gehenna.
 

Best wishes
Bill Joukhadar