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[Announcer] (0:00 - 0:18) Think about the Bible like you never have before. You're listening to Christian Questions. Experience more episodes, videos, and Bible study resources at ChristianQuestions.com.

Our topic is: "Did A Belief In Hell Always Exist?" Here's Rick, Jonathan, and Julie.

[Rick] (0:21 - 0:31) Welcome everyone, I'm Rick. I'm joined by Jonathan, my co-host for over 25 years. Julie, a longtime contributor, is also with us. Jonathan, what's our theme scripture for this episode?

[Jonathan] (0:32 - 0:46) Genesis 2:16-17: "The LORD God commanded the man, saying, From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."

[Rick] (0:46 - 1:37) The subject of eternal torment can be volatile, as there are so many variations in its explanations. Aside from all of the questions and debates regarding the interpretation of scripture, there's one fundamental question that often gets overlooked. If a hell of torment is the ultimate consequence for sin, did God's people always know that?

Think about the power of this question. For Christians who see the eternal torture of hell as a deterrent from sin, wouldn't God in His justice have given all of His people, through all of history, ample knowledge of this overwhelming consequence? Is the doctrine of eternal torment plainly revealed throughout the whole Bible?

When do we see this teaching revealed in any ancient pagan belief systems?

[Julie] (1:38 - 1:49) We're going to overlay pagan history onto the Old Testament history. It's very revealing, and as with each episode in this Hellfire Series, we want to state right up front our understanding of scripture on this topic.

[Rick] (1:49 - 2:41) Our firm belief is the doctrine of hell as a place of eternal torment did not have its beginnings in scripture, but in several very ancient pagan civilizations. Over thousands of years, we believe that the influence and power of these pagan beliefs corrupted the perspectives of many who claimed to hold to the sacredness of biblical scripture. The end result left many with unjustified fears of horrific afterlife events never proclaimed by God.

Never proclaimed by God. Why do we say this? Let's look at scriptural proof.

Our scriptural proof begins with God's first command and consequence. You go back to the beginning, Genesis 2:16-17:

[Jonathan] (2:41 - 2:57) "The LORD God commanded the man, saying, From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die." Literally translated from Hebrew, this means, "dying thou shalt die."

[Julie] (2:57 - 3:05) Now this begs the question, why did God boldly proclaim Adam would die if He really meant he would be tormented forever?

[Rick] (3:05 - 3:22) See, that's an important question. Right from the very beginning, the first mention of dying, you have to ask the question, how come it's not specific if torment is really, really the penalty? Let's go further.

We want to put this in perspective. Jonathan, let's continue now.

[Jonathan] (3:22 - 3:47) This simple scriptural proclamation was directly contradicted by Satan as he spoke to Eve, Genesis 3:4-5: "The serpent said to the woman, You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." It was here that Satan's thread of deception was put into action. Should we believe God or Satan?

[Rick] (3:47 - 4:41) Now see, that sounds like a "Duh!" question, right? Well, should we believe God or Satan? We should believe God! Hold on to that thought and watch this thread of deception blossom into something that becomes magnetic to belief systems. This lie of not dying has taken hold of mankind. The hell of torment is a direct outgrowth of that lie.

Four thousand years later, the Apostle Paul--four thousand years after the proclamation of death to Adam--four thousand years later, the Apostle Paul repeated the exact penalty that God had proclaimed to Adam in Romans 6:23: <Editor's Note: Jonathan reads the scripture> "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ." All right, you had it stated at the very beginning, and you fast forward thousands of years, and it's restated again. There's scriptural basis and principle here that we need to pay attention to.

[Julie] (4:41 - 5:21) If God pronounced death as the penalty for sin, where did this eternal torment in hell come from? As far as we can tell in our research, it began with ancient Egypt. I'm going to read from touregypt.net, an article called "The Hell of Ancient Egypt" by John Watson: "The principal sources for our knowledge of the Egyptian concept of hell are the Books of the Netherworld, which are found inscribed on the walls of the royal tombs of the New Kingdom in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes, and then later on papyrus and other funerary objects belonging to the commoners." These writings are dated during the 18th dynasty of Egypt, which began when Moses was young.

[Jonathan] (5:21 - 5:42) Let's remember that Egypt became an enemy of God's people. While enslaved, Israel developed from a family to a nation in Egypt. They would have known Egyptian customs and beliefs. Remember, the Ten Plagues were against the gods of Egypt. Once free, for the first time they were given a written Law clearly establishing their allegiance to God only.

[Julie] (5:43 - 6:50) I liked how you said that, because it's thought that each of these Ten Plagues intentionally targeted a different god of Egypt. For example, the first plague of turning the water to blood was a direct confrontation against the Egyptian god of the Nile. The ninth plague of three days of complete darkness was against Ra, the Egyptian god of the sun. God's supremacy over the Egyptians' false gods was demonstrated with each plague. Let's continue our quote from touregypt.net: "The concept of hell in the ancient Egyptian religion is very similar to those of our modern religions. Those who were judged unfavorably faced a very similar fate to our modern concept of hell, and perhaps even more specifically to the more Middle Age concept of it as a specific region beneath the earth. For the damned, the entire uncontrollable rage of the deity was directed against those who were condemned through their evils. They were tortured in every imaginable way and "destroyed," thus being consigned to nonexistence. They were deprived of their sense organs, were required to walk on their heads and eat their own excrement." There's more, but we're not going to read it.

[Rick] (6:50 - 7:34) There's a lot more. It gets worse, but this is the afterlife in ancient Egypt. This is important to understand.

That's the context in which Israel was enslaved, as God would deliver them many years later. With this Egyptian belief system as context, that's a background. This is factual.

This is what they believed at that time. We go to the first text of the Old Testament that some interpret as a reference to hellfire. Now, the following scripture was written between 1400 and 1500 BC, and that's going to be important because we're going to walk through history, through scripture and pagan background, and compare the two.

Jonathan, let's go to Deuteronomy 32:21-22:

[Jonathan] (7:34 - 8:14) "They have moved Me to jealousy with that which is not God; they have provoked me to anger with their vanities, and I will move them to jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation." Let's pause here. This is the consequence; to have you replaced, not to burn you forever. Part of this verse is quoted in Romans 10:19-21 as it relates to the favor that will come to the Gentiles after Israel rejected Jesus as their Messiah. Continuing: "For a fire is kindled in Mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on fire the foundations of the mountains."

[Rick] (8:14 - 8:43) You've got God angry with Israel, and He's saying, essentially, you're going to be replaced. The Apostle Paul tells us that's what He's meaning, and then you've got this "fire kindled in Mine anger." Some look at that and say, see, it's burning to "the lowest hell," and it's consuming. Yeah, that's right.

It's consuming. What is consuming mean? When you consume something, it's not there anymore.

Let's be clear. First of all, this is a little bit of picture language, but Jonathan, when it says, "unto the lowest hell," what does that mean?

[Jonathan] (8:43 - 8:56) Well, the word for "hell" here is the Hebrew word "sheol," meaning "the grave." In the King James Version, this word is translated as "grave" thirty-one times, "hell" thirty-one times, and "pit" sixty-five times.

[Julie] (8:57 - 9:04) This Hebrew word "sheol" has nothing to do with torture or even consciousness. It's the state of being dead and "sleeping" in the grave.

[Rick] (9:04 - 10:09) You've got the concept of sleeping in the grave. We want to understand how this works. The Apostle Paul's quotation of this text that we talked about from Romans 10:19-21 relates to the casting off of Israel and the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. "Sheol" is the "grave" that symbolizes destruction, Julie, just like you just said. The further context of the Deuteronomy 32 scriptures show God's punishments. Yes, there is punishment.

Okay, well, what is it? Does it have to do with the fire that's kindled in His anger burning up the mountains? No! If you read the chapter, it has to do with punishments being inflicted in this life upon those people. It is not an AFTER-life thing. It's a PRESENT-life thing. Let's go to another example of that, when God judged the sons of Korah for their rebellion. Israel's been delivered from Egypt and they have this freedom, but the sons of Korah rebel against it. Here's what happens, because Moses gives them an opportunity to repent, and they don't. Numbers 16:32-33:

[Jonathan] (10:24 - 10:26) "And the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, and their households, and all the men who belonged to Korah with their possessions. So they and all that belonged to them went down alive to Sheol; and the earth closed over them, and they perished from the midst of the assembly."

[Julie] (10:26 - 10:40) They perished. The King James Version substitutes "pit" for "sheol" here. In other words there was an earthquake, the fault line opened up, the people fell in while they were alive, and this catastrophic event killed them. Death was their judgment because of their rebellion.

[Jonathan] (10:40 - 10:54) In Moses's time, we see no scriptural evidence of torment remotely close to the Egyptian beliefs. If the horrific consequence of sin is eternal torment, was God unjustly hiding it from His chosen people?

[Rick] (10:54 - 11:16) Do you think for a second, folks--listen, think--do you think for a second that He would not have told Moses, Moses the Deliverer, about this? There's silence. There is scriptural silence.

We need to understand that. Let's broaden our perspective here, Julie, by going to some other historical resources and putting things in order.

[Julie] (11:16 - 12:43) From now on, we're going to be reading from a source called "The Origin and History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment" by Thomas B. Thayer. Let's start with our first quote. "Among the ancient pagans, the belief in a hell of some sort was very general, if not universal. It was known by various names, as Orcus (named after a god of the underworld), Erebus (meaning darkness), Tartarus, and Infernus or Inferna, whence our expression infernal regions comes from. The views...respecting it were different at different periods, and among different nations, according to the degree of civilization." The point here was that the concept was everywhere--except in Jewish culture. Let's jump forward in time by about six hundred years from that 1400 to 1500 BC time period. Now we're in about 850 BC. Scripturally, this is about the time of Elijah the prophet. Here's another quote from Thayer: The location of this hell "was supposed to be as far below the earth (or as deep down into it), as the heavens are above it." There was a poet who lived in 850 BC, and he was "very precise in his statement..." His name was Hesiod. He says, “a mass of iron would be nine days falling from heaven to earth, and nine more in falling from earth to hell.”

[Jonathan] (12:43 - 12:50) Remember at this time, it was widely thought that the earth was flat. They're trying to show how far up heaven is above and how far below hell is. Human imagination is limitless!

[Rick] (12:51 - 13:39) You see that they're putting these things together and they're showing you the distance. As far as heaven is above, so is hell below. Again, it's based on pagan, what ends up being mythological thinking.

We have Israel, and we've established up to the point of Moses you don't have any concept of any burning hell in the Old Testament. Now we're pushing ourselves to Elijah's time. What's happening in Elijah's time?

Well, Israel at this time wasn't generally swayed by Greek culture, and that's really where, Julie, where those quotes came from. However, they were steeped in the mire of Canaanite culture and fighting idolatry, as illustrated by Elijah confronting the priests of Baal. The question now is, who is Baal and why does Baal have so much authority and influence at this time?

[Julie] (13:40 - 14:13) Yeah, the Canaanites have mythology also. Let's quote from Gotquestions.org on the question, "Who is Baal?" "Baal was considered the most powerful of all gods, eclipsing El (the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon of gods), who was seen as rather weak and ineffective. In various battles Baal defeated Yamm, the god of the sea, and Mot, the god of death and the underworld ...the Canaanites worshiped Baal as the sun god and as the storm god-- he is usually depicted holding a lightning bolt--who defeated enemies and produced crops."

[Rick] (14:14 - 14:26) Okay, so we want to understand, how did God deal with the Baal issue? Here's a hint; remember how God dealt with the gods of Egypt. Jonathan, how did he deal with this Baal issue in terms of Elijah?

[Jonathan] (14:26 - 14:48) Well, first, there was no rain for several years. Baal was a storm god yet they had no rain, showing Baal's weaknesses. Next, rain only came again when Elijah said it would, showing God's dominant power or influence. Lastly, God sent fire down to consume Elijah's sacrifice, while Baal, the lightning bolt bearer, could do nothing.

[Julie] (14:48 - 14:49) Ironic!

[Rick] (14:49 - 15:14) He could do nothing! That's why God sent fire from heaven, because Baal was supposed to be able to do it but he couldn't. This is how God operates.

He doesn't enter into the pagan ritualistic thinking or allow it to be "borrowed" by His people when they're paying attention to Him. He puts it in its place. He makes it mythological because that's exactly what it is.

Let's go back to some more history and put this together.

[Julie] (15:14 - 16:37) We're moving ahead in the stream of time to the 7th century BCE. At this time in the Bible, the prophet Jeremiah is on the scene. Let's check in with the pagans of the ancient Persian empire at the time. That's present day Iran. Continuing back to Thayer's quote: "The national religions of Greece and Rome were the inventions of the legislator and the priest for the purpose of governing and restraining the common people... all the early lawgivers claim to have had communications with the gods, who aided them in the preparation of their codes." This is really interesting! Here's some examples. " Zoroaster (the religious philosopher) claimed to have received his laws from a divine source; Lycurgus (the lawgiver of Sparta in ancient Greece) obtained his from (the Greek god) Apollo, Minos (the king of Crete) from the Greek god Jupiter, Numa, (the second king of Rome) from Egeria (a nature deity in Greek folklore), the Greek lawgiver Zaleucus from Minerva (the Roman goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare), etc. The object of this sacred fraud was to impress the minds of the multitude with religious awe, and command a more ready obedience on their part." It's interesting! You've got the lawgivers getting it from these really mythological characters. I have a quote from Toni Morrison: "When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice."

[Jonathan] (16:37 - 16:45) These pagan cultures kept the thread of deception going to justify Satan's original lie--"you surely will not die."

[Rick] (16:46 - 17:38) It's everywhere! You see these pagan cultures, each of these individuals has a connection with gods. Well, so did God's prophet have a connection with the real God! Let's look at Jeremiah, because this is the 7th century BC and this is about the time of Jeremiah. What was he doing in relation to the potential for torment or not?

What was his perspective? Well, we know how the demands of these false gods pressed people into submission, especially in Jeremiah's time. Again, this time with sacrificing of children to Baal, that same God from Elijah's time. God's response to this was clear and sure. We're going to just give you very briefly a horrible but necessary example to prove how different God Almighty was and is from these pagan deities. Jonathan, Jeremiah 19:4-7:

[Jonathan] (17:38 - 18:07) "Because they ... have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind; therefore, behold, days are coming, declares the LORD, when this place will no longer be called Topheth or the Valley of Ben-hinnom, but rather the Valley of Slaughter." Torture never entered God's mind! He was condemning their actions.

[Julie] (18:07 - 18:16) Yeah, we talked about this particular scripture at length in Part I of this series, Episode #1341: "What Did Jesus Mean When He Talked About Hellfire?" Don't miss that if you haven't heard it!

[Rick] (18:17 - 19:16) It's important to get that for the context, because again, God is not pushing torment and torture. All of these other gods of these other nations and societies are. It's different.

It's fundamentally different. Is it reasonable? I mean, think about this circumstance with Jeremiah.

Is it reasonable to assume that God would torture countless billions of unbelievers when He proclaimed this valley to be a valley of slaughter because of the torture of a few children? It is not even in the realm of reason. Folks, please think--look at history and think--why would God be silent on such an important doctrine through all of history when all of these pagan deities are showing it? It doesn't make sense. The reason he's silent is because it doesn't exist. One more Old Testament scripture that could potentially get stretched into fitting into hell's teachings.

Jonathan, that's Isaiah 66:22-24:

[Jonathan] (19:16 - 19:48) "For just as the new heavens and the new earth which I make will endure before Me, declares the LORD, so your offspring and your name will endure. ...all mankind will come to bow down before Me, says the LORD." Well, Rick and Julie, obviously this is a future time as there has never been a time when all mankind has bowed down to God. Verse 24: "Then they will go forth and look on the corpses of the men who have transgressed against Me. For their worm will not die and their fire will not be quenched..."

[Julie] (19:49 - 20:08) Corpses are dead, and that Hebrew word means a "carcass," or, when used figuratively, an "idolatrous image." Even if someone were to take this literally, the prophecy does not include torture. To quote from what we found over and over again in Episode #1341 I just quoted; "no torment, just utter destruction."

[Rick] (20:08 - 20:52) Right, no torment, no torture, just a terribly sad and age-lasting reminder of the destruction of those who ultimately stand against God. We're going through, we're up to Jeremiah and you got nothing when it comes to eternal torture in the Old Testament. You've got nothing, but it's filling pagan culture.

Let's look at this. The Old Testament covered the four thousand year history of mankind from creation to about four hundred years before Christ. In all of that biblical history, like we said, burning hell never shows up.

In contrast, the New Testament covers less than one hundred years of history and that's where we seem to get it all from. What happened to the other four thousand years?

[Jonathan] (20:53 - 20:59) Would God have withheld such an important, eternal truth from His creation for four thousand years?

[Julie] (21:00 - 21:19) That's kind of a trick question. You can't answer "no" because we just don't see it in the scriptural record of the Old Testament. But if the answer is "yes," that He never told His people that for what they did in their short lifespan they would have pain and agony for all eternity, you start to question His integrity, justice, and compassion. It just doesn't make sense.

[Jonathan] (21:19 - 21:27) Well, it does when you start to realize the concept is pagan and pagan gods were created in the image of man.

[Rick] (21:27 - 21:50) That's where the sensibility comes in, not scripturally, not according to God Almighty, but according to pagan belief systems. Let's focus in now. We're moving forward in history to this four-hundred-year period between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In this period of four hundred years, there is a HUGE piece of the hell puzzle that becomes revealed. Julie, let's go back to tracing history here.

[Jonathan] (21:50 - 21:51) Sure.

[Julie] (21:51 - 22:13) We'll go back to the Thayer's quote: It's commonly accepted "that the Jews in our Savior's time believed the doctrine of future endless punishment; that was a part of the common faith. Of course, as the doctrine is nowhere to be found in their Scriptures, the question arises, where did they find it? At the close of the Old Testament Scriptures, they did not believe it; at the beginning of the New Testament, they did."

[Rick] (22:14 - 22:23) Let's go to the last book of the Old Testament. Let's go to one verse in the book of Malachi, in his prophecy that ended the Old Testament. Malachi 4:4:

[Jonathan] (22:24 - 22:32) "Remember the Law of Moses, My servant, even the statutes and ordinances which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel."

[Rick] (22:32 - 22:55) What's the command? He's saying, hold on to ALL of what God had given you, the statutes and the ordinances. Hold on to these things. There's going to be this period of silence.

Hold on to what you know. Don't be corrupted by what looks enticing. The Law was their only foundation! That's what they had. Now let's go back to history.

[Julie] (22:56 - 23:19) Back to Thayer's: "Malachi was the last of the Hebrew prophets, and from him to Christ there stretches this waste period of four centuries... And all this while they were in constant and close intercourse with the heathen, especially the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, who held the doctrine in review as part of their national faith. From these, therefore, they must have borrowed it."

[Jonathan] (23:19 - 23:23) The Jews adopted the idolatry surrounding them.

[Rick] (23:23 - 23:39) There you have it. You have this event that gives you the sense of bringing things in from the outside. During this time, we can note the great detail with which this hellfire teaching was explained.

Julie, again, back to history during this four-hundred-year period of time.

[Julie] (23:39 - 24:31) Yeah, and we're in approximately 200 to 118 BC when a Greek historian named Polybius wrote this: "Since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, there is no other way to keep them in order but by fear and terror of the invisible world; on which account our ancestors seem to me to have acted judiciously, when they contrived to bring into the popular belief these notions of the gods, and of the infernal regions." In other words, he's saying this is a good thing because there's no way we can keep these fickle crowds in order other than with the threat of eternal misery. We can have a peaceful society with every human being living in fear. I've got one more quote, this one from Carlton D. Pearson: "Belief compelled through fear is not belief; it is blind and forced obedience."

[Rick] (24:31 - 24:38) Look, fear creates obedience. It's that simple. Let's go back to Malachi because there is a graphic warning in Malachi. He tells them, hold on to the ordinances of the Law, and here's why; Malachi 4:1:

[Jonathan] (24:38 - 24:54) "For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts."

[Rick] (24:54 - 25:16) This is a future day of judgment using a furnace of fire--not the underworld, not someplace nine days of falling below--but a furnace of fire as a symbol of judgment. Once again, God delivers judgment within a time frame and not for eternity. Pay attention to the details.

[Jonathan] (25:17 - 25:41) We went over this in detail in Part II of this Hellfire Series, Episode #1342: "What Does Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth Mean?" Now let's compare. The Greeks are promoting despicable fear-mongering. Malachi is saying to hold on to what you know. A judgment is coming that will cause a tremendous separation. Those who have been unjust will be revealed as such.

[Rick] (25:41 - 25:57) Now remember, we're in this four hundred year period of time, and there's this imbalance that we're seeing. It's a dramatic imbalance. There's not even something like, well, yeah, you could interpret it that way.

No, you can't. You can't interpret the scriptures that way. Let's go a little bit further with history. Julie, who's next?

[Julie] (25:57 - 26:41) Virgil. Virgil was an ancient Roman poet who lived between 70 and 19 BC. This is about fifty years before Jesus was on the earth. This is towards that end of this intervening time between the Old and New Testaments. This is what he said about punishment in the afterlife in his epic Latin poem called the Aeneid: "And now wild shouts and wailing dire and shrieking infants swell the dreadful choir. Here sits in bloody robes the Fury fell, by night and day to watch the gates of hell. Here you begin terrific groans to hear, and sounding lashes rise upon the ear. On every side the damned their fetters grate, and curse, 'mid clanking chains, their wretched fate."

[Rick] (26:41 - 27:04) All the while, God has given Israel a Law that doesn't even come remotely close to any of this. You have their Law where they're punished in this life in a just way, and you have all of these other belief systems. Think about the difference as we look at what is God's true message-- not what we think it is--but what's God's TRUE message. Let's look to more about the day of judgment in God's earthly kingdom in Daniel 2:44:

[Jonathan] (27:04 - 27:24) "In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever."

[Rick] (27:24 - 27:39) Once again, if you thought eternal torment was there, you'd say it would crush and torment forever all these kingdoms. But no, no, it doesn't say it. Why wouldn't it say it?

Because it doesn't exist! Understand--the scriptures are clear.

[Julie] (27:39 - 28:50) The next example is just before John the Baptist and Jesus will appear on the scene. Strabo was a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian who lived between 64 or 63 BC to 24 AD. Here's what he said: "... For it is impossible to govern the crowd of women, and all the common rabble, by philosophical reasoning, and lead them to piety, holiness, and virtue-- but this must be done by superstition, or the fear of the gods, by means of fables and wonders; for the thunder, the aegis (that's the shield or breastplate of protection through supernatural power associated with Zeus and Athena), the trident, the torches (of the Furies; these Furies were goddesses who cursed criminals and inflicted famine and pestilence), the dragons, etc., are all fables, as is also all ancient theology. These things the legislatures used as scarecrows to terrify the childish multitude." So in the ancient world, they not only adopted this thought of an afterlife of torture and torment, but the ones in power realized that this was made up and they used the fear of the unknown as a tool to keep people in line.

[Rick] (28:50 - 28:53) It's a simple tool. It's easy to use. Why not?

[Julie] (28:53 - 28:55) Just make it up. Make it up!

[Rick] (28:55 - 29:19) Make it up and perpetuate the myth and make it look real. Now you think about this and we've talked about Israel and their Law. Does it seem hard to believe that Israel could swallow such heresy? Well, just look around us now and ask yourself how much anti-biblical morality is now normal and excusable without a second thought. We look at them and say, shame on them. Hang on. Maybe shame on us. We have to be careful about this.

Julie, let's finish up the history here.

[Julie] (29:19 - 30:21) Yeah, this is our last quote from Thayer: "The process is easily understood. About three hundred and thirty years before Christ, Alexander the Great had subjected to his rule the whole of Western Asia, including Judea, and also the kingdom of Egypt. Soon after he founded Alexandria, which speedily became a great commercial metropolis, and drew into itself a large multitude of Jews, who were always eager to improve the opportunities of traffic and trade. A few years later, Ptolemy Soter (that was a Macedonian Greek general, historian and successor of Alexander the Great) took Jerusalem, carried off one hundred thousand of them into Egypt. Here, of course, they were in daily contact with the Egyptians and the Greeks, and gradually began to adopt their philosophical and religious opinions, or to modify their own in harmony with them." Rick and Jonathan, this is "conflation." The word "conflation" is "the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, or opinions into one, often in error." This all gets jumbled together.

[Jonathan] (30:21 - 30:31) During that four hundred year period of time, God was not speaking to Israel. There certainly was a lot of error and corruption to listen to from the surrounding countries.

[Julie] (30:31 - 30:31) Right.

[Rick] (30:31 - 31:14) Four hundred years is a long time. Think about it. The United States of America has been around for two hundred forty-eight years, and we look at the beginnings of that and we say, that's ancient history. Well, how easy is it for us to develop different sets of beliefs over the history of this nation? Think about four hundred years in ancient times. It would have been easy to be seduced by these things because they're there and they're powerful and they're overwhelming and other people believe them. Not true! It's not true.

Let's look at how God looks at the overall picture of humanity because it's not through torment and torture. It's through ransom and restitution. The results of that are in Micah 4:3:

[Jonathan] (31:14 - 31:41) "And He will judge between many peoples and render decisions for mighty, distant nations. Then they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they train for war." No torment, no torture. Jesus' ransom sacrifice provides a resurrection for all in God's kingdom with the opportunity for life under God's perfect government.

[Julie] (31:41 - 31:55) We've seen how the history of pagan cultures and history of what God proclaimed in the Old Testament are entirely at odds. Paganism from most ancient times had themes of torture and torment after death in their belief systems.

[Jonathan] (31:55 - 32:11) The Bible has none. Why the difference? The gods of paganism are created in the image of fallen men, whereas the God of the Bible is above reproach and has always had a plan that offers salvation and life for ALL who have ever lived!

[Rick] (32:11 - 33:12) When we look at pagan history and biblical history, what do we see? We see a graphic difference in what they say is true. On the biblical side, you see a godly approach, a just approach.

On the pagan side, what do you see? You see the weaving of the thread of Satan's deception into belief systems that instill fear and create this obedience because of fear. But it's untrue, unkind, and wrong.

It doesn't belong. The history of the Bible shows us God is loving, just, and powerful, and above such things. When you think about the history of hell, think it doesn't belong in scripture! Folks, think about it. We love hearing from our listeners. We welcome your feedback and questions in this episode and other episodes at christianquestions.com.

Coming up in our next episode: "Why is Jesus Called The Bread of Life?"

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