Question:
Greg,
I
was browsing through your Q&A site and someone asked you what is hell.
Your answer was that the best answer you could give was that hell is
separation from God. I couldn’t
believe it. Nowhere does the Bible
say that hell is separation from God. It
is the grave. I would say that
spiritual death is separation from God. I
strongly believe that you should study the scriptures to get truth from it and
not to put your opinions and ideas into it.
Neftali
Answer: Dear Neftali,
We
base what we believe on the Bible—all of it.
Not simply one word that is translated “hell” in the Bible (which
means, “grave”), but all of the words, and all of the biblical passages.
There is no doubt that the words translated as “hell” in the Bible
have more than simply the one meaning of the “grave”—or of the death of
the body. The word, “hell” as
well as “heaven”, “kingdom”, “kingdom of heaven”, and “kingdom of
God” have to do not only with the description and definition of the human body
after death, but also of the human soul.
Nowhere
does the Bible imply that the soul or spirit of humans also goes into the grave
with the body. The grave, as hell
may mean in some biblical passages, only refers to the state of the body after
death. But there is more to being a
human than having a body. Animals
have a body which decomposes after death. Are
humans the same as animals? What
does it mean to be created in the image of God?
What do the passages that speak of the soul and spirit of humans
mean—as Jesus told us not to fear those who can kill our body, but fear Him
who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28)?
In
Christ,