neanderpaul wrote:If you are about to walk out in front of a speeding bus I will jerk you back even if I injure you doing it.
Unfortunately Paul & Chris,
The analogy is improper. In saving someone PHYSICALLY, you are able to enforce your will upon others to do it.
Spiritual redemption doesn't work that way.
Love doesn't work that way.
You CANNOT force anyone to love God or love anyone else for that matter.
Salvation CANNOT be accomplished for anyone else, or achieved on their behalf. Even Jesus death on the cross, is meaningless to a person, who does not accept the love God offers them.
As an aside, and this part is only my personal belief...
You are not saving anyone from a
future fate. THEY ARE
ALREADY UNDER THE BUS. Hell is not a literal place, created for the purpose of torture or punishment. Hell is very simply, the state of PERMANENT separation from the love of God. If you are not in a relationship of love with God, you are ALREADY in hell.
Jesus gives an anaology, a physical analogy, of how terrible and miserable hell is, because people who have not experienced a personal loving relationship with God, have no idea why it is so miserable to live without it. What would they compare it to? If Jesus were to tell his audience: "You do not have the love of God living inside you... and you are in hell right now! And if you do not open your heart and recognize your need for God's love, then you will continue living in the hell that is your current life!"
What would they say... "Uhh... this is hell? This is it? This isn't so bad. I've been living this way a long time. Why not continue in it?"
I have eaten at some of the best restaurants there are. 5 Star dining, with culinary delights that are dificult to describe to someone who may have eaten nothing but stale bread all his life. If all someone has tasted was literally stale bread, his entire life, and had nothing to compare it to, how would you describe a dining experience at a restaurant with world renowned chefs, and the world's best delicacies? When it would be that difficult to explain the best food, to someone who had eaten nothing but stale bread all his life, how much more difficult would it be to explain what God's love tastes like? How it feels? What it does to your life?
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to adequately explain this.
So Jesus uses an analogy that his audience would understand. One of the names Jesus used for hell, Gehenna, was the identical name of the city's garbage dump. Every Jew understood it to be the most putrid and foul and disgusting place anyone could think of. Before it was a waste site, it was a valley, where Jews sacrificed their children to false gods. Later it became a garbage dump as well as a place to dump the bodies of criminals. Everyone brought their refuse here, and it was dumped into a ravine and burned. Imagine food and waste and even human flesh, months old, rotting and stinking up the place, and then being burned continuously, and the fire not going out, because every day, new waste, from an entire city was continually added to the dump. New fuel everyday. Worms fat and happy, because there is no shortage of food for them.
It was understood by the Jews to be a type of a punishing afterlife.
The place... the garbage dump, IS REAL.
A physical place somewhere else, where this would occur to punish non-believers, is NOT REAL.
Gehenna is simply a disgusting and foul place, to be avoided whenever possible.
And so Jesus is trying to get across the idea to these people, that WITHOUT THE LOVE OF GOD, in their hearts, and when they are living for themselves in selfishness, and hatred... they are not any better SPIRITUALLY, than the garbage stinking up Gehenna. In others words... When you live for yourself, and you live selfishly, and deny the love of God into your heart, and live for the carnal and physical, rather than the spiritual, then you are SPIRITUAL GARBAGE, SPIRITUAL REFUSE.
And what did these ancients do with garbage? Like the refuse found in Gehenna, it is burned up, to be rid of it. Garbage is useful for burning, not much else.
This is his message to his audience.
When hell (Gehenna) is described as a place burning with unquenchable fires that never go out.... Christ is speaking of the garbage dump. Which burns continually. When he speaks of worms never dying... it is because they can eat and eat and eat, continuously, because new food is coming daily for them, the rotting leftovers from the city's waste. NONE of this is literal, other than the analogy of a rotting, putrid waste dump, being a TYPE of what a person without God's love inside them, is like SPIRITUALLY. They are like that dump.
The audience understood this analogy, because they went there daily. They were disgusted to imagine themselves, as being like that dump. or to imagine dwelling in the middle of it forever, day after day.
What is it like to be spiritual trash? How do you explain that concept? Jesus uses a literal trash heap, for the comparison.
Now however, it has been MISUNDERSTOOD and passed down for nearly 2 thousand years, as LITERAL. This has been a TRAGIC error, and a grave misunderstainding of scripture and God's heart as well. So now, in a modern era, atheists and anti-religionists, quite correctly ask: "How is God a loving being, if He would purposefully create a place burning with fire continuously, merely for the purpose of torturing non-believers for all eternity. Why keep a person's soul alive, forever, merely so you can torture it without mercy for all eternity? And yet there is supposedly only love and happiness in Heaven? How could someone be happy, knowing God was keeping his Aunt Martha alive for all eternity just so He could torture her?"
They are quite right in their judgement of that kind of God.
Sadly, that kind of God is NOT the Creator God of reality. But a God invented through taking an analogy literally, and passing it down through successive generations as truth.
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I happen to be Comanche ( Numunu) and Tarascan ( Purempecha), I tell those people who preach.... "I don't worship imported Gods" and wear a T-shirt that says....Jesus save me from your followers" 
