GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 9:43
Gehenna
In the 1960s, between Granite City and East St. Louis, Illinois, there was a public dump. In one section, a continuously smoldering fire belched noxious fumes. Everyone knew where the “dump” was. When someone said they were going to the dump, everyone understood what “Take it to the dump” meant. It became a metaphor for discarding trash—physical, emotional, or spiritual.
Jesus taught his audience that it was important not to allow anything to stand between themselves and God. “And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better to enter into life crippled than to depart to Gehenna having two hands, to the unquenchable fire.” (Mark 9:43)
Outside the city of Jerusalem, to the south, was the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, where early inhabitants had a shrine to the god Molech and sacrificially burned live babies in a perpetual fire. (2 Chronicles 28:3) Among King Josiah’s reforms, he declared it an unclean place. “He desecrated Topheth, which was in the Valley of Ben Hinnom, so no one could use it to sacrifice his son or daughter in the fire to Molech.” (2 Kings 23:10) “Gehenna” is a transliteration of the Hebrew “Valley of Hinnom.” By the New Testament era, the place had become a public dump where a perpetual fire smoldered. The word “Gehenna” became a metaphor for everlasting punishment, a reference to Isaiah 66:24.
Jesus employed a rhetorical method of exaggeration to underscore the issue’s deadly seriousness. He and his audience knew that “sins of the hand”—violence, assault, theft, fraud, etc.—could not be eliminated by simply cutting off the hand, for they were sins of the heart, but they surely gasped the eternally true message. Now?
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