New(ish) Passages
Hey there,
Recently, in our Tuesday night Bible study, we have been going deep. We’ve been diving into the cultural context of the scriptures—asking what these passages meant to the original readers, what they would have actually heard vs. what we hear today, examining the Greek root words, and mapping the geography.
I have been reading passages in a way that brings them new life.
Take the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Jesus leaving the 99 to go after the 1). Instead of reading it purely as an individual comfort, we instead read this as a community challenge. Yes, it’s beautiful to know Jesus pursues us individually, but it’s also our work as the church to join in that spirit. We have to be his hands and feet and move on that, letting Him do the heavy lifting.
But that communal responsibility makes the very next verses in Matthew 18 come across radically different.
The Selective Literalism of Matthew 18
Look at Matthew 18:8–9:
“If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away…”
I love how the modern church has reached a comfortable consensus here that this is hyperbole. We all agree that self-mutilation doesn’t reflect the heart of God or the intent of the passage.
Yet, in the exact same breath, by and large, everyone is ready to pivot and say the second part of the verse means a literal, metaphysical hell.
I can’t say I subscribe to that view. I know it sounds like Jesus is talking about the afterlife, but the more I looked into the background, the more it became clear that He’s using a vivid, physical mirror to make a point about dealing with sin in our lives right now.
The Geography of a Burning Trash Heap
When Jesus mentions “eternal fire” and the “fire of hell,” the Greek word He actually uses is Gehenna.
To a first-century Jew standing in Jerusalem, Gehenna wasn’t an abstract, invisible dimension; it was a physical place you could literally look down into. The Valley of Hinnom (Ge-Hinnom) sat just south and west of the city walls.
It was a place with a horrific history. In the Old Testament, it was the site of pagan child sacrifice. By Jesus’ time, it had become the city’s municipal trash dump—a place where garbage and dead animals were constantly burned. It was smoky, disgusting, and universally known as a place of absolute shame and ruin.
It was a tangible, local visual aid to what happens when an individual or a society turns away from God’s design: a wasteland of refuse, smoke, and wasted potential.
Jesus was essentially asking them: “Do you want your life to look like the Holy Temple up here, or the burning trash heap down there?”
Standing at the “Gates of Hell”
This wasn’t a one-off teaching style, either. Jesus constantly used local geography and pagan monuments to turn cultural assumptions completely upside down.
Think about Matthew 16:18—the famous passage where Jesus says, “…and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” Growing up, I always pictured the “gates of hell” as some invisible, spiritual barrier. Here comes the fun part: look at where they were actually standing when He said it.
Jesus and his disciples were in the northern region of Caesarea Philippi. Standing right there was a massive, intimidating cliff face with pagan shrines carved directly into the rock. At the base of the cliff was a massive, gaping cave with rushing water—the ancient Temple of Pan. Herod the Great had even built a temple to Caesar on the very site.
To the locals and pagans of the ancient world, that bottomless-looking cave was feared as a literal, physical entrance to the underworld.
So when Jesus looks at his disciples in the literal shadow of Roman power and pagan worship, points at that dark cavern, and says, “the gates of Hades won’t stop my church,” He isn’t giving a theological lecture about the afterlife. He’s standing on the enemy’s front porch, declaring a holy eviction notice. Gates are defensive structures. Jesus says the strongholds of evil won’t withstand the advance of his kingdom.
Connecting the Prophetic Dots: Mark 9 & Isaiah
This isn’t out of left field, either. Jesus uses this exact same imagery in Mark 9:43–48, but there He adds an explicit cross-reference, quoting directly from the very end of the Old Testament (Isaiah 66:24):
“…to be thrown into hell, where ‘the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched.’”
In ancient Jewish thought, this imagery from Isaiah wasn’t a roadmap of a metaphysical underworld; it was a graphic description of a final battlefield where the enemies of God lay defeated in public shame and ruin. By connecting the local geography of Gehenna to Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus is doubling down on the idea of total destruction, shame, and ruin in both the present and the ultimate reality, rather than offering a detailed description of the afterlife.
The Bigger Picture
When we split these verses up—deciding this phrase is metaphorical but that phrase is literal—we miss the entire point. Jesus isn’t trying to map out the afterlife here; He’s using something intense that they all understood to say, “Take sin seriously, and deal with it now.”
The larger context of Matthew 18 fully supports this. The whole chapter flows out of humility—protecting the vulnerable, pursuing the wandering sheep, restoring broken relationships, and radically forgiving others.
This warning about Gehenna adds weight to the communal calling: Sin is dangerous. It fractures communities, hurts “little ones,” and ruins lives. We need to address it urgently before it turns our relationships and our hearts into a trash dump.
It actually makes the warning feel incredibly real, practical, and entirely aligned with who Jesus is.
just Pray