Harvest Daily with Greg Laurie - Sept. 4, 2006

Discarded Lives

 

But she who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives.

—1 Timothy 5:6

 

On more than one occasion in the Bible, hell is compared to a big garbage dump.  In fact, the very word that is used for hell in many New Testament passages is the Greek word gehenna.

 

Gehenna was a word used to describe a garbage dump outside Jerusalem during the time of the New Testament.  Not only was garbage placed in this dump, but there were corpses as well.  It burned day and night.   There was always fire and smoke billowing from this horrid, stinking place known as Gehenna.

 

So Gehenna was a term the people would be familiar with in Jesus’ day. He used this word on a number of occasions to describe hell, to depict its horrors, and to imply that the real place was far worse than even a place like Gehenna.

 

Now when you go to a dump, you will see things that are no longer of value to people.  First of all, you will notice that it smells.  There is all kinds of junk piled up that probably had been quite valuable at one time: old TV sets . . . stereo systems . . . pieces of clothing . . . shoes.  A lot of items that may have been of value at one time simply have been discarded.

 

Just stop and think of a life that has been wasted on the pursuit of sin, a life that has been wasted on the pursuit of pleasure, a life that has been lived without God.  It is a life that ends up just being thrown away—a life that ends up in a garbage dump.  That’s what we do with our lives when we ignore God and live only for ourselves.

For more relevant and biblical teaching from Pastor Greg Laurie, go to www.harvest.org.

Copyright © 2006 by Harvest Ministries. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Bible text from the New King James Version is not to be reproduced in copies or otherwise by any means except as permitted in writing by Thomas Nelson, Inc., Attn: Bible Rights and Permissions, P.O. Box 141000, Nashville, TN 37214-1000.