There is confusion over some words in the Bible because of the way they are translated from the original. Sheol which is the Hebrew place of the dead was translated into Greek as Hades which is usually thought of as hell. Gehenna which is a word for what we have come to think of as hell is sometime thought to be a synonym for sheol but it is not. “Sheol, the place with an insatiable appetite”, is a quote from the blog yesterday that I neglected to cite. The blog comes from F.E Mayer in an article that he wrote years ago called “Human Will in Bondage and Freedom”. It is obvious that Mayer is conflating sheol and hell but Mayer was a great scholar and I am not going to argue with him. The concept of hell as a place of insatiable appetite is a pretty good metaphor that tells me we are living in hell right now.
Listening to the political debates it is obvious that governing has been reduced to one of two activities – giving as many people goodies as possible and paying for the goodies with the earning of others; or trying to figure out a way to stop that. The second may be an impossible task since once folks get goodies the appetite for the goodies gets stronger. We may be past the tipping point in our life together and the craziness we see around us may be the early signs of the final dissolution of the United States as a representative Republic and the beginning of a “banana Republic”.
One of our former presidents was described as “an appetite in a suit”. It seems an apt description from what we see of him today. Every issue that we deal with today can be boiled down to the insatiable appetite of human beings and the rulers of this present darkness to feed what they created in the first place.
