In the Book of Leviticus, it says: it is unlawful for someone to throw their child in fire; so he says: we're going with that. Mm, this is going to work out better for him…
So he takes the army of Israel out to Gehenna, and he rips all the place down. He makes a royal decree: from this day forward no one, no one, will sacrifice their children in the fire of Gehenna, ever again.
In 2 Kings 23:10 it says: “and he defiled Topheth”, which means ‘the place of burning’. He defiled the place of burning, in the valley of Gehenna, so that no man might make his son or daughter pass through the fire of Molech again.
So this King Josiah comes out and he defiles Gehenna; so for years and years and years and years and years they've been sacrificing children in a place called Gehenna - and he rips it down.
Now what's the problem with that? If you're the king, and you go and you defile a place where they've been sacrificing children, what dilemma are you left with? The dilemma is simply this: now the land is worthless.
What are you going to do with it? You've been sacrificing children there for say 100 years; what are you going to do with that land? Okay, so you've made it impossible to sacrifice children there, but now you still have a piece of land that is spooky!
Are you going to build houses on it? Hey, would you like to buy a house? It's Poltergeist Acres!
It has this ‘Children of the Corn’ feel to it doesn't it, like it's just odd. To this day, this place is spooky. It has a spooky feel to it. You wouldn't want to live there, and so what did they do? What do you do with a piece of land that is now worthless because of a sin that you guys have committed?
They made it the town garbage dump! So everybody in Jerusalem took their garbage to Gehenna, and to keep the smell of the garbage out of the city, they had to keep the fire going. So they'd keep the fire going all the time to keep the smell of the garbage inside Gehenna, instead of outside Gehenna.
It was also a place of crying, because anybody who could not afford a tomb, they would have their funeral at Gehenna. So if you couldn't afford a tomb, your loved ones would take your body, and they would throw it into the fire of Gehenna to burn you up there, because you couldn't afford a tomb to be properly buried. So all the time in Gehenna, garbage was being burned up and there were people standing around crying, because they had to throw their loved ones on the fire.
Also when you've got a big open garbage heap like that, all the stray animals from the area would come around, and they'd scavenge for food. So you had animals, foxes and wolves and all kinds of things; you'd have them scavenging for food everywhere, and they'd be fighting, and they'd bite each other. They'd be barking.
So the people in Jerusalem called Gehenna “the place where the fire doesn't die, and there's weeping and gnashing of teeth”.
So any time Jesus used the phrase “the place where the fire doesn't die and there's weeping and gnashing of teeth”, or if He used the word “Gehenna”, no one thought: that's where we go when we die. Everyone thought: that's the town garbage dump.
I had this whole belief system built around hell, and Hell was a place that people go when they die. Who goes there when they die? Not us! It's always somebody else is going to hell, in the future, for something they're doing now. That's how we think about hell, and we use phrases like that all the time: oh, I hope they get that straight, because they could go to hell for that one day.