Mark 9: 43 – 48: And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
Hell is commonly portrayed as a place of burning torment where demons inflict all kinds of torturous pain on the lost and so forth. Regardless of the supernatural experiences people have claimed to have had of visiting Hell, and their descriptions of its fire and heat and pools of lava and devils chasing them about etcetera, these fantastic claims have no foundation in the scriptures nor in what the prophet of God taught us.
In 1923, at the age of 14, the prophet of God was laying dying in a hospital after a shooting accident. As he reached the point of death, and because he had not accepted and received Jesus as his Savior, the prophet drifted out of his body and began falling into the Region of the Lost. As he reached this horrible place, he could hear the groans of the lost and saw their contorted, twisted-up faces. The prophet described it as being in like a nightmare where the soul of the sinner is caught between worlds.
In this terrible place that the prophet had arrived at, there was no fire, nor smoke, nor heat, nor lava, nor devils chasing people about; this is because the fifth dimension of Hell has three planes of existence to it: the first is the Region of the Lost, the second is the Region of Demons, and the third is Satan himself. It is for this reason that when the prophet went to the Region of the Lost, he did not see devils nor did he see Satan. The destiny of Death and Hell and the souls of the lost is that they will be cast into the Lake of Fire according to Revelation 20: 14 – 15. It is only then that we read of the lost coming into contact with a supernatural fire.
The wrong understanding of Hell crept into the church because of Catholic teaching which was learned from Hebrew mythology that was in turn gotten from Babylon. Before the first coming of Christ, the Jews believed that Sheol (the Grave) was a place of sleep for the soul; the name Hell did not even exist at that time, and when its name did come into being, it was never described as a place burning with fire until the stories and descriptions of it became hugely exaggerated over the centuries, which the church then went and picked up on.
When Jesus spoke of Hell in Mark 9, He did not use the word “Hades,” but instead used the word “Gehenna.” Gehenna was originally the Valley of Hinnom outside the gate of Jerusalem to the south. The Valley of Hinnom was where all the filth and refuse of the city of Jerusalem would be gathered up and burnt; this is also where the bodies of dead animals, criminals and other wicked people would be burnt. Because it became the rubbish dump and refuse site of Jerusalem, people were terrified of it, especially because fires were always burning there, and so from this site and what happened there, the legend of a burning Hell was born.
When Jesus was speaking of people being cast into Hell where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched, He is quoting from Isaiah 66: 24 (And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.), and is actually telling the people that if they do not live right and refuse to obey the laws of the land, then they too will be killed and taken to Gehenna in the Valley of Hinnom to be burnt. The worm never died in the burnings of Gehenna because carcasses of the dead were always arriving there to be consumed. Again, if we look at the wording of Isaiah 66: 24, we see that it is not the spirits of the dead, but rather, the bodies (the carcasses) of the dead transgressors that are being looked upon, for worms do not exist in Hell and natural fire cannot consume a spirit body.
The Region of the Lost in Hell is thus a place of torment for those who rejected the Word for their day. In a spiritual sense, the worm that dieth not represents the guilty conscience of the sinner in Hell, that is always there to disturb and remind them of the opportunity they turned down in this world; and the fire that is not quenched represents their constant state of mental torment in knowing that they can never return to this world and make things right.