The worm that wouldn't die

"Hell, where 'their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'"
Problems for 21st century people include:

• The concept of hell
• The idea that it's a place for punishment
• The thought of a "good" God arranging for his/her creatures to be destroyed forever - especially if, as in Calvinism, God has already decided who gets the harps and who gets the immortal worms.
• The pleasure some people seem to take in other people being in hell.

The "worm" is a maggot.  "Hell" is "Gehenna" - the valley of Hinnon, where the people of Jerusalem would take their rubbish to burn.  A kind of Jewish 1st Century landfill.  The fires burnt to destroy the rubbish - and the worms always had another snack.  That was the vision of hell that the people of Jerusalem saw from day to day.  And it was a vision that was made entirely by humans.  They made the rubbish; they lit the fires; they drew the maggots.

Hell ain't a great place to be.  It is a place of isolation.  It's the place we humans don't want to go.  And it's a place we make.  We can choose what goes there - is it the junk of our lives, tipped in a pile and burnt in a fire - the stuff we don't need, the stuff we don't want, the stuff that does us harm, the stuff that has outlived its purpose - or do we hang onto it and go with it?  A twenty-year-old sofa goes down the dump.  What sort of wally straps herself on it when it goes in the skip?  You let it go on its own.  Let the worm and the fire have the rubbish.  Your treasure is somewhere else.