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jesus-passion.com/THE_PASSION6.htm#CHAPTER%20LIXActually, the 1611 King James bible **included **the Apocrypha. Most don’t realize that. The Apocrypha was not “officially” removed until 1885 by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
I’ve always been curious about purgatory myself. It does seem there are several destinations for the dead. I believe there is a “land of the dead”. The Hebrew sheol is an “abode of the dead”. It is a lot like the Greek concept of Hades, an underworld for the dead.
I thought Gehenna was were the really evil ones go to be tortured/destroyed. It is a place name, meaning the “valley of Hinnom,”, it’s where they burned trash and dumped dead animals. It was already considered unclean because it was thought to be the place where children were sacrificed to the pagan god Molech.
Matthew 23:33, “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of gehenna?”
For Catholics, I wonder if in purgatory if God can look on them?
As a little kid I wanted to know who the forgotten dead were in the Psalms. So was curious. The word there was sheol. Here is an example:
Psalm 88
4 I am counted with those who go down to the pit;
I am like a man who has no strength,
5 Adrift among the dead,
Like the slain who lie in the grave,
Whom You remember no more,
And who are cut off from Your hand.
6 You have laid me in the lowest pit,
In darkness, in the depths.
7 Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
And You have afflicted me with all Your waves. Selah
8 You have put away my acquaintances far from me;
You have made me an abomination to them;
I am shut up, and I cannot get out;
9 My eye wastes away because of affliction.
10 Will You work wonders for the dead?
Shall the dead arise and praise You? Selah
…
16 Your fierce wrath has gone over me;
Your terrors have cut me off.
17 They came around me all day long like water;
They engulfed me altogether.
18 Loved one and friend You have put far from me,
And my acquaintances into darkness.
PSALMS 6:
5For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?
I do think of the weirdest things at times. For example, since God created us with a spoken word, we began first as a thought in the mind of God. Since God can do anything, can he forget us? And if so would that be as if we never existed? I think of it in modern terms, Control, alt, delete.
Or maybe God only forgets and we remember. So being a forgotten dead would be a form of hell I suppose.
And I wonder about the sleeping dead. Perhaps to them there is no sense of lost time, since they are unaware and are awakened to be judged.
Which makes me think about sleep. Do the sleeping dead dream? If so, can the soul “sleepwalk”?
This is the stuff that keeps me up at night sometimes because I can’t shut it off. LOL
It is also in 2 Kgs or 2 Sam 12:13-14; 1 Cor 3:15; Heb 12:23; Matt. 5:26, 36 and 2 Machabees 12:46; Matt. 3:2; Luke 3:8, 13:3; Apoc/Rev 3:2-3, 19, also in James 3:2, Apoc/Rev 21:27 and Matt. 5:48.I don’t believe any book actually discusses purgatory…the passage in Maccabees you refer to concerns praying for the dead. Purgatory in Catholic belief is “implied” through various scriptures but never actually defined as “purgatory”.
It sounds like an event or process and not a place to me:From the US Lutheran / Catholic dialgue about the subject of Purgatory, this
usccb.org/comm/archives/2006/06-212.shtml
My personal view is, if I, as a Lutheran, can define Purgatory as a momentary cleansing of all the vestiges of sin, at the time of death, as Father Tavard does here, then to me Purgatory is no longer a church-dividing issue.
Jon