These are words from the lips of Christ; what do they mean? They were evidently spoken in a very serious and solemn mood, and were evidently intended to represent a very serious and solemn reality.
I. Now we know what the popular opinion is, concerning the hell of which Christ speaks, and I must needs begin by repudiating it under the constraint, the irresistible constraint of the conviction, that it is diametrically opposed to all that He has shown and told us of God; that it contravenes entirely the revelation which He has brought to us of the Father. What then is this hell, with its unquenchable fire, of which Christ warns us. To go into hell, was on His lips, as you know, simply to go into Gehenna, and Gehenna was the Syro-Chaldaic word for the Hebrew Gahinnom, "valley of Hinnom" a narrow valley with steep rocky sides, running south-west of Jerusalem; but a ravine with a history. It would seem to have become "the common cesspool of the city, into which its sewage was conducted, to be carried off by the waters of the Kedron," as well as the spot where combustible refuse of various kinds was gathered to be burnt. It represented to the Jews as being "the lay-stall of Jerusalem's filth," the ultimate portion of corrupt souls.
II. Gehenna was the state of moral unwholesomeness, of corruption, to which they would invariably reduce themselves, who refused to give up what they felt to be perilous, or prejudicial to their interests, as moral creatures.... When Christ says, Better life with self-mortification than self-indulgence with Gehenna, Gehenna, on His tongue, must needs stand for corruption, since corruption is the antithesis of life, and the literal Gehenna, as we have seen, was emphatically the place of corruption. Yes, the hell by which Christ warns us to be loyal to the demands of faith, to the voice of the soul within us, is just the inward depravity which disloyalty and unfaithfulness in such directions are certain to breed; and what hell can be worse than that?
III. But the Lord Jesus goes on to speak of the fire of Gehenna, passing thus from the thought of the corruption induced by unworthy self-indulgence, to the thought of what such corruption shall be subject to. Gehenna, he says, is frequently lit up with fires; fires kindled for the consumption of the refuse collected there; and remember, that in the moral world of God, wherever there is corruption, theresooner or later, firewill surely come, to attack it remorselessly, until it shall be purged away.
S. A. Tipple, Echoes of Spoken Words,p. 143.
References: Mark 9:47; Mark 9:48. Christian World Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 216. Mark 9:50. Preacher's Monthly,vol. x., p. 28. Mark 10:1-12. H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man,p. 211.Mark 10:1-27. A. B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve,p. 251; W. Hanna, Our Lord's Life on Earth,p. 257. Mark 10:2-52. Ibid. x.13, 14. Sermons on the Catechism,p. 230; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times,"vol. iii., p. 241.Mark 10:13-15. J. Aldis, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxiv., p. 280.