Hey everybody, I'm Tim McEy and this is my podcast Exploring My Strange Bible.

I am a card carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is

utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have.

On this podcast I'm putting together the last ten years worth of lectures and sermons

where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites

us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find those resources at thebibelproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week.

This is going to be the first of a four part series on the biblical ideas or topics of heaven and hell.

Very simple, nothing controversial here folks.

The reason I did this series, this was actually quite a number of years ago, but I still feel good about most everything.

I said how I framed it.

I would probably tweak a few things differently.

But in my years of local church, pastor of ministry and in my own personal journey of growing as a follower of Jesus,

the ideas of heaven and hell, I didn't come with a blank slate when I was a new Christian in my twenties to these concepts.

I had already been provided through media and Christian religious media and non-religious media with images and ideas about heaven and hell in the Bible.

Most of them were ridiculous, but I didn't know it at the time because they were all passed off as this is what Christians believe or this is what the Bible teaches.

So personally, I had a long journey of trying to sort this out because these popular ideas of heaven as like the golden city and the clouds and pearly gates and hell as a subterranean torture chamber for bad people after death and so on.

And these ideas are very hard to get out of our imaginations if they're there in the first place.

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