Step One:
Gather materials.
You’ll need a good, sharp saw, lots of towels, and I suggest vice grips and straps to hold your leg still. You’ll need a tourniquet. A belt or rope will do. A red hot iron plate for cauterization should be nearby. And, of course, you’re going to want a stick, or a wallet - something to bite down on.
Step Two:
Get in the right mind set. This is going to hurt, and hurt bad. Plus, if you pass out in the middle, you’re liable to bleed out and die. You’re going to have to be tough. It’s a shame someone else couldn’t do this for you, but the instructions were clear.
Step Three:
Clamp down that leg. It should be immobile. Bite the stick - hard. Choose your starting point.
You really have two choices and I’m not sure which is best. It's your call.
1) You can start at the thinnest part of your ankle and go as fast as you can. Cutting through the bone is going to be awful. Really. But this method requires less precision than the second. You can just scream like a madman and hack away without thinking too much.
2)You can go for the joint between your foot and ankle. This one skips hacking through your bones, but you have to go through a lot more tendons and nerves to pull it off. You’ll have to cut at several angles and that could be awkward if not impossible during that kind of pain.
Either way you choose, that Achilles’ tendon is going to make you scream. I’m just guessing.
Step Four:
Cauterize. The hot plate will do, but an acetylene torch could handle the job. Maybe I should have listed that in step one.
Step Five:
Look at those eyeballs of yours. One of them needs to come out. Get something with a sharp point, or a hook.
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Are you disgusted? Angry I’d write this stuff? Wondering where the PG13 notice is? I'm okay with that.
In Matthew 18:8, Jesus says, "If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better to enter life with only one hand or one foot than to be thrown into eternal fire with both your hands and feet.(NLT)" He says the same thing about our eyes.
We've probably read it a thousand times, but most of us have never thought about how awful his suggestion was.
It's gruesome, violent, agonizing, and horrible.
And He - Jesus - says that this kind of torture would be better than going to Hell.
A lot of people want to ask, "Is Hell literal flames?", "Is it eternal conscious torment?", "Are the descriptions of Hell meant to be allegorical?" There can be lousy motives for such a question like wanting to live by our own rules and trying to diminish the consequences. Or, genuine and God-fearing reasons, like trying to figure out how our loving God can be reconciled with such a terrible place.
I think an honest look at Scripture, though uncomfortable, indicates the strongest possibility that Hell is eternal, conscious, and beyond awful. See 2 Thess 1:9, Jude 12-13, Rev 20:10. And Jesus compares Hell to a fiery trash dump where the "fire is never quenched" and the "worm never dies."
In the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16) Jesus talks about a man who is conscious and in "agony in [the] fire." He craves even a drop of water for his tongue.
Here's what we know for certain. Jesus said we'd be better off taking a saw to our own legs, and a knife to our own eyes, than to experience the end result of sin, which is Hell. He used the worst of terms like "torment","darkness", and "fires" to describe the place. To me, when approached with the question, "Is Hell eternal conscious torment?" I think the best answer is "Jesus described it as awful, awful, awful to the extreme. Does that concern you?"
The wages of sin is death and the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus.
Let us fear Hell, do our best to avoid it, and dedicate our lives to helping others do so as well.
It's interesting...because I don't think that I ever thought of that passage that way. I had always seen the 'point' as that it'd be better to not have a hand, foot, or eye than keep it and end up in hell. So it wasn't actually the REMOVING of it that was better than hell, but having to live without it was better than hell.
Does that make sense?
Anyway...you've given me something to chew on...I like chewing :)
Lol. Silly, Christian. Hell doesn't exist.
I guess to be more specific, I always took it to mean that it's better to not have something that is generally 'good' and 'helpful' if it can be, at times, used by you for evil/sinning.
Interesting way of applying this scripture to imagine the pain and horror of hell. Is hell like having major surgeries without any painkillers--forever? This article didn't explain to readers how they can escape hell, though I know you have that information on your website.
Have there been a lot of discussions on campuses about hell since Rob Bell wrote Love Wins?
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