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The Bible is far less clear about Hell than what you may have grown up hearing. Complex and eternal realities cannot be talked about with complete certainty. Instead, we can approach these topics with great humility and trust that God will bring clarity in the end. Today, we're looking at the historic and cultural references that are often translated to "Hell," and what the Bible says Hell is intended for.

Ultimately, we have never known a time and place in our entire history without God’s presence. No matter what that looks like in reality, the point is to understand God's grace that surrounds and protects us. God does not desire for anyone to experience this kind of existence without Him.

The focus of darkness in spiritual warfare is to pull us into ourselves and doubt God's love - this happens when we believe lies over the Truth of God. When we choose to live out the words of Jesus to "love others as [He] has loved us," we defeat darkness. There isn't a magic formula, it's simply loving others in the same love that has transformed us. Today, we continue to define how to live out this idea according to scripture and the armor that God has given us.

There can be a disconnect between our daily lives and the internal realities of what the death and resurrection of Jesus did for us. We will all experience difficult times in our lives, but we don't always feel the reality that Jesus has overcome that difficulty. In these seasons, we can find some relevant parallels to what the disciples experienced in the moments immediately after Jesus' death/resurrection. If don’t leave God in the hard and confusing seasons in which it feels like the bottom falls out beneath us, we find God and our faith come alive with new and deeper meaning.

The victory of Jesus doesn't just impact our future, it affects who we are NOW. His suffering and his death and his resurrection was a work that remakes us into people of God whose shame is banished, where death does not have the final word, where we are in deep communion with God again, and where we learn to love others as God has loved us. We often spend our time trying really hard to BE different instead of being transformed by the knowledge that we ARE different, and then choosing to live from the knowledge of that reality.

We're continuing our series about the supernatural themes and ideas of the Bible and what it tells us about God. This week we start to examine the idea of spiritual warfare and what God actually asks us to do.

Having a personal doctrine of spiritual warfare in which we feel we must battle Satan is a dangerous game to play. It can often end up putting people exactly where Satan wants them - which is focused on the darkness, or themselves, more than God and others. Ideas about spiritual warfare can seduce us with a list of the right actions and words that are needed to successfully push back darkness and in so doing, it elevates man and method above the work of Christ.

Putting on the reality of who we are in Jesus Christ is what eliminates the darkness. Owning this identity prevents lies from taking root in our mind.

We are continuing our study of what the Bible says about Satan, specifically the influence that he has (or doesn't have) on the world. The purpose of this study is to define our true identity in the love and power of God and how we do not need to fear the world or its ruler, no matter what we face. Part of this is acknowledging the ways of the world that are not aligned with the Truth of who God is, but may feel right to us. We humbly ask the Holy Spirit to teach us and show us ways that we are acting with hard hearts or anger instead of the grace and love of Christ.