I am Apulakan Siklab. My English name is Marthy. I was a pastor who was preaching the holiness of God, repentance and the horrors of hell. When my son was young, I was telling him that we must give gospel tracts to people in the parks and streets so that they would be saved from the eternal punishment of hell fire. When I was a new worker to the ministry I was very zealous and I was witnessing to people and even to my mother and told her that if she would not repent from her sins and make Jesus the Lord of her life, she would go to hell. See how terrible that is.
But things have changed in the course of time. I continued studying my Bible and seeking God’s truth. Little by little I was being freed from religious errors that were implanted in my mind since I was a young Roman Catholic faithful. I and my fellow preachers held regular Bible studies together and we discovered that hell is not real. That God is not happy blessing his saints in eternal bliss while at the same time many of his creatures are eternally suffering in eternal torments. We embraced the doctrine of soul sleep then rather than immortality of the soul. But that is not the end of the story. It is now in my individual studies because our independent group didn’t continue. We parted ways. In my individual study of the Bible and also with online studies in internet and facebook, I discovered progressively that even soul sleep is not real, because “in him (God) we live and move and have our being”. One of the keys that led to my enlightenment is the principle of “audience relevance”. One of the books of the Bible that talks of the horrors of hell is the book of Revelation. It is very frightening to many people. But when I knew that the book of revelation was not written to “me” or “us” in the twenty first century but only to Israel in the first century that saved me from the wrong doctrine of hell. My fear was gone! And another thing. I discovered that hell is not really an unending fire in the underworld but it was the judgment of apostate Israel in the first century. And that this hell or gehenna is not a spiritual eternal place somewhere in the universe but it was a local place, Jerusalem itself. So it means that there is really no hell after AD 70.
Hell is simply a fairy tale but because we have believed it as true, it appeared as true just like the ghosts, the grim reaper and Santa Claus. My continuous study of the Bible helped me a lot and little by little my eyes are being opened. I now see that God our Father is so good so he will not torture us in eternal flames just because we disobeyed him. That is not the kind of Father God is. That is a Jewish myth, or a Yahwist myth. Father God wants us to learn more of his love and nature as our Father. If you are a genuine Bible believer, you will find out that hell is not real. I mean that the “hell” preached today in the Christian pulpits that frighten people is not real but only a “fantasy”. The hell that the Bible teaches is a metaphorical place called Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom, a dumpsite of dead decaying bodies. The real literal hell was Jerusalem city and temple when the Roman armies burned them down. And also another hell spoken in the Bible is called Hades and it is death. One of the translations of it is “grave”. Death and/even Hell were cast into the lake of fire, the second death. It means death and grave were thrown into the second death. They are gone for ever! When we die we don’t go to hell. We simply close our eyes like sleeping for a moment but open our eyes again and in glory. No need to be afraid of something that doesn’t exist. Hell is not real.
Marthy Austria is simply a man with simple faith in the God Most High, our Ab, our Father, the Alpha and the Omega, the Alep and the Tav. He believes that we don't have to worry when we die because in God we live, and move and have our being.
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Great testimony, @apulakansiklab!