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Welcome to our traditional website for the

Three Valleys Team Ministry

 

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A new website is being created.

Please follow the link www.threevalleysteam.org.uk 

There are lots of new ideas, including "Word for the Week", a text and commentary to help each week. 

 

Please explore the new site (which will be run in parallel with this one for the moment)

and 

please send feedback using the contact details for the Reverend George Moody on either website.

 

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It is the summer holiday and this is the UK so naturally our thoughts turn to rain!!

Water is so vital to life that we very quickly feel the effects when we can’t get it and, of course, if we go without it for too long then we die but we also complain when we get too much of it. There is no doubt that it is absolutely essential to our lives. The ancient Jewish people were also acutely aware of their need for water and they knew all about the torment caused by being lost in the desert without it. To die in the blazing sun of an arid desert through lack of water is one of the most unpleasant deaths imaginable and living near the desert as they did they were very familiar with it.

It is not surprising then that this very unpleasant imagery began to colour the Jewish ideas of Hell. The Old Testament descriptions of Hell are often much more images of thirst in a hot arid environment rather than the later mediaeval description of a fiery furnace. In fact even the parables of Jesus in the New Testament sometimes also share this idea of an unquenchable thirst.

I find the idea of a raging thirst without relief a much better description of Hell than the one in common currency because, far from Hell being a place where bad people are put, it becomes a state of being where the unquenchable thirst is the need for God which is forever unsatisfied because our own desires and wants get in the way. Indeed, as a counterpoint to the unquenchable thirst, the descriptions in the Bible of God’s interaction with us often use the terminology of being offered ‘living streams’ of water.

It seems to me that all too many people today recognise that they have a thirst and need for God but for some reason they continually forbid themselves the opportunity to quench it and far too many of them suffer the tormented thirst of the damned as a consequence.

 

Yours

 

Tony Gilbert

Team Rector

 

 

 I hope that you will find plenty of useful

 and interesting information in here. 

    

 

 

The Reverend Tony Gilbert

and

Tony with his wife Nicola