Faithfully In Ecuador: How Can A Good God Send People To Hell?

HOW CAN A GOOD GOD SEND PEOPLE TO HELL?

"If God really is all loving, then how can He send anybody to hell?"

This question is an embarrassment for many Christians today.

The Bible teaches that God is love, and yet, it warns that those who reject God face everlasting punishment.

But aren't these two somehow inconsistent with each other?

A lot of people seem to think that they are inconsistent, but in fact this isn't at all obvious.

After all, there is no explicit contradiction between them.

The statement "God is all loving" and "Some people go to hell" are not explicitly contradictory.

For make these two are inconsistent, there must be some hidden assumptions which would serve to bring out the contradiction.

God doesn't send people to hell against their will.

God desires everyone to be saved (2 Peter 3:9).

Those who are not saved do not will to be saved (Matthew 23:37).

“The door to hell is locked on the inside.”

C. S. Lewis

All who go there choose to do so.

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’ and those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done’. All that are in hell, choose it.”

C. S. Lewis

The detractors of hell make two crucial assumptions.

First of all, they assume that if God is all powerful, then God can create a world in which everyone freely chooses to give their lives to God and are saved.

The second assumption is that if God is all loving, then God prefers a world in which everyone freely chooses to give their lives to God and be saved.

Since God is both willing and able to create a world where everyone is freely saved, it follows that nobody goes to hell.

These both assumptions have to be necessarily true to prove that God and hell are logically inconsistent with each other.

If there is a possibility that one of these assumptions is false, it is though possible that God is all-loving and yet some people go to hell.

“Without that self-choice there could be no hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

C. S. Lewis

According to Bible, God’s nature is both perfect justice and perfect love.

Both of these are equally powerful and neither can be compromised.

God is just.

He is totally fair.

He is the most competent, intelligent, impartial, and fairest judge we will ever have.

Every human will be guaranteed absolute justice.

And this is precisely the problem!

God’s justice exposes our inadequacies.

Every person has failed to live up to God’s moral law and so finds himself guilty before God.

Thus we find ourselves under the law of divine justice.

We reap what we sow.

So our problem is that nobody measures up.

If we are judged for who we are and what we have done, if we rely on God’s justice.

We all go to hell.

There is nobody who deserves to go to heaven.

To be able to go to heaven we must cast ourselves on God’ mercy.

God literally pleads us to turn back from our self-destructive course of action and be saved.

That is why He sent His only son to die for us.

Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of God’s justice and love.

In order to be able to go to heaven, we only need to place our trust in Christ as our Savior and the Lord of our lives.

If we reject Christ, we reject God’s mercy and fall back on His justice.

Then there is no one else to pay the penalty for our sin – but ourselves.

God doesn't choose to send anybody to hell.

His desire is that everyone be saved, and He pleads with people to come to Him.

It is matter of our free choice.

“I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully ‘All will be saved’. But my reason retorts, ‘Without their will, or with it?’ If I say ‘Without their will’, I at once perceive a contradiction, how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say, ‘with their will’, my reason replies, ‘How if they will not give in?’”

C. S. Lewis

God is just and He must punish sin.

(Habakkuk 1:13) (Revelations 20:11-15)

But He is also love (1 John 4:14).

His love cannot force others to love Him.

Love cannot work coercively but only persuasively.

Forced love is contradiction in terms.

Hence, God’s love demands that there be hell where persons who do not wish to love Him can experience the great divorce when God says to them, “Thy will be done!”.

This is Good God Questions Monday. A series dedicated to those good, and difficult, questions about God, universe, life, sin, Christ, love, and everything related.

Why is it so important to answer questions about God?

“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect”

1 Peter 3:15

Even little children can ask tough question, but there are good answers for all of them. The Bible exhorts us to find them and give them.

“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”

Colossians 4:6

This post is based on the book “How Made God? And Answer To Over 100 Other Tough Questions Of Faith” by Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler.

The First Monday we wondered:

WHO MADE GOD?

The Second Monday we wondered:

WHY COULDN'T THE WORLD HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED?

The Third Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN GOD MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING?

The Fourth Monday we wondered:

WHAT WAS GOD DOING BEFORE HE MADE THE WORLD?

The Fifth Monday we wondered:

HOW CAN THERE BE THREE PERSONS IN ONE GOD?