Board index ‹ Heaven and Hell

[Java]

How does God not seem like a terrible being, considering the fact that he creates people that he knows (because he is supposedly omniscient) will live a brief, miserable life on Earth and then go to burn in hell for all eternity?

[jimwalton]

The Bible makes quite clear that God didn't create a place of endless suffering for certain humans to go. Mt. 25.41 says that hell was specifically created solely for the devil and his angels. There was never intent on God's part that any human should go there.

Secondly, the Bible makes clear that God is just, and frankly, any God worth his salt would have to be. A cop who lets the criminals do what they want is not a cop at all, and then society just becomes anarchic. A courtroom judge who lets everyone go free, regardless of what they've done, has no clue what justice is. In the same way, a God who ignores wrong-doing is a monster, not a deity.

So here's the scene: God invites each person into a loving relationship with himself. He has prepared a wonderful place for them, and leaves the door wide open. It doesn't make God a terrible being that a person refuses to come in and chooses of their own free will to stay outside in the chaos. There's a Book of Life, but there's no Book of Death. But people who reject God choose to be separated from him, and they will go to a fate that was never meant to be theirs. We are free agents, and the choices we get to make regarding spiritual truths are real choices. God does not force anyone towards heaven or hell. Those choices are ours alone to make.

So here's the true scenario: God loves you (Jn. 3.16), knows that you can't save yourself (since no one is worthy), and so has made every provision for your rescue, offering it as a free gift to all comers. We must repudiate what separates us from God (repent of our sins), and turn to him in love (very different from "religion". It's much like a marriage ceremony, where you forsake all others to commit yourself in love to the one who loves you.) But since love must always be chosen and never forced, he informs and invites all people to come to him for rescue (salvation). The choice is each individual's, and always ours. No worthiness is involved, but only choice and love. All sincere comers will be accepted. All who refuse and choose to have nothing to do with God will endure the consequences of that decision: life without God, and eternity without God, if they get all the way to the end of life spurning his every invitation. They weren't created bound for hell, and Jer. 18.1-12 lets us know that they always have a legitimate choice to do as they wish with their lives. God will adjust according to their free-will choices. The path to hell is never a certainty unless the person in question makes it such.

The Bible pictures it this way: Let's suppose there are two doors, one leading to eternal separation from God, and one leading to eternal joy in his presence. Door #1 was only prepared for Satan and his sycophants, and door #2 was prepared for all people. Jesus is standing between the doors, and as people approach, he expresses his love for them and invites them to enter door #2 and bliss. But when people grab the handle to door #1, he cries out to them, "Don't do that. It's a terrible thing. You don't want to go there. Come this way, into door #2." But they choose to enter door #1 anyway.

Of course that's just. My bottom line is this: Those who turn away from God will be separated from the life of God. Though we can't be sure about the form or duration of that separation, this we can be sure of: it will be a horrible experience, and God will be fair about the form and duration of it. If you reject God, you take your chances.

[Java]

But regardless of what God wants, created us for, what is available to us, etc, some people obviously still suffer in hell, and he knew they would, yet he allowed them to exist whether or not he directly "made" them.

[jimwalton]

Couples bring children into the world, knowing that there is a possibility of disease, accident, or death. Even in desperate parts of the world, couple brings children into environments of violence, malnutrition, and disease. Men and women start businesses, knowing that there is a possibility of failure and financial ruin. We are people of hope, and of love. We long for stability, health, prosperity, reason, and success. We want to engender life and well-being, but we know about pain, suffering, failure, and the great risks of living.

God also wanted children. He wanted to engender life. He froths over with love, and created a temple (the cosmos) for himself to engage the people he had made in a loving relationship. Yes, he knew the risks. He knew that some would rebel and reject, that there would be suffering, and some would even choose death and suffering over life. As we all know, you can't have love without the possibility of hurt.

Let me put it this way: You are thinking of hell as endless unfair torture of fairly good people who just happened to not believe in God or follow him. That's not the teaching of Scripture. You are using a false idea to color your thoughts and feed your rejection of God as some kind of immoral monster.

And I'll add this: Even you have a choice. Before you stand two doors, one that leads to life, and one that leads to destruction. You are making your choice willfully, knowing the stakes and risks. God is not to blame for the free-will decision you make. He "allowed" you to exist so that you could come to Life and live in loving relationship with your Creator. He has no intention that you reject him and be separated from him. But he can't stop you if you choose to walk away, knowing that eternal separation is the ultimate consequence. Instead of God being a terrible being, it just makes you, if I may say so, the fool. You have turned your back on a treasure because of a false impression.

[Icky]

> So here's the scene: God invites each person into a loving relationship with himself.

Each person? How, exactly, did he invite native Australians before Europeans and their preachers showed up, 18 centuries after the first Europeans got their invitations? Of course, this "Didn't receive an invitation for X number of centuries," is very, very long.

[jimwalton]

Good call. Thanks for checking up on me. Romans 1.19-20 tell us that even people who don't know anything about the Bible can know that God exists and at least something about him from the world around them and the conscience inside of them. God had made himself evident enough to be perceived on some level. So you're right: they couldn't know that God was inviting them into a loving relationship with himself, they could only know that he existed and what some of his qualities were: power, beauty, order, uniformity, purpose, function, cause and effect, the validity of sense perception, reason, personality, knowledge, moral responsibility, will, and love. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, "We don't start with a knowledge of God. We begin as knowing the world in which we live. We have to be content with reasoning to God's existence from that." Thanks for catching that and letting me clarify.

[Icky]

> Romans 1.19-20 tell us that even people who don't know anything about the Bible can know that God exists and at least something about him from the world around them and the conscience inside of them

So it logically follows from what you say that Christianity was never a necessity and missionary work is pointless.

Do you agree? Because if you say that it is necessary and missionaries are important, you are admitting that the people in places and times where Christianity has reached have an advantage over places where it has not. And when you are talking about eternal rewards, such advantages are unjust.

[jimwalton]

No, that doesn't logically follow from what I said. Knowing God is a matter of progressive and growing understanding, of progressive revelation. Paul's point in Rom. 1 is that everyone has a starting point—things about God that are fairly obvious and that no one needs a missionary around to explain to them. The prophets were necessary because there was more to learn and deeper to go. The OT was written because there was even more to learn and understand, and God revealed himself in those writings. Then when Jesus came, he was a much fuller and more complete revelation of God, a giant step forward in our understanding of God. Then Christian wrote the New Testament, explaining much more about Jesus, salvation, and eternity. So Christianity has always been a necessity, and missionary work is valuable. The revelation of God is progressive, and our knowledge of God is ongoing.

Does that mean that "people in places and times where Christianity has reached have an advantage over places where it has not"? In ways, yes, but we also know from Romans 5.13 and some of Jesus' parables that "to those who have been given, more will be required," and from those to whom less is given, there is less accountability and the conditions are different. In other words, God runs the system fairly so that no one has an advantage or a disadvantage. Each one of us is responsible for what we've done with what we had access to.

[Java]

If these Romans verses are true, how come there have been no spontaneous outbreaks of Christianity?

[jimwalton]

There are plenty of anecdotes of "spontaneous theism." Missionaries tell stories of coming into a village in the middle of nowhere, presenting the Gospel, and the people responding with "We just KNEW it was something like that. We knew there was a Creator God, that there were right and wrong, and now you have put a name to Him that makes perfect sense. Thank you." Christianity can't spontaneously generate, since those populations are without knowledge of Jesus. It's specifically the knowledge of Jesus that is the definition of Christianity. You seem to be asking, "How come they don't spontaneously follow Jesus about whom they've never heard?" You're asking for a contradiction.