Why hell?
The following is a response is written in conversational style and is meant to start not stop conversation on this important subject.A Friend’s question, slightly reworded:
Why would God send someone to hell where there is eternal suffering and not just make them cease to exist? Would God send a good person to hell just because they believe in a different religion?My response:
Do you mind if i ask you a few questions? Trust me, I'm going to come back to your question.Do you consider yourself a good person? Have you lied? Stolen? God says that if you look with lust you have committed adultery in your heart. Have you looked at someone in lust? If you’ve admitted to these things, by your own admission you're a lying, thieving adulterer at heart. Do you think you'd be innocent or guilty of these things on Judgment day?
It’s important to realize that we’re not an unbiased party when answering this question. And if we’re on the same page about our guilt before a morally perfect standard, we can move on to the deeper issue of what hell is and how people get there.
God never sends good people to hell. But are there any good people? Or have people as a whole followed their own paths of wrongdoing, rather than the Creator who gave them life? The Bible says no, none are good (Rom 6:23, Is 53:6, Rom 3:10-12) and your natural wages when you leave the good path (sin) is death.
How can you have life apart from the source of life? (Colossians 1:16-17, John 1:3)
When you flee the light, why are you surprised you have darkness? That is the nature of hell (1 John 1:5, Matthew 8:12, 22:13, and 25:30).
Sometimes --a lot of times-- we don't know exactly why God does what he does. (I don’t know all the motives for why most humans do what they do.) But we can be sure of God’s character. So don’t be surprised if we are unable to come up with a mathematical proof of why God sends evil people to eternal punishment. It’s possible to know that something is true without knowing exactly why. Nevertheless, consider the following moral reasoning:
It is offense to let guilty people go free without punishment, because it ignores the offense. We could let all murders go free, but it would effectively diminish the value of their victims. It would seek to suppress the evil of the crime without warrant.
But God gives people value by the image of God put on our nature. So asking God to not punish sinners is asking God to say evil is nothing and deny himself, that is, deny his good character. God cannot do this.
When people get punished, do you think they'll continue to have sinful intents, thoughts, and motives? The horror is that people will continue sinning in hell. Those sins would then need more punishment, and it's likely they should actually be punished more. Only God can judge our thoughts, but the implications are serious. If you are in a sinful state, you will keep on deserving more and more punishment. You will never get out, and your deserved punishment will only grow not lessen. That is what it means to be lost.
Ultimately, Jesus is why I believe in a hell. He clearly teaches it (Luke 16:26). People are thrown into Hades and Hades moved to the Lake of fire, where the smoke of their active torment goes up forever and ever (Rev 14:11).
Seek God while there is time (Psalms 2:12). If you have a broken nature that seeks darkness rather than light, how will you ever escape the darkness? God is pure joy (1 Tim 1:11). People who love evil reject God--presumably on their own volition. As far as I can tell, people choose to “reign in hell rather than serve in heaven.”
While this is not a full critique of universalism or annihilationism, I hope that these meditations can provide a framework for seriously considering human lostness and the implications for eternity.
Food for thought:
“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, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. 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. Those who knock it is opened.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
“All get what they want; they do not always like it.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
