My Musings – For those that still struggle with reconciling God’s love with His righteousness, the following essay by Charles Stanley might offer some added insight:
The existence of hell seems to fly in the face of what the Bible says about God’s love, forgiveness, and grace. How could a God of love send people to hell forever? Furthermore, it doesn’t seem reasonable. How is it that seventy or eighty years of sin merit an eternity of punishment?
These questions reveal an error in our overall understanding of sin and the nature of God. If a man’s eternal destiny was a matter of counterbalancing his bad deeds with good, these questions may have some credence. If hell was a system wherein a person paid God back for her sin, seventy years versus eternity would be an issue. If God arbitrarily came up with the rules that governed who goes to heaven and hell, we would have good cause to call his fairness into question. But none of these things has any bearing on the question of why there is a hell and why people who go there go there forever.
Hell is a reality because of an incompatibility problem. Holy God and unholy humankind are incompatible. And no amount of time apart can change that.
The rules that govern who goes to heaven and hell are established by God’s nature. Things are the way they are because God is the way He is. That makes them unchangeable because God cannot change.
Take fire, for example. Fire is hot by nature. Fire doesn’t make itself hot; it is hot. That is the nature of fire. If you stuck your hand in a campfire to retrieve a hotdog that fell off your stick, you would be burned. You wouldn’t get mad at the fire. You wouldn’t say, “I can’t believe that fire burned me, I never did anything to the fire! Why would it treat me like that?”
Fire and your hand are incompatible. They don’t go well together. You can protect your hand with a fireproof glove, but that doesn’t make your hand and fire more compatible; that doesn’t change the nature of fire.
God is holy by nature. And He can’t change. Unholy things don’t do well around holy God. It is hard for us to grasp the power and awesomeness of God’s glory and holiness. John – who knew Jesus well – saw Jesus in all His glory and fell down as a dead man (Revelation 1:16-17). Why? He was overwhelmed by the glory of God.
The only solution to this dilemma was for God to change us. That is why Christ came and died – to pave the way for a change in our very nature. Those who accept Christ’s death as the payment for their sin are made holy (2 Corinthians 5:21). That is why we are referred to as saints. That is why the Holy Spirit is able to dwell in us. At salvation there was a fundamental change in our nature. We were taken out of darkness and placed into the kingdom of God. We became heavenly citizens.
Unbelievers go to hell because they are incompatible with heaven. They don’t go to hell to pay God back. The severity of the sin doesn’t send them there. The quantity of their sin doesn’t send them there. The problem is that they aren’t suited for heaven. They have not been cleansed of the sin that makes them unholy.
As much as I dislike the idea, I do believe that the lake of fire (hell) is a real, literal place. And as hard as it is to grasp, I do believe that people will eventually be sent there to live for eternity. People in hell will be separated from God and all that is good forever.
I believe it because Jesus believed it. I know Jesus believed it because of the price He paid to provide a way to escape. If He hadn’t believed in Hell, He would not have gone to such extreme measures to save us from it. His belief was so deep, and His picture was so clear that it drove Him to leave His throne and His glory to die an excruciating death.
So how do you respond? Christ’s desire [love] to rescue you from hell motivated Him to die for you. It certainly ought to motivate you to [respond to Him].
My Advice – No response is a rejection. Things just won’t work out in the end, so don’t count on it.
Resources:
Charles Stanley, The Glorious Journey, (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1996), pp. 245-248.
The Brew Is A Musing 