Here are some thoughts I put together! Hopefully some of these prove useful:
“How could a loving God send people to hell?” When people ask this question I think they often have a couple worries in mind:
1. It seems unloving to deprive people of heaven forever as punishment for a finite amount of sin.
2. It seems unloving to have people tortured forever as punishment for a finite amount of sin.
That is, the problem is both with what the damned don’t get as well as with what they do (and the amount of it too).
Underlying worry 2 is an idea of hell as involving literal torture applied to the damned. While this is a popular picture of hell, the biblical images of damnation are a bit more nuanced. In the Bible, damnation is described in terms of fire, darkness, shame, rubbish, destruction, and death. These pictures are ways of depicting judgment and separation from God and his kingdom. In other words, hell or damnation involves a split between the person and God and between the person and God’s rule on earth. That’s the center of the concept, not hell-as-torture-chamber with God-as-head-torturer.
So just as we can think of heaven as the place of God’s presence and will - and hence of Christians as already in heaven and bringing heaven with them to the earth (Ephesians) - so we can also think of hell as the place of God’s absence and deviance from his will - and hence of people as already in hell in their separation from God and bringing hell with them to the earth. “War is hell”, “I went through hell”, and similar sayings, then, aren’t so far from the truth!
This helps us not only understand worry 2 but worry 1 as well. The damned fundamentally, at the core of their being, do not want God’s kingdom - they don’t want themselves or how they live or think conformed to God’s will nor do they want to live in a world that does so; they simply don’t want the kind of relationship God offers nor do they want to value things the way God values them. Some may want some kind of heaven or paradise or a divinity - just not the actual one on offer!
Not only do the damned not want God’s kingdom, they would not be able to enjoy it even if they were somehow to find themselves there. Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.’s paraphrase of John Henry Newman: “Heaven is not for everyone: it is an acquired taste, and hard to acquire while our taste buds still resemble a crocodile’s back. An unholy person would be restless and unhappy in heaven.”
In sum, the damned are not fit for the kingdom of God nor do they want to be. The kingdom and the damned simply cannot work together. The damned are unfit for the kingdom like a fish is unfit for dry land and would suffer there. Placing the damned into God’s restored creation would be like shoving a rusty tool into the moving gears of a working engine - both will be ruined.
In the kingdom of God, in God’s restored creation, God’s will is done. By definition, the damned are outside this - they do not conform to God’s will nor do they want to. So when the kingdom fully comes to earth and God’s will is fully done and earth and heaven are made one, the damned cannot, will not, and would not take part in that. In character, in deed, and in will, they place themselves outside the kingdom and outside what is to them God’s intolerable presence.
This ability to place ourselves outside God’s will - to place ourselves into a state of hell! - is part of our original design. We were designed to be God’s helpers in shaping creation - and part of that creation is ourselves - and are given the freedom to conform to God’s will or not. Hence, we can shape ourselves in a way in conformity with that will or not. In other words, we can make ourselves through our actions into who we will become – we decide in the present our future character. We become our choices.
In a sense, then, God does not send people to Hell, we choose to become it. Romans 1:28-32.
“Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.” C. S. Lewis
Being condemned to Hell is nothing other than being condemned to self. Hell is our chosen “freedom” from God. “There are only two kinds of people – those who say ‘Thy will be done’ to God or those to whom God in the end says, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice it wouldn’t be Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.” – C. S. Lewis
As others have said, the gates of hell, therefore, are locked from within. God doesn’t want to exclude anyone from his restored creation but some people voluntarily exclude themselves. This is why responding to the gospel and turning to Christ is so important - it is a turning to the kingdom, to God’s will and his future restored creation. Those in Christ are ultimately conformed to his will - they embrace it, they want it, they live in harmony with it around them.
(None of this, of course, answers questions like “What about babies” or “What about people who never hear or understand the gospel?” While these are great questions, they are separate from the question considered here, whether a loving God could send anyone to hell - the question here is could not who!)
(There is also the further question of whether God will allow the damned to continue in their ever-deteriorating state or instead will ultimately purge them from creation - traditionalists say yes to the former, annihilationists like John Stott say yes to the latter. That obviously goes beyond the current question!)
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