How would you answer?

The will of God will be done. He has already spoken that those who will not accept Jesus will be condemned forever. We are good as dead anyway because we are hallucinating. We dont know what we are doing but the light from God is always available to us. God gives too many chances but it is clear that the wages of sin is death. Evil will continue to make us suffer but God will deliver the enduring and righteous away from it in the end.

Can't be sure if the quoted person is objecting to all God's violence or specifically something regarding hell.



The idea that all violence is primitive and immoral is a kind of high-minded dysfunctional view. I think it comes in large part from unforgiveness toward wrongful violence, or even toward rightful violence. Violence has to be reserved for when it is protective and precise, like surgery. But if you neglect to do what is necessary, the problem grows. Like cancer.

In this understanding of "God", you mustn't merely agree internally that all of God's actions are good, but must applaud him for carrying out acts that, if performed by a human, would earn them a life sentence in prison, or worse!

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Not really. Human leaders are expected to protect the people under them and that often requires violence. There is an ongoing spiritual war, one side has to win. Until they're defeated they are a threat, and that includes those who align with them, those who have given up having a heart and who ultimately want nothing to do with the values that make eternity possible.

My friends, when your understanding of the holiness of God forces you to lay aside what you know to be moral in favor of what you know to be immoral, there is a very large problem with your concept of God's holiness. If you must, under pain of death, call the actions of a superior force "good", when everything within you knows those actions to be evil, you are not serving the Father Jesus revealed. This sounds far more like North Korea than it does the Kingdom of God.

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Seems like the writer really overestimates his understanding. Has he ever been in authority over a large amount of people? During a crisis or a war where some had died and more were at risk? Fighting against an enemy that wished to remove him, everyone like him, and his way of life? A spiritual enemy thousands of years into deceit, torment, and extorting his side by the suffering of his loved ones?

Sin is comparable to a spiritual epidemic which makes its victims unable to survive in heaven and unable to avoid harming themselves and others wherever they are. Has this person ever been in an epidemic, and had to contain it, limit the casualties, and bring a cure, while staying uninfected? Has this person lived for ages and presided over countless worlds and lifetimes and balanced more power than we can imagine, with the goal of creating a family of beings that can relate without inhibition? How far has this person looked into eternity, in order to be qualified to say they know good and evil well enough to judge God?

God's holiness is manifested in his mercy, and in his unwillingness to resort to the methods we resort to. He does not valorize the actions of mad dictators and genocidal maniacs, but contradicts them. How we can condemn the actions of a Hitler, many of whose victims would be understood by the evangelical Christian as having gone straight to hell, and then turn around and praise the "God" who only intensifies what Hitler began, is absolutely beyond me.

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This is a caricature that makes me wonder how much time the writer has spent with these questions on his own, rather than taking the questions to God. It's like living next door to a very friendly ex-president and instead of talking to them about what you heard, you read all the propaganda by their political enemies and secretly agonize over it, imagining the worst.

But responding to the point: God's mercy is good, but God's holiness is mostly about God's truthfulness and love, working together and preserving eachother. Not everyone is willing to be a part of that. Hell is a result of letting people have their own way. Heaven is not about everyone doing things their own way and that is in a nutshell why some people can't accept it or be accepted by it. And mercy is for people that can benefit from it, sooner or later. It's presumptuous to speak for someone and say, this person will eventually choose to change, they will eventually love me back. Really, forcing everyone into heaven would be controlling.

You cannot call Hitler bad, and the one who presently tortures his "unsaved" victims' souls good, and keep your moral integrity intact. If Hitler is bad, so is the deity who takes up his mantle once the victim passes into the next life. If Hitler is evil so is hell, and, consequently, so is the "God" who stokes its flames.

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As I alluded to when I said people's choices create their eternity -- people are fully capable of torturing themselves. They can do it in this life so you can believe they can do it in the next life. The writer is using a very simplistic notion of omnipotence to put all the consequences at God's feet. What if God, in the process of making eternity and even divinity available to us as his children, also made it possible for people to misuse that divinity and create consequences as lasting as all the blessings he had hoped we'd choose?

There's a lot of modern ethics that mix themselves into christianity in a similar way to the 'leaven' of the pharisees. Humanistic ideas like the idea that all lives have value. It's more that they have potential value, and it is being revealed through the process of a human life. If their individual beings can connect with eternal values and truths then they can grow and flourish in a kingdom built by God on those values and those truths. But if their lives demonstrate through their choices and their beliefs, that they can't accept those things, they have rejected God and heaven, they have rejected what God and heaven are about. God is love, truth, and life. I believe that when they reject these things, they have rejected value itself.

Forgive me if what I am about to share has already been posted, but as I understand scripture:

John 3v16:
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

God didn't make hell for human beings, He made it for satan's and demons' eternal punishment. It is the place of eternal death. And so anything that is dead deserves its place there. God warned Adam and Eve that if they ate of the particular fruit of one particular tree they would die. I believe that once they ate it, death began its work in them, both spiritually and physically.

I don't believe heaven applauds when sinners got to hell, but rejoices when a sinner is saved,m as in the parable that Jesus told about the leaving of the ninety-nine sheep to find the missing one, and that of the prodigal son. (Luke 15v3-7, Luke 15v11-32)

Why if God wanted to be rid of us would He send His Son to reconcile us back to Him? Why would He bother to shed the blood of an animal that He made to clothe Adam and Eve in their exposed nakedness?

God is Love. Not Hitler. It is our choice to receive that love and salvation. God can only warn us where death leads and He won't twist our arms or make us little robots to follow Him and love Him. He leaves the decision to us. Once we have the faith to make it, it should seem like a no-brainer, right? Death or life? Pain or love? Until one has faith this is very difficult to see, for the God of this age has blinded the world's eyes.

Deuteronomy 30v19:
19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:


That's my take, anyway...
God bless all

Very good answer! I dont believe God wants to see anyone in hell, nor should we. God gives us every chance to accept Him.If we still continue our own way then we are choosing hell over heaven. But no Christian should ever rejoice that sinners are going to hell.

I take satisfaction in the thought of God cleaning house, but I also know I don't know the heartfelt ramifications of such desires. Be careful of what we wish for always comes to mind.

Well...wow. Willie, I want to start by saying that I think everyone who has ever really considered their Christian walk must have come across a similar roadblock, which, as I understand it, boils down to the "how can a holy God send people to Hell?" That being said, most people simply aren't honest enough to put it into words. I will be the last person to say that I know exactly how this works, or that I don't struggle with it. In a lot of ways this is simply one of the areas when I cry out "Lord I believe! Help thou my unbelief!" With our mortal minds, we cannot completely understand it.

I hopefully will send a response to this question as soon as possible, I want to pray and think about it first.

You're punishing your kids to teach a lesson, hopefully making them better people, better members of society.

The people that end up in Hell made that decision themselves. It's not "punishment" it's the final result of their own choosing.
It's not God saying "Aha! You said curse words most of your life...begone!" God has given humans the opportunity to either choose Him, or the world. If a human chooses the world, then he is receiving the outcome he wanted, and willingly chose. That's not God being cruel... that's God being JUST.

As far as the hypothetical 16yr old that crashes his car.... who says he's bound for Hell? It's not our place to say who is doomed and who is not.
God is the one that makes that call, and I trust Him to be just.

Well...yes. It was your hypothetical situation, and you said the kid had not even had enough time to accept or refuse (or something to that effect) which would make him pretty much not accountable. The souls that get sent to Hell had all their lives to accept or reject, and they said "no thanks" ... God is not going to force Himself on anyone..remember...free will.

(Not to be confused with Free Willie . )

I hate pat answers to difficult things as much as the next guy, but if you speak with honesty and love and say your bit, I would think that speaks volumes. Besides, while some of the answers here weren't helpful, there were certainly a few people that at least made some attempt to answer the question and did so with dignity and wisdom. If the person can't see beyond that, it's because their eyes haven't been opened to God's truth. After all, it's God who gives us the faith to have faith. It's God who opens our eyes to His reality to see us for who we are, to see Him for who He is, to show us how badly we need Jesus as our Saviour and Lord. You can rationalise things all you want, you can give the best answers possible, but if they're not open to the things of God, there's no helping them, there's no answer that will satisfy their yearnings.

The first thing I think of when I see this is the Moral argument.
When I give it more thought, I think of free will versus no evil left in the world, the difference between kill and murder, and objective morals versus subjective morals. I would probably use what a teacher of mine called the "Columbo Tactic" to get down to the the very basics of what is being asked.
Hitler murdered/tortured many that we are not fit to judge, but how do we get that hell is murder/ torture of people we judge? I think we commonly get the ideas behind justified killing/ murdering mixed up and this impacts our viewing of God.
This is a hard question, I am not sure how to answer. I want to say that if they are referring to why the world is in chaos....the answer would be free will, God wants us to come to him freely, but free will causes chaos/evil to enter the world.....You cannot destroy evil and still have free will. Wouldn't it also take a perfect God to judge perfectly before punishing to hell?
This is the best I can come up with right off the top of my head....If I think of anything else, I will add it later. Honestly, I have no clue how to answer.

I have a couple of Theologian and author friends who are really big on God having no traits that were not evident in Jesus' life and teachings. Sometimes it is tough to talk with them when they are so adamant that "If it doesn't look like Jesus, it isn't really God."

I usually just end up letting it go.......... partially because I can see where they are coming from, but I just can't accept that there isn't going to be at least, some kind of temporary punishment.... and then if no change of heart after that.... back in the frying pan for another few years.... then "Yes or No" asked again... If "No", it's back in again.

I just can't buy the fire forever thing....... But I can't go with no punishment at all.

And then we always get into the "justified violence" thing. I am for it, both of them (especially Mike... not so much Jeff) are not.

If I didn't like both of them so much, I'd just tell them to kiss off. But they are neat guys.

When you get into justified violence, what do they think about murder versus killing? Have you ever brought up when Jesus chased everyone who sold in the Temple? That would count as violence, right?

I like having friends that I disagree with... it makes for interesting conversations, as long as everyone knows when to take a break from it and "cool down", so to speak.

Sort of on a tangent here.... I'm not convinced in my own mind that "Hell" is going to be a fiery place... I know that some scriptures have alluded to that, but were they similar to the "pearly gates" kind of thing? Merely describing something in the most accurate way possible, given our limited knowledge and vocabulary? Streets of gold? Seriously, I think the streets are going to be SO much better than mere gold..
I'm thinking that the eternal torment described is part of the natural choice that people made, that end up there. Can you imagine an eternity of knowing you willingly pushed away the creator of the universe? An eternity away from the presence of the great I AM, the Light, Love?
Weeping and gnashing of teeth, indeed. I don't think that fire would make it any worse.

Again, just my opinion, at this point in my life. Worth what you paid for it.....

edit: Also, that "theory" of mine might help explain to your friends that God is not "punishing" people sent to Hell, that it is just as I, and others have described, the result their own choice, through free will. The "torment" is the direct result of their choice.

One thing we can find solace in, and take comfort by, is our ways are not His ways, our thoughts are not His thoughts. Do not isolate scripture, it will never produce the proper fruit for our edification,(faith hope love). In the Psalms we read, "God is terrible", I see this truth from God about Himself, His position, and my heart is for Him, that He has to do what no one could ever do, remain honest, with integrity, true holiness and be completely righteous all day every day, eternally. That is the God I need, the God of our salvation.

I offer this, in the book of Romans, we learn, insight to part of the holy, righteous judgment of God on the heart, it is how a person holds the truth. God has placed knowledge in our heart from conception, it is absolute and our possession, our compass. Even the heathen who were "without hope, without God and without Christ in the world", were found to preform before God's eyes from this compass of truth.

God is beautiful in all His ways, but we may not see or understand this "through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know"

Consider that Jesus came to save the world, not condemn it. He was sent by the Father. I think it bears mentioning, in order to be saved, one has to be being saved from something. That something is Hell. Its often described as the "highway to Hell" as all are condemned without Christ, but Jesus is the exit to salvation.

Keep in mind the Lord didn't create Hell for mankind, but for the devil and other fallen angels (who rebelled). That was its first intention, but because of man's sin and alienating himself from God that place became the default destination because there cannot be darkness in light.

Then, of course, we have the Gospel... Jesus dying and then resurrecting to reconcile man to God. God doesn't want people in Hell, nor did He create it for them but by choice of their own they made it their destination. This, God didn't desire and therefore the rest is history in that of the Son of God dying and resurrecting for man.

The NT didn't restate all the attributes of God all over again. Jesus is God. The OT is the NT Jesus. Jesus came to give His life,He became human,He had work to do. So we see different attributes of God in the NT. But the longsuffering,slow to wrath, merciful God is evident in both OT and NT. You cannot separate the two.