Consider for a moment God’s law about a working bull: “You must not muzzle a bull while it is threshing.” (Deuteronomy 25:4) This law reflected God’s compassionate concern and care for unreasoning animals. The bull was not to be tormented by being forcibly prevented from satisfying its desire to feed on some of the grain it was threshing.
Far greater is God’s concern and love for humankind than for the unreasoning animals. As Jesus Christ reminded his disciples: “Five sparrows sell for two coins of small value, do they not? Yet not one of them goes forgotten before God. But even the hairs of your heads are all numbered. Have no fear; you are worth more than many sparrows.”—Luke 12:6, 7.
Would it not be totally inconsistent, then, for anyone to claim that a God with such tender feelings would literally torment some humans for all eternity? Who of us would want to see someone undergoing the most horrible torture for even an hour? Is it not true that only fiendish persons would delight in seeing others suffer? Does not our inward sense of love and justice go into a state of revolt when we hear that a father tortured his child nearly to the point of death for some act of disobedience? Regardless of how bad the child may have been, we find it impossible to have any tender feelings for such a father. Being made in God’s image makes such a thought unthinkable!!
