How Can A Good God Send People To Hell? Series

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SERIES RECAP

If you are visiting or this is your first time listening, today we’re wrapping up a series called Talking Faith. It’s a series about apologetics; learning how

“…to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).

In this final message (Part 4) of the series, I’d like to tackle a question I hear people ask from time to time: How Can a Good God Send People to Hell?

To begn to unwrap this question, let's read a parable Jesus told in Luke 16:19-31.

WHAT IS HELL AND WHERE IS IT?

What is hell? The Bible uses several images to describe hell:

As a place where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” This phrase is used 7 times in the New Testament as a description for the destination of the unrighteous (Matthew 8:12, 13:42, 13:50, 22:13,24:51, 25:30; Luke 13:28).

It a place of an “eternal fire [which has been] prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:30)

A “lake of burning sulfur” (Revelation 20:10)

The contours and thermal output of hell are not as important as the fact that hell is complete separation from the presence of God. The Apostle Paul put it like this in 2 Thessalonians 1:9,

They [the wicked] will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might… (2 Thessalonians 1:9).

Hell is eternal separation from God. It’s a place of everlasting destruction, where its captives moan and wail. It’s a place of utter hopelessness, extreme anguish, and endless torment. It’s a place that has been prepared for the devil, his angels, and for those who reject God.

QUESTIONS ABOUT HELL

Most, if not all, people associate hell with unpleasantness; a place you wont to avoid at all costs. So, since hell, is such a wretched place, how could a good and loving God send people there for eternity? The short answer is he does not send people to hell; people choose to go there themselves.

In his book The Great Divorce (1945), C.S. Lewis wrote that in the end there are only two kinds of people in the world,

“…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.”

So, claiming that God is unjust to punish people for sins they committed on earth is illogical. Those who are in hell have knowingly committed the ultimate sin: they’ve rejected a relationship with God. If a person wants to live like there’s no God, they are free to do so, but they will spend eternity without God. God is not unjust to punish those who reject Him, their punishment fits the crime they’ve committed.

A CHANGE OF HEART IN HELL?

Someone might say, well wouldn’t a person in hell want to be with God once they found out what hell was really like?

No. Those who have resisted God on earth will continue to resist him in hell. Their hearts have been hardened by sin. For example,

(1) Joseph Stalin, who was on track to become a minister, rejected a belief in God and went on to murder 15 million of his own people. Stalin sold his soul to the devil and on his deathbed as his last act of defiance, he clenched his fist toward heaven, and with that, he died.

(2) Adolf Hitler murdered 6 million Jews in the Holocaust (1939-1941). Hitler was a diabolical murder and his mission was to destroy the apple of God’s eye; the Jewish people. Hitler said, his mission was to “...to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious, relentless and cruel.”

(3) Historians estimate that Mao Zedong (Tse Tung) was responsible for the deaths of as many as 46 million people in the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962).

These men totally rejected God and gave themselves fully to evil. They detested anything and everything that had to do with God. They hardened their hearts toward God. Reveled in wickedness. They were heartless, calloused, cold-blooded murderers who took pleasure in inflicting pain and horror on others.

THE RICH MAN AND THE BEGGAR

Another aspect about hell is that the Bible doesn’t give us any reason to believe that those in hell are repentant. In the parable of the Rich Man and the Beggar (Luke 16:19-26), Jesus paints a vivid picture of the eternal state of two men.