why is there a hell?
This week I ran across a guy who absolutely refused to follow any God who would condemn people to hell. He didn’t care what they had done or who they were. “Hell is a horrible place,” he argued, “and no one deserves to go there.” His problem was not necessarily a misunderstanding about God, but rather a misunderstanding about man. Before we can ever follow Christ, we have to understand how truly wicked we are without him. There is a difference between understanding the depravity of man in an abstract philosophical way and coming to a full conviction of how evil we are. It is only the power of Jesus Christ who can rescue us from this condition and help us walk in “newness of life.”
When Nathan confronts David about his sin with Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 12, David declares about the man in Nathan’s story “as the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die.” When Nathan tells David that he is the man in the story, David knows what he has done and declares “I have sinned against the Lord.” He didn’t sit there and make excuses, instead he understood the wickedness in his own heart and how he deserved death.
Now, one might ask, “why is it that we need to go to hell in the first place? Why can’t God just cut us some slack and forget about the whole thing? Why can’t we all just go to heaven and be happy? He loves us, doesn’t he?” Well the answer to all those questions has to do with the very nature of God. He is totally holy and totally pure. Heaven is not a place were we all get what we want or live in total bliss. Heaven is the very presence of God. That is what makes it so wonderful. If there was any amount of sin in the presence of God, it would cease to be heaven. Therefore, no one who is sinful can possibly enter heaven by definition.
Hell is the opposite, the state of not being in the presence of God. When people choose to sin, they choose to cut themselves off from God’s presence. In this way, God does not send people to hell, they choose to go there themselves. Praise the Lord that he has made a way for us to turn around and come back to his presence even after making this terrible choice. It is the power of the blood of Jesus Christ to remove the guilt of past sin from us, and it is the power of his resurrection to purify our present lives and enable us to live with him.
Bjorn wrote:
So, assuming for a moment that omnipotence (in god) is not contradictory with free will (in man), why did god give man the choice to sin?
Posted on 18-Jun-07 at 12:41 pm | Permalink
Bjorn wrote:
To clarify,god, having determined the nature of all things, surely determined the nature of man. If sin is part of the nature of man, what explanation does the Bible provide for this “decision” on god’s part.
Posted on 18-Jun-07 at 12:45 pm | Permalink
dan wrote:
I’m glad you asked, Bjorn. Your question wasn’t really within the scope of the above post, but I would be glad to address it. This gets into the stickier parts of the problem of evil. How is it that an all good, all powerful and all knowing God allows evil in the universe?
Here is the quick answer: The very nature of “love” is such that it requires a free moral agent. The nature of “love” is also such that it is a greater good than any evil which could be caused by the wrong exercises of said freewill. Therefore, God gives us freewill. Clearly we can debate about those two necessary premises I just gave, but that is my basic position.
For a longer explanation, I wrote a somewhat related paper on the subject. This was written for Philosophy 545, the Philosophy of Religion, with Dr. Bradshaw. It was written in response to an article by JL Mackie called “Evil and Omnipotence”. You can find it on JSTOR if you have access. My positions have changed somewhat since I wrote that paper; however, it addresses the question from a mainline Christian perspective.
Some more recommended reading can be found at the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Posted on 18-Jun-07 at 1:20 pm | Permalink
dan wrote:
It is also worth mentioning that many Christians reject some of the basic claims like “God is all powerful” or “God is omniscient”. I’m not ready to completely sign on to this view, but I’m fairly sympathetic towards it. If you are interested in some reading on that particular subject, I recommend The Openness of God
. You can also read the Wikipedia article on Open Theism.
Posted on 19-Jun-07 at 6:49 am | Permalink
Emily wrote:
Hey, that’s a blurry picture of Jason and Jarrod Owens!
Posted on 19-Jun-07 at 7:43 am | Permalink
dan wrote:
Actually it is a cutout filter of me and Jarrod Owens. The original picture is here.
Posted on 19-Jun-07 at 8:24 am | Permalink
Emily wrote:
Ha! Well done. In the blurry version it looks like you’re conversing over a mailbox. I understand now. By the way, I put a link to this website on my facebook profile, so however mindless my comments, I am still helping you.
Posted on 19-Jun-07 at 2:02 pm | Permalink
Cody wrote:
wow so hitting up this post a little late, but i was scanning the site and felt compelled to add to the discussion… when answering a similar question one time, i was confronted with an even more frightening one, “why would a loving God have placed the tree of knowledge in the garden of eden and then tell man he could not eat from it, effectively creating temptation, didn’t God know they would do it?” that bothered for an incredibly long time and finally, after praying about it, i came to a better understanding of the nature of all creation being: What good is a good thing without a bad thing to compare it to? if as humans we cannot appreciate something until we no longer have it, how else could we have ever learned to appreciate the glory of God? man was placed in a perfect environment, but it was all he ever knew. so in this way we are able to seek the kingdom of heaven, knowing that it is better than anything we have ever experienced… also a note on the Omniscient God, if you think of God as the creater of all things, including time, then he is able to exist outside of that restraint, therefore able to view all creation from begining to end, in the manner of a timeline, and in that sense God knows all.
Posted on 22-Aug-07 at 12:10 pm | Permalink
Ben H. wrote:
It is also incredible to think that God gave man free will, and prepared for it’s abuse in advance. The lamb was slain from the foundation of the world.
Posted on 22-Aug-07 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
Jace wrote:
The Great Divorce is an awesome book to read on this subject and talking to Dan is also a good thing to do.
Posted on 05-Oct-08 at 2:34 pm | Permalink