How can a loving God be just in sending morally good people (from a human perspective) to hell for all eternity?
Trinity President, Dr. Braxton Hunter, addresses that question in the video below.
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Video Transcript
Welcome to Trinity Insight: The home of the thinking Christian, and today we’re asking the question can a loving God really be just in allowing people to go to hell for all eternity.
So, how can God be just in allowing people to go to hell for all eternity? I mean after all, the punishment doesn’t really seem to fit the crime.
If you think about it, if this is true as atheist often remind us, Adolf Hitler, if he prayed to receive Christ on his deathbed, might be in heaven and six million Jews in hell. It just doesn’t seem right. After all, I’m a very conservative evangelical man, but I couldn’t hold for a man’s hand to the fire for 10 minutes to the fire even if he was the worst pedophile. So how could God send someone to a place of absolute suffering for all eternity? Better yet, how is he just in doing this?
Christian philosophers answer this question and number of ways. One of hte more popular ways is like this and this is my rendering of it…
Imagine that you’re sitting at home one night watching television, and your neighbor’s cat is whining at your window, and you can’t watch the television show. And so you get up and after enough nights of putting up with this cat – sorry if you’re a cat person – you go out and strangle the cat in the middle of the night.
Now there’s probably a penalty for that. I don’t know what it is – maybe spend the night in jail maybe have to pay a fine, I don’t know what the penalty is for killing cats, because I usually… scratch that, I never kill cats.
On the other hand let’s imagine now that my neighbor keeps buying more and more cats and I keep strangling them. Ultimately, I might go across the street and strangle my neighbor – I mean not me, I mean somebody.
Now the penalty for this is much greater. I’m now going to have to spend the rest of my life perhaps in jail. I might receive capital punishment. The point is that there’s a penalty for sinning against a cat that is not really all that great. And there’s a penalty for sinning against a man which is equal to my own life. So, what must the penalty be for sinning against an everlasting God? Our own sense of justice that you can see as we walk through this progression leads you to the realization that it is an everlasting punishment
Now, you might say, “But God is God. Can’t he just ignore that and forgive people and let them go to heaven anyway without a sacrifice?”
Well not really. Justice is a part of God’s nature, just like the number of other things are, and just as you can’t change your own nature, God’s nature doesn’t change either. He must act justly. As a result we’re all destined to an eternity an everlasting amount of time in a place called hell unless there’s an everlasting person who can pay the price for us. But there’s only one everlasting person, or at least the godhead is everlasting. And so Jesus came to Earth as the everlasting person who paid the everlasting penalty, so that we all might go to heaven through him. And that, my friends, is how you answer the problem of hell.
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