Never mind my own personal struggles, I know that in history there were a lot of people that lived their whole lives in pure Hell conditions.
No, only those in hell actually live in "pure hell." Life on this globe can get incredibly awful but the very worst condition a person may be in here on earth is only a pale shadow of the horror of the "blackness of darkness forever," where there is never-ending "wailing and gnashing of teeth" and tormenting eternal flames from which there will
never be relief. However bad things may become in our lives here, the suffering has an end. Not so in hell.
Yet, God continued to let it stand, no matter how bad it was, and not only that he desires from us that we don't stoop to the same thing and wants us to turn the other cheek and love our enemies.
At times, God
has intervened. Repeatedly, He rescued Israel; often, He protected His prophets; Christ healed folk at every turn; God saved us from eternal punishment through Jesus. But He cannot do so all the time. He can't
constantly interrupt what we have chosen to do and be without effectively negating our free agency. If we are to truly, freely choose Him in love, God cannot reverse or negate all our free - but evil - choices. To be able to love God, we must be able also to hate Him. And when people choose to hate Him, evil results and the pain, destruction and death that always attend evil. It is this evil, reflected in the many diseases that afflict humanity, in the myriad instances of "man's inhumanity to man," and in the psychological "hell" of minds and hearts deep in the darkness of Self-worship that manifests
our wretchedness, freely chosen, not God's. And He allows our sin to bear its terrible fruit because it is a necessary feature of the free agency He has given to us.
Justice will be done; no one "gets away with it." God who knows and sees all will one day call all people to account for their deeds, rewarding them accordingly. We might want a more immediate accounting (always only for the
other person, of course, never for us), but God's ways are better than ours and we ought to trust to His superior justice, informed by His perfect holiness, knowledge, love and mercy rather than our own fallible, ignorant human sense of justice.
Matthew 16:26-27
26 "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?
27 "For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and WILL THEN REPAY EVERY MAN ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS.
1 Peter 4:3-5
3 For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry.
4 With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you;
5 but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.
Hebrews 10:30-31
30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.”
31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
If I was a prisoner under the Soviet Union gulag, conditions would be so awful that I can't imagine that I'd have much faith.
And rejecting God would improve the experience of the gulag how, exactly? Rather than having God as a "strong tower," as a divine support in the midst of the horrors of the gulag, you would throw off any connection to Him and endure the gulag alone, relying on your meager, weak, human power, your suffering empty of any eternal, divine meaning? Really? How does that make any sense? This seems to me a perfect example of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."
A lot of faith is just fluff "You may have it awful now, but you get to have the reward of Jesus one day" and dismisses the scars or wounds that people have.
The former doesn't necessarily require the latter. Acknowledging heaven to come doesn't necessitate a denial of the suffering of the here-and-now. The Bible often acknowledges the suffering of various individuals (not least among them, Christ himself) and it offers divine succour to those who would take it.
2 Corinthians 1:3-5
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,
4 who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
5 For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ.
Psalm 46:1
1 God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble.
Scripture also puts that suffering in its proper eternal context, giving us important, balancing perspective on it.
Romans 8:18-21
18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
19 For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.
20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope
21 that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
1 Peter 5:10-11
10 And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
11 To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.
People live entire lives being denied desires of their heart or mind like physical or romantic intimacy, greatness and success, even more dire things like lack of food and basic humane resources, and yet when they die here they aren't given a continuation of what could've been or what they would prefer, but just for the sake of merely being with Jesus, and that also seems to be the mindset of most Christians I seen.
God has not made us for ourselves, to serve our own interests, but for Himself. God is the vital Center of Everything; the universe revolves around Him; He is the Ultimate Thing, the Ground of All Reality, the Highest and Best Person we can ever know. Everything is far, far, far downhill from Him. And so, when God offers to us communion with Himself, He has offered to us the greatest gift He could possibly offer. Romance, worldly success, money and power, comfort - these all are tepid, silly things compared to God. But only when one understands properly who God is. If God is small in one's mind, a distant, bearded, smiling "Big Guy in the Sky," nice, harmless, eager to support
our agenda, essentially just a super-powered human, it can be very difficult to see why one should take much interest - or comfort - in Him. But such a God is not revealed in Scripture:
Revelation 1:12-18
12 Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me, and on turning I saw seven golden lampstands,
13 and in the midst of the lampstands one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest.
14 The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire,
15 his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters.
16 In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.
17 When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last,
18 and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.
Job 40:6-14
6 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said:
7 “Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me.
8 Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?
9 Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?
10 “Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor.
11 Pour out the overflowings of your anger, and look on everyone who is proud and abase him.
12 Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand.
13 Hide them all in the dust together; bind their faces in the world below.
14 Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can save you.
Deuteronomy 10:17
17 For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God...
1 Timothy 6:13-16
13 I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who testified the good confession before Pontius Pilate,
14 that you keep the commandment without stain or reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ,
15 which He will bring about at the proper time—He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords,
16 who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen.
It's like two teams are playing a never-ending game and when it finally comes time to end, the referee suddenly changes all the rules, or you just get a fluff paper saying these platitudes that aren't actually material manifest, like the characters in the movie "The Wizard of Oz" when they finally are able to meet the wizard. It does make entire existence look kind of pointless in that way.
Here's a good example of the diminishment of God. The "Wizard of Oz"? God is like the "Wizard of Oz"? Have you not read the Bible? Yikes! God couldn't be more unlike this fictional character, a mere human masquerading as something more. So long as God remains small in your thinking, a fraud, like the Wizard of Oz, the sort of faulty ideas you've expressed in your OP will continue to plague you.
Back to the topic of horrible evil, I also have to live with the thought that if God allowed Stalin and other ruthless dictators to kill and torture hundred of millions of people, then that could come to even America and broadly the Western world one day
Only as America continues to reject God and drift into the vacuum of meaning that results and the social chaos that inevitably follows. When people forsake God, they inevitably replace Him with themselves; when they throw off God's law and rule, they become their own Law Giver, every person doing that which is right in their own eyes. In such a state, a society descends into disorder, delusion, conflict and violence, growing ripe for a "Strong Man" to assert himself, promising peace, and order, and equality - but at a price: He must rule unopposed, his word being law.
Such "Strong Men" appear all throughout human history - the worst of them, though, coming to power in the last hundred years or so: Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler, Kim Jong-Il, Castro, Hugo Chavez, and so on. God warns of such terrible evil in His word, offering the blessing and peace of His right rule instead. But if we will not be under His authority, we cannot benefit from His protection and goodness.
But this all starts with God shrinking to insignificance in the minds of people while they swell to inordinate importance at the same time. When this happens, creatures asserting themselves over their Creator, He sends them "a strong delusion that they might believe a lie," judging them according to their own choices, allowing them to race headlong, free of divine constraint, into the darkness and destruction that always lies at the end of people seeking their own way over His.
Romans 1:21-31
21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing to be wise, they became fools,
23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them.
25 For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
26 For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural,
27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.
28 And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper,
29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips,
30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful;
People say that we have free will, and I know that, but it feels dismissive to people's struggling when others just say about it is because God gave man free will.
Well, as someone has rightly pointed out, "facts don't care about your feelings." What is true is important, not what we might
feel about what is true. See above.
