Shouldn't God's eternal love mean hell can't exist?

Friend-of-Jesus

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The meme does not express anything but a nasty sick twisted version of things as they are.

It implies that if we love sin and death then we should be permitted to continue inflicting this on others with impunity.

Reminds me of the type of grooming that is done against children so that they will accept perversion as normal.

The mem shoes how silly it is to believe in hell and God's love together. It's like saying to a toddler, "your mommy really loves you, but if you wet your pants she'll literally make a shish-kebab out of you".
 
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Aseyesee

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It is quite simple. God's wrath gets a mention in the Bible at least as often as his love does. It is the culture we live in which wants to turn God into a Santa Claus figure.

It is the realm of knowledge ... God is a saviour as well as an adversary, dependant upon the condition of our soul.
 
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Friend-of-Jesus

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turn God into a Santa Claus figure.

Santo Claus repeats exactly the same ungodly pattern: he doesn't give gifts to the boys and girls on his naughty list.

No. God isn't like that at all. He gives His gifts to ALL
 
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Presbyterian Continuist

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What is "just" about creating someone knowing in advance that that person will ultimately end up in hell for eternity?
Just because Hell is God's eternal prison house, it doesn't mean that anyone is destined to go there. In the same way, just because there are prisons in our countries, it doesn't mean that anyone is destined to go to prison. Prison is not there just to punish criminals, but also to protect innocent, law-abiding citizens from criminals and their acts.

No one goes to prison for nothing (and don't distract by going on about innocent people going there through a miscarriage of justice, because that is not what this thread is about). A person ends up in prison because they did a criminal act which, by law, sentenced them to a term in prison. This is normal justice. Without that, every innocent citizen would be at the mercy of lawless criminals who would rape, pillage, and murder without restraint. All we have to do is to look at countries and communities where the rule of law has broken down.

It is the same with God. The Old Testament prophets warned Israel and Judah that God's judgment would result if they continued to reject Him and worship idols. False prophets said the opposite - that everything is okay because God is a God of love and He will not punish the nation but will continue to protect it from its enemies in spite of its worship of idols. But history tells us that Israel and Judah went to custard and were taken over by the pagan nations around it.

In the same way, there is the warning that those who reject God and His Son Jesus Christ will be sentenced to God's eternal prison house which we call Hell. This is not just to punish rebellious and criminal sinners who reject Christ, but it is to protect and insulate all those who love God and put their trust in Christ from the corruption and harm that godless sinners will bring on them if they have to share heaven with them. God has one strict rule about people entering His heaven. They have to enter through the narrow gate of faith and trust in Christ as their personal Saviour. To be part of the great feast of heaven they have to be wearing the correct wedding garment - which is the righteousness of Christ. Without it, they will not be permitted to enter heaven. This is no different from many nightclubs who demand a certain strict dress code for entry. The bouncer at the door might love you to bits, but if you are not wearing a tie, he cannot, through the rules of the club, let you in.

So, if rebellious ones who will not embrace Christ cannot enter heaven, where else can they go? The only other place is the "outer darkness where men shall wail and gnash their teeth" that the scripture speaks about. There is no other place than the place well call hell.

In fact, I would seriously doubt the truth of God's love toward me and my daughter, if we had to share heaven with the low-life, Christ rejecting hockey puck who raped and infected her with an STD when she was just seventeen.
 
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Presbyterian Continuist

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How would it affect your respect for God if you got to heaven and found that Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Herman Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Idi Amin, all the ISIS crowd, were sharing heaven with you and still spouting their idealistic garbage? They wouldn't be changed by being in heaven, because true change comes only by being born again in Christ.

I don't think they would be happy in heaven, because it is a Christ-centred heaven and these, along with every other Christ-rejecting sinner would find themselves in total opposition to everything that heaven stands for.

God may love sinners intensely, which He does, but to those who reject His Son's sacrifice on the cross and His offer of salvation through Christ, it will be unrequited love; in other words, His love is rejected by those who reject Christ. Therefore, heaven is not for them because only those who have accepted the love of God through Christ can enter there.

So, those who reject Christ are doomed to spend the rest of eternity where there is no light, no beauty, no love joy or peace, because these things are all creations of God which will only be found in the New Earth which God will create to replace this one which will be destroyed. Christ rejecting sinners will not be found on it, so guess where they will go?
 
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Halbhh

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Santo Claus repeats exactly the same ungodly pattern: he doesn't give gifts to the boys and girls on his naughty list.

No. God isn't like that at all. He gives His gifts to ALL

Right, Christ gave us the ultimate gift even when we were still enemies of God! (Romans ch 5)

The ultimate gift is available to all.

But not all choose to accept that gift -- Christ as their savior.

Here's more in very general language. Christ teaches the truth of real love -- not lesser things some call 'love', but the real Love, "greater love has no one", the full Love.

So rejecting this essence of real Love, rejecting Christ, is rejecting the essence of what is Good (the real Good), no less. It's as He said in the gospels, such as in John 3:19-20 for instance. This really amounts to directly rejecting what makes Life livable, ultimately, for the long run. An actual rejection of Good itself.

If one rejects embracing Life, real Love, Christ, they are in effect choosing anti-life. Of course, rejecting Life entails death. The "second death" -- the final end of the soul that perishes by having rejected Life, Christ.

Better than my explanation by far is to read through gospels, such as the Gospel of John.
 
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disciple1

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Hi guys, im a christian with some views i wish to share here and get some great feed back from this community.

My question is - how do you reconcile god as ever-loving and still have a hell? i find hell contradicts the very notion of a god that loves all unconditionally for all time and yet still has a place for you where he doesn't love you.

I believe god is embracing, and hell’s definition is the absence of God or a lack of love for God, and that cant exist because god is never absent and is never not loving you. So how does hell make sense to you?
Romans chapter 11 verse 32
For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

Maybe this is the verse you want.
 
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Anguspure

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The mem shoes how silly it is to believe in hell and God's love together. It's like saying to a toddler, "your mommy really loves you, but if you wet your pants she'll literally make a shish-kebab out of you".
Ok. It looks to me like the sort of argument presented by the Antitheist crowd in an effort to show my Dad as a cruel and malevolent despot.
He most certainly is not, quite the opposite, and whatever the truth about judgement and death, He has only the Love of His children in view.
 
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Anguspure

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Santo Claus repeats exactly the same ungodly pattern: he doesn't give gifts to the boys and girls on his naughty list.

No. God isn't like that at all. He gives His gifts to ALL
I wasn't aware that Santa's wife is so awful
 
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Friend-of-Jesus

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Ok. It looks to me like the sort of argument presented by the Antitheist crowd in an effort to show my Dad as a cruel and malevolent despot.
He most certainly is not, quite the opposite, and whatever the truth about judgement and death, He has only the Love of His children in view.

Love does not have "or else" clause, especially in the form of eternal conscious torture...
 
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Friend-of-Jesus

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Right, Christ gave us the ultimate gift even when we were still enemies of God! (Romans ch 5)

The ultimate gift is available to all.

But not all choose to accept that gift -- Christ as their savior.

Here's more in very general language. Christ teaches the truth of real love -- not lesser things some call 'love', but the real Love, "greater love has no one", the full Love.

So rejecting this essence of real Love, rejecting Christ, is rejecting the essence of what is Good (the real Good), no less. It's as He said in the gospels, such as in John 3:19-20 for instance. This really amounts to directly rejecting what makes Life livable, ultimately, for the long run. An actual rejection of Good itself.

If one rejects embracing Life, real Love, Christ, they are in effect choosing anti-life. Of course, rejecting Life entails death. The "second death" -- the final end of the soul that perishes by having rejected Life, Christ.

Better than my explanation by far is to read through gospels, such as the Gospel of John.

I get this logic, but...

Creation of a hell in the first place and dooming poor weak human creatures is... not love at all. It's hate.
 
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Halbhh

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I get this logic, but...

Creation of a hell in the first place and dooming poor weak human creatures is... not love at all. It's hate.

Yet another of several reasons, including scriptures, that show 'double predestination' isn't real. That terrible doctrine you sense false is indeed. Over and over we get instead the offer of Grace, available to all, and all are able to choose it if they will.

None are doomed, not one. All are free to choose.
 
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Friend-of-Jesus

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Yet another of several reasons, including scriptures, that show 'double predestination' isn't real. That terrible doctrine you sense false is indeed. Over and over we get instead the offer of Grace, available to all, and all are able to choose it if they will.

None are doomed, not one. All are free to choose.

Even if one person ends up in hell for whatever reason, it's not love.
 
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Halbhh

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Even if one person ends up in hell for whatever reason, it's not love.

The "second death" is just that. It's like the atheist version of death. A final end.

Force isn't love. Love lets you choose.
 
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Sketcher

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God only loves, he doesn't decide this person is good or bad, that's for the person unto themselves to decide and judge. Genesis 3:14-19. is simply saying, now that you have practiced judgement onto others, you will suffer from your own actions. Having to eat other animals to live is a judgement implying your life is more important than the other creations of god. So as you continue to judge, you will live in sin living a life style of judgement of everything around you. But what's being confused is not that god himself is making us like this, but us ourselves in our choices of judgement and the road goes on. That's all.
If that is all, then Hell would also exist for the same reasons. However, God does in fact judge (Revelation 20:11-15, Revelation 21:5-8).

That's a semitic expression, meaning that God preferred Jacob over Esau. Preference does not equal antipathy.
Not wrong, but it doesn't change anything when attempting to argue for or against the existence of Hell. Whether it is the mere ambivalence or a more active hatred, you get the same result - God reserving rewards for those he loves as his people, and the others who are on the outside of that.
 
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Sketcher

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This is not a biblical thought, as evidenced by Joseph's brothers in Genesis, Pharaoh, Cyrus, Lydia, Paul and many other examples. Man does not have autonomous libertarian free will. This is a false notion.
What is false is ultra-Calvinism.
Have you read the account of Paul on the Damascus road? Or Lydia?
Yes I have.

And no one will be in Heaven and be able to say, "I did not want to come to Heaven, but God forced me." Conversely, no one will be in Hell and be able to say, "God wanted to save me, but because of my sovereign will, I frustrated God's plan and I have made Him eternally heart broken."
Did you get this in a vision, or are you just making it up?

Wow. You are making an idol of man. God does not need us to complete Him. You elevate man far too highly.
I never said or came close to insinuating that God needs anyone. I did not elevate man, I only spoke of how God's love for man puts man's love for man to shame.
 
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CrystalDragon

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He loves us enough to not force us to be with Him so we were gifted free will and some people make a choice to be separated from Him therefore they go to hell.


Isn't it forced through coercion though? Worship God or be tortured forever?

The only choices people make are what God directs to happen because it's his will. That is, if we assume God is all-knowing and all-powerful.

If we assume that he's not either of those, and not all-loving, then it makes a lot more sense.
 
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