When I was very young I remember going home in the family car after visiting relatives. It was a couple hours on the highway and I'd often lay on the floor of the backseat (seatbelts weren't mandatory back then) and let the steady hum and vibration lull me to sleep. I didn't know how to drive. I didn't know how an automobile worked. All I was sure of was that my Dad, who was driving, would get us home. It never occured to me that he might purposely drive into a tree or off the road.
I've looked at a number of the thoughts expressed on this forum, and opinions, and many are about how to drive or how an automobile works. But the best way to understand is to look at our Dad (God) Who is driving, and how we understand Him.
Example:
Suicide - deliberate escape from life. One way ticket to hell? Or is God merciful? What happens at that moment of death when life in the flesh comes to an end, and time then ceases to have influence on that person? Might God discuss and present the opportunity? He's God - He's certainly capable. Is that how He does it? ... I don't know. But He is merciful, so if there is a way of mercy He would certainly use it.
Christ died because of sin, even though He was sinless in His time as a man. He was raised from the dead because of the Father's mercy, and not because He was sinless in His time as a man. So if one sin could send us to hell then it reasons that zero sins would allow us to heaven, but then we would be greater than Christ because He was sinless and still condemned. Yet we would all agree that we are not greater than Him. Christ authored our salvation, which was to believe, trust and obey His Father - the trust part was trusting in His Father's mercy to raise Him from the dead and receive Him into glory.
We're not called to understand how everything works - there's no multiple choice quiz at the narrow gate. We're called to believe, trust and obey.
So what does God do for the little child born in a remote African village where no missionary has reached, when that child steals an apple, then gets killed a day or two later? Cast them into eternal, flaming torment? That's not my Dad. How He extends His mercy to them - I have no idea - but that He does extend His mercy is a given.
Here's a couple thoughts:
God commended and blessed the Rechabites solely because they obeyed their earthly father, Jehonadab.
Christ preached to the spirits in prison that were formerly disobedient (already dead).
God has confined us all under sin (zero sins or 10,000 sins - no difference) so that He might have mercy on us all. When John and James wondered if they should call down fire on the city that rejected Christ and His message, Jesus replied that they didn't know the manner of the Spirit that led them - that He came to save men's lives, not destroy. He further said that in seeing Jesus, we see the Father.
He that comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those that seek Him diligently - or to paraphrase: must believe that God is real and that He is a good God.
