Why does god send people to hell

In the ancient world whether Greek, Roman, or Jewish , the worst punishment a person could experience after death was to be denied a decent burial. Jesus developed this view into a repugnant scenario: corpses of those excluded from the kingdom would be unceremoniously tossed into the most desecrated dumping ground on the planet.

Jesus did not say souls would be tortured there. They simply would no longer exist. At one point he says there are two gates that people pass through Matthew The other is broad and easy, and therefore commonly taken. The wrong path does not lead to torture. So too Jesus says the future kingdom is like a fisherman who hauls in a large net Matthew After sorting through the fish, he keeps the good ones and throws the others out. They just die. Or the kingdom is like a person who gathers up the plants that have grown in his field Matthew He keeps the good grain, but tosses the weeds into a fiery furnace.

They are consumed by fire and then are no more. Still other passages may seem to suggest that Jesus believe in hell. Most notably Jesus speaks of all nations coming for the last judgment Matthew Some are said to be sheep, and the others goats. The good sheep are those who have helped those in need — the hungry, the sick, the poor, the foreigner. So the punishment is annihilation. Because the fire never goes out. The flames, not the torments, go on forever.

Because it will never end. These people will be annihilated forever. And so, Jesus stood in a very long line of serious thinkers who have refused to believe that a good God would torture his creatures for eternity.

But the torments of hell were not preached by either Jesus or his original Jewish followers; they emerged among later gentile converts who did not hold to the Jewish notion of a future resurrection of the dead.

These later Christians came out of Greek culture and its belief that souls were immortal and would survive death. From at least the time of Socrates, many Greek thinkers had subscribed to the idea of the immortality of the soul. Even though the human body dies, the human soul both will not and cannot. Later Christians who came out of gentile circles adopted this view for themselves, and reasoned that if souls are built to last forever, their ultimate fates will do so as well. It will be either eternal bliss or eternal torment.

It was a strange hybrid, a view held neither by the original Christians nor by ancient Greek intelligentsia before them. Socrates himself expressed the idea most memorably when on trial before an Athenian jury on capital charges. Socrates openly declares that he sees no reason to fear the death sentence. On the contrary, he is rather energized by the idea of passing on from this life. For Socrates, death will be one of two things. On one hand, it may entail the longest, most untroubled, deep sleep that could be imagined.

On the other hand, it may involve a conscious existence. That too would be good, even better. It would mean carrying on with life and all its pleasures but none of its pain. Just as through the Spirit, the believer is finally sanctified after death, something happens to the unbeliever at death that makes him unable to ever repent.

He has chosen to hate God and he will hate God for all eternity. Jesus reminded us that some will not believe even if He rose from the dead. The unbeliever cannot inhabit Heaven, because he embodies everything that can never enter Heaven; and to be in the presence of God is not Heaven for him in any case, but the most exquisite torment.

He has lost the ability to experience God as anything but terrifying. For such a person, Hell is God giving him what he asked for all along—a place where His presence is not manifested as it is in this life. But this also means that there are none of the blessings and providence that even the unbeliever experiences in this life. So why would a loving God send someone to Hell? Because that person has chosen in such a way that God has no other choice.

The existence and reality of eternal judgment for the person who does not repent is sobering, and no one really wants to contemplate it too deeply. But the person who goes to Hell must reject Christ, who died so that anyone who repents can be saved. So God is not to be blamed when an unrepentant, rebellious creature chooses a destructive path that leads to Hell. In fact, we all deserve hell due to our sin nature that separates us from God, but thank God for Jesus.

Have you ever stolen something, committed adultery, blasphemed etc? I wish Christian more focus on how to follow his foot steps and spread a good news without justification as like we are god. Why would an omniscient god allow his creation access to a tree of knowledge in the first place? Would he not know that they would turn against him? If people could just expel their egos and critically think for themselves again maybe there would be less division in the world. I feel like this is ridiculous.

If God truly knows everything that will happen to everyone since it goes with his plan, why would he set Adam and Eve up for failure with the tree? God also commanded that we spread humanity and sin when he told us to be fruitful and multiply, which multiplies sin as well.

Our sinful nature is proof that God has actively set us on the path to hell, and commands us to do something unnatural. Our infirmities come with the package of coming into being. He set the default state to hell because he wants us to go to hell. Jesus is the one whose atonement takes a meagre selection of us who are lucky enough to believe, that we might see his righteous cruelty that he inflicts the rest of us Romans Is this unfair?

No, because God is outside of the law. He does what he wants, and is by definition, good. He is not responsible for us, because he gives account to no one.

God is fairness, and there is no escape. Original Sin and the bondage of the will prove this. What about people who have never even heard of him? Does he just send them straight to hell?

The tree of Knowledge and the birthing of sin. And he supposedly loves us a lot. Yet we get so much pain. The nasty predator that was eliminated actually kept in balance the number of other animals and plants necessary to that particular ecosystem. In the same way, if we play down "bad" or harsh doctrines within the historic Christian faith, we will find, to our shock, that we have gutted all our pleasant and comfortable beliefs, too. To preach the good news, we must preach the bad.

How to preach hell to traditionalists Before preaching on the subject of hell, I must recognize that today, a congregation is made up of two groups: traditionalists and postmoderns. The two hear the message of hell completely differently. People from traditional cultures and mindsets tend to have a a belief in God, and b a strong sense of moral absolutes and the obligation to be good.

The way to show traditional persons their need for the gospel is by saying, "Your sin separates you from God! You can't be righteous enough for him.

Traditionalists are motivated toward God by the idea of punishment in hell. They sense the seriousness of sin. But traditionalists may respond to the gospel only out of fear of hell, unless I show them Jesus experienced not only pain in general on the cross but hell in particular.

This must be held up until they are attracted to Christ for the beauty of the costly love of what he did. To the traditional person, hell must be preached as the only way to know how much Christ loved you. If we play down harsh doctrines, we will gut our pleasant and comfortable beliefs too. His body was being destroyed in the worst possible way, but that was a flea bite compared to what was happening to his soul.

When he cried out that his God had forsaken him, he was experiencing hell itself. However, if your spouse walks out on you, saying, 'I never want to see you again,' that is far more devastating still.

The longer, deeper, and more intimate the relationship, the more torturous is any separation. When Jesus was cut off from God, he went into the deepest pit and most powerful furnace, beyond all imagining. And he did it voluntarily, for us. How to preach hell to postmoderns In contrast to the traditionalist, the postmodern person is hostile to the very idea of hell. People with more secular and postmodern mindsets tend to have a only a vague belief in the divine, if at all, and b little sense of moral absolutes, but rather a sense they need to be true to their dreams.

They tend to be younger, from nominal Catholic or non-religious Jewish backgrounds, from liberal mainline Protestant backgrounds, from the western and northeastern U. When preaching hell to people of this mindset, I've found I must make four arguments. Sin is slavery. I do not define sin as just breaking the rules, but also as "making something besides God our ultimate value and worth.

Lewis's depictions of hell are important for postmodern people. In The Great Divorce , Lewis describes a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven.

There they are urged to leave behind the sins that have trapped them in hell. The descriptions Lewis makes of people in hell are so striking because we recognize the denial and self-delusion of substance addictions.

When addicted to alcohol, we are miserable, but we blame others and pity ourselves; we do not take responsibility for our behavior nor see the roots of our problem. You can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine. Modern people struggle with the idea of God thinking up punishments to inflict on disobedient people. When sin is seen as slavery, and hell as the freely chosen, eternal skid row of the universe, hell becomes much more comprehensible.

Here is an example from a recent sermon of how I try to explain this:. Romans tells us that we were built to live for God supremely, but instead we live for love, work, achievement, or morality to give us meaning and worth. But these things enslave us with guilt if we fail to attain them or anger if someone blocks them from us or fear if they are threatened or drivenness since we must have them.

Guilt, anger, and fear are like fire that destroys us. Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that the people on Lewis's bus from hell are enslaved because they freely choose to be.

They would rather have their freedom as they define it than salvation.