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What about Hell?

If you have come to this website because you are worried about Hell then please read “How do I become a Christian?” or “Can God forgive someone like me?”

Why write this article?

This article was not written for people who might be worried about going to Hell; it is aimed more at people who are more concerned about why it exists.
I want to make one point clear right from the start and that is that it is not my highest priority to convince you of the existence of Hell. I don’t want to force you to believe in Hell, especially if you don’t want to believe in it. I don’t really care if no one reads this article all the way through. The Bible says that “the goodness of God leads you to repentance” Rom 2:4. (NKJV). In other words it is God’s kindness that attracts people to Jesus. I would much prefer to put my energy into telling you about the goodness of God. Please see “Why do people become Christians?” and “Does God love you?”
I'm not going to be talking about eternal flames and brimstone or Satan and his demon angels stoking fires with pitch forks or what that might mean in a litteral sense because this article is not so much about what my views on Hell are as it is about how I can have them and believe that God is still a God of love.
So why bother writing this article? Some people reading articles on my website will know that when I’m talking about “separation from God” that I'm talking about being  “sent to Hell”. Some might consider it to be dishonest that I gloss over the issue without even explaining my motives. My motives are simple, most visitors to my website read between 1 and 2 articles and that’s it. That means that I’ve got one or two articles to tell them that God loves them, that he is real and that he is someone that they would want to get to know. It is hard enough to get those concepts across in few enough words for a web article without having to write a long explanation on every article about why a God of love would send someone to Hell and still manage to get across the idea that Hell’s the last place that God want’s them to go (Jer 29:11, Ezekiel 33:11 & 2 Pet 3:9).  I really want to emphasize that point, if you could look into the eyes of Jesus, just his eyes alone would tell you that you are important to him, that your well being is extremely important to him and that just the thought of someone spending eternity without out him causes him great sadness. Hell really is the last place that God want's you to spend eternity. Jesus went through extreme agony on your behalf because he wants you to be with him in Heaven.

God's holiness and his love

It’s not my goal to make anyone reading this article believe in the existence of Hell or to get them to accept my view on what it would be like to go there but some people will want to know how I personally could recommend a God who sends people to Hell and how I can claim that he is a God of love at the same time as believing that. The heart of the issue for me comes down to being able to understand God’s nature and to try to see things from his perspective. We are his creation and that means that he owns us and that he has the right to tell us what to do. If you ever had an ant farm then how did you treat the ants in that farm? Some might actually treat them gently and responsibly but I doubt anyone would die for their ant farm. Compared to God, we are smaller than ants, actually there is no way to compare something infinite with something finite. Yet we are way more precious to God than we are to ourselves, we are special to him, so special that he sent Jesus to die for us.
God is a God of perfect justice and a God of perfect love. Some people think that love and hate are opposites but think about it, have you ever heard of a love - hate relationship? Well God loves people but at the same time he hates their sin, (sin is disobedience to his rules). Sin is like a cancer and God want’s to remove it from our lives but he will not do that without our permission.
I discuss the two seemingly paradoxical aspects of God’s nature in my article “Why do bad things happen?” But to sum up the situation, God has a perfect sense of justice that goes beyond our understanding and at the same time his love far exceeds any love that we are familiar with.
For me the fact that God loves everyone has been something that God has revealed to me in many different ways over the years (see “Does God love you?”). I’m at the point where I don’t doubt that even when I’m alone with my thoughts and dealing with issues. It took years of God working in my life to build up that confidence, I needed to go to a church where I could receive good teaching and read my Bible so that God could speak to me and use various situations to show his love to me. But there were highlights along the way so here is one particular highlight that reinforced my belief that God could be a God of infinite love and be a God of perfect justice at the same time.

A vision of God

Someone I used to know lost a leg as the result of a car accident. I didn’t know it before then but he had been living a double life. He was “on the run” and using an assumed name. His life was changed as a result of something that happened during that accident. He gave himself up and made arrangements with the people he owed money to. So what was it that changed this former conman?  I went to visit him while he was still in hospital and he recounted a vision that he had while he was unconscious. He saw a vision of God in which he felt the full force of what I’m trying to describe and that is that God can love someone beyond our ability to comprehend but at the same time hate our sin. He saw God as a shining light and felt those two aspects of God’s nature emanating from that glorious light at the same time. Now I want to really try and emphasize something here and that is that the love that he felt coming from God was like no love he had ever felt before. This is not just mere sentiment that God feels for us; you are valuable to God in a way that goes way beyond your ability to comprehend. These are not just nice words, this is not extreme exaggeration, this is what I believe and if anything my words cannot do justice to the extent of God’s love for you.
From our point of view sin seems like a little mistake but from God’s point of view it’s a total rejection of him and his love. Can you at least relate to what it might be like to be rejected by someone you love? Just imagine how painful it would feel to be rejected by them if you loved them infinitely. But that is not where the vision ended, he also saw himself clinging to Jesus who was on the cross and the cross was positioned on the edge of a huge chasm and to let go would have meant that he would fall to his death. The meaning of that part of his vision was to show that nothing but Jesus’ death on the cross can save us and that we need to cling on to what he has done for us. We can’t depend on our own efforts or the good things we do. It is only through Jesus death that we can receive God’s forgiveness. Of course if only the word of a former conman was the only evidence that I had to go on, it would not be terribly convincing but that vision only reinforced what I had already learned, so it’s just one reason why I can accept that God can be a wonderful God who dearly loves us but that we can be separated from him by rejecting him.

It's our choice

Now I know that people who don’t believe in God or know much about him would not be aware of deliberately choosing to reject him on a conscious level, at least that’s how it feels from our perspective. But from God’s perspective it’s different because he looks at our heart and even if we are not rejecting him in a conscious level we can still be rejecting him at an unconscious level and I believe that we all have moments during the course of our lives where we make choices that either take us towards God or away from him.
So could someone really decide that they want to be in Hell instead of Heaven even on a sub conscious level? I’ve heard it said that Heaven would be worse than Hell for an unbeliever. The righteousness of God permeates Heaven, Heaven is full of God’s glory, the best way I can describe it is like this. Imagine yourself in court, the judge looks straight at you and says “I find you guilty and order that you pay the maximum fine.” What would you say if you passed the judge on the way out of the courtroom and the judge looked at you and said, “Care for some lunch? I'll pay.” I don’t know about you but I would not be very keen on the idea myself. That’s what it would be like if you only knew him as “The Judge”. But what if the situation was different, what if that same man was your father? Assuming that you had a reasonable relationship with him and he had just paid the fine for you, then you would most likely take him up on the offer and you might even enjoy the time spent with him. People who only know God as “The Judge” and not as their “Heavenly Father” would feel even more uncomfortable about being in God’s presence forever. But people who have become part of God’s family enjoy the thought of being in his presence and being surrounded by his love.

Getting to know God

God does not send people to Hell because of their sin. Jesus death on the cross has paid for all our sins, past, present and future. God has sent Jesus as a way back to him. Jesus death on the cross means we have an opportunity to come back to God if we are willing to accept him. The only reason that people spend eternity without God is because on some level during their lives they reject God. God says
“If you look for me in earnest, you will find me when you seek me.”  Jeremiah 29:13. (NLT).
God was talking to the Jews when he said that but it applies to everyone including you and even people who have never heard the Gospel. Brother Yun in the book “The Heavenly Man” talks about a village that had never seen a missionary, so Jesus himself came and preached to them after they called out to the God who is their “Creator”. Gulshan Esther is a former muslin that had been lame since she was 3 months old and it would have cost missionaries their life or jail to even try to convert her. In her book “The Torn Veil”, she claims that she started praying to the prophet “Jesus” asking him to heal her and that he came to her in a vision and instantly healed her. She said that Jesus taught her the words to “The Lord’s prayer” before she had ever heard the words before or read the Bible.
You might wonder how it will be possible to go to Heaven and live there forever without ever sinning.
Here's what the Bible says
1 John 3:2  Yes, dear friends, we are already God’s children, and we can’t even imagine what we will be like when Christ returns. But we do know that when he comes we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is. (NLT)

 When someone becomes a Christian their spirit is born again but their soul and body are still not perfect, when people finally go to Heaven they are completely perfected so that they have no desire to sin but not only that, the Earth is a place of testing and Heaven is not, so people will not even be tempted to sin in Heaven.
There have been many things that have reinforced my belief that God can love people and hate their sin and be left with no choice but to deal with us according to our sin if we choose to reject his free gift of forgiveness.
Someone might ask if I can tie up all the loose ends and promise you that you wont have any more questions about why God would judge people he loves. In short, I can’t but I can tell you what God has done for me. He has shown me that I can trust him. Whenever I contemplate a question that I don’t have a complete answer to, I ask myself this. “If I reject God now instead of trusting him and find out later that I could have trusted him and as a result, I spend eternity away from him just because I couldn’t tie up every last loose end, how am I going to feel when I find out that I was wrong?” If God had not earned my trust after more than 25 years of following him then maybe I could reasonably doubt his character but God has shown me that I can trust him and I’m convinced that if you genuinely seek God he will earn your trust as well. In my heart I know that God has done enough to convince me that he is real, the he is a God of love and that his motives are not selfish.
I’m not attempting to force anyone to believe in the existence of Hell, (I would use more than the testimony of a former conman if that was my goal) if however you do believe in Hell and you are worried that you are going to end up there then I want to convince you that you don’t have to go there, (No matter who you are and what you have done). I want to convince you that God has not got it in for you, that on the contrary he loves you more than you can even imagine. Hell is the last place that God wants you to go to.
Ezekiel 33:11 As surely as I live, says the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live. (NLT)
I've been talking about judgment but now I would like to talk about knowing Jesus and how to start a relationship with him. When we get to know Jesus as our saviour and our friend we find out what he meant when he said things like “My purpose is to give life in all its fullness.” (John 10:10 NLT), “I have told them many things while I was with them so they would be filled with my joy.”(John 15:11 NLT), and “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Mat 11:28 NLT). God is not a cosmic killjoy; he wants to give you a great life. I'm not saying that Christians don't have any problems but that when you become part of God's family, God will give you enough strength to face your problems.
The following links are to articles that have been posted to tell people how we can know that God loves us and how we can know that we are forgiven. Please follow this link if you do not know how to become a Christian. If you don’t believe that God loves you then please read, “Does God love me?” If you are already a Christian but are struggling with “condemnation” (i.e. you have strong guilt feelings) or you don’t think that God wants to forgive you then please read “Can God forgive someone like me?”