The Apologetics Advertisement for Christianity
By Nathaniel Ashcroft
5 Claims
Now, many very strong arguments have been made here, some of the ones I find most compelling. They are supplied with ample evidence, but mostly I hope this gets you thinking. We have gone over meaning, creation, Pascal’s Wager, the fallacy of subjective truth when applied to religion, Atheism, the fallacy of a works-salvation religion, Biblical reliability, Jesus’s claims to divinity, and resurrection evidence. Next, I’m going to help shed some light on some common reasons non-believers do not believe in the Christian God.
Claim 4: A Good God Wouldn’t Send Anyone to Hell.
An all-loving God would not send anyone to hell, but a good God of love would. Christians follow a good God, and a good God would not be good if He were unjust. An all-loving God loves sin and loves every act of rebellion against Himself. This God is not the God that exists in reality and would not be a God worth following. A God of love loves us, but hates our sin, because it hurts us, goes against His good and perfect law, and it separates us from His own perfection and presence. God judges justly everything we have done, and if He did not judge us or were to judge us unjustly, He would not be good. Of course, Jesus has covered the payment of our sin if we are His and drank the cup of God’s wrath on our behalf. Because God is good and loving, wrongdoing is not permitted in the paradise of Heaven nor the presence of God, and those who reject the sacrifice of Christ as payment for their sins are condemned for their wrongdoing. Even one sin is enough to separate us from God. As stated before, assuming that we deserve heaven in any way, or that a ‘good person’ will enter by their deeds cannot be synthesized with a perfect, just, and divine God.
Some who are inclined against Christ, whenever they speak the term ‘good’, are not thinking about moral good, or moral perfection, but more of a nice and beneficial sort of ‘good’. They believe a ‘good’ God, meaning a nice and unholy God, would not send anyone to Hell. This is not the meaning of the term ‘good’, but I will treat the idea of a ‘good God’ that the claim I am answering today poses, as if it means beneficial to humanity, only kind and nice, a lover of pleasure, an unholy God who does not judge. This God would probably not send anyone to Hell. This God would therefore endorse all sorts of defilement of human life and other horrible acts and be a God not worth following. This idea of a ‘good God’ is not the God of the Bible, who is good (in the real meaning of the word), loving, and holy. The God of the Bible hates sin and is at the same time incredibly gracious. He is wonderful and infinite, the God who made creation good, and the God who does not endorse the spoiling of that goodness.
Love is a loaded word for the Christian religion, with strong and beautiful theological significance.
“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (NIV Colossians 3:12-14).
Love is what binds us together. Love is associated with and the foundation of the two greatest commandments Jesus gives us (Matthew 22:37-40). Love is the hallmark of the Christian faith. Love finds its origin in the relationship between the persons of the Trinity, from all eternity. True love does not endorse harmful behavior. Holiness does not stand for sin. Part of goodness is the absence of sin. Sinful behavior can be used for good in God’s providence (Genesis 50:20), but the sin in of itself is, of course, not good. Our God of love has every right to send us to Hell. Thank God for Christ Jesus.
What is Hell?
Some people say Hell is a burning place of torture for eternity. Some say Hell is seeing the majesty, goodness, grace, and glory of God in its fullest, and spending eternity knowing what you missed. Some say Hell is humans being left to their own devices, without God’s hand in it at all, leading to many times over the suffering we already bring to the world. All of these are true in part; I don’t know all of what Hell entails, but it certainly involves the absence of God, loss, and judgement; sort of a mix of all three. We can be sure that Hell is suffering the wrath of a holy God against sin, a place of burning and suffering.
In the Bible we see God described as a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:28-29, Deuteronomy 4:24), and His wrath is depicted as fire (Jerimiah 4:4, Genesis 19:24, Isaiah 30:27).
“But now, why should we die? This great fire will consume us, and we will die if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any longer. For what mortal has ever heard the voice of the living God speaking out of fire, as we have, and survived?” (NIV Deuteronomy 5:25-26).
“‘We are doomed to die!’ He said to his wife. ‘We have seen God!’” (NIV Judges 13:22).
“‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.’ Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for’” (NIV Isaiah 6:5-7).
All of these are instances of being in the presence of judgement. Specifically in Isaiah 6, Isaiah is having a vision of God. At first he is in awe and acknowledges his unworthiness. Then Isaiah is cleansed with a burning coal, which shows Isaiah’s need for atonement. It’s also clear that being in the presence of God, with your sins unatoned for (“I am a man of unclean lips”), is a place where your sin is laid bare, and you are subjected to fiery wrath. And that is not a good place to be. So whenever the Bible describes Hell as a “lake of burning sulfur” (NIV Revelation 20:10), it is describing the effect a holy God has on sin whenever judging it. God freely offers salvation to all, but if that is not accepted, being a good and holy God, He judges sinners according to their actions. The Bible also is adamant that those who are judged on the last day will be “shut out from the presence of the Lord (NIV 2 Thessalonians 1:9)”, judged and barred from His holy presence. We see how this will take place in 2 Thessalonians 1:7-8, “This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (NIV 2 Thessalonians 1:7-8), and later states they will be “shut out from the presence of the Lord” (NIV 2 Thessalonians 1:9). So clearly those who are objects of His wrath are immediately judged in the presence of God, which is “revealed from heaven in blazing fire” (NIV 2 Thessalonians 1:7). After that, the sinner is cut off from God eternally.
Hell is not a place any of us want to be. It can sometimes be difficult to understand how God can love humanity and also send some of them to Hell, but this difficulty in grasping that humanity deserves justice and Hell is largely a product of our culture. When we begin to understand that love doesn’t mean being unjust and that God is holy, who would be perfectly just in offering no ways to salvation, we can start to see how a good God can send people to Hell. The question should begin to arise, why did God offer any of us mercy? Why should God save a wretch like me? The more and more I consider this truth, the more and more I grow in my love for God; the gospel of salvation is truly a mystery to be pondered.
Paul, in two of his four prison epistles (Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon), Ephesians and Colossians, loves to call Christ and His work for us the ‘mystery’. The prison epistles are letters Paul wrote while being imprisoned in Rome. It is not always in that exact phrasing but also appears as ‘mystery of God’ and ‘mystery of Christ’. Paul uses this phrasing in other letters as well, but the concentration of this phrase is particularly high in these two letters. Ephesians and Colossians are written to two churches that are geographically close, and a lot of the same teaching appears in both letters. Anyway, what I think is so amazing, is that the gospel is so full of grace, so incomprehensible, that Paul calls it the mystery of God. Paul is in chains for the gospel, and yet he is so overcome by its wonder he considers it a mystery. He can’t fathom the abundance of love and grace the Father has lavished on His sheep! This is truly the mindset we must adopt.
“In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to people in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets. This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus” (NIV Ephesians 3:4-6).
We have a sin problem, that’s for sure. Jesus loves us so much as to die being hung on a tree, which holds strong Biblical significance. The Bible says this when on the topic of a man who has committed a crime punishable by death,
“his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God” (ESV Deuteronomy 21:23).
When Jesus was hung on that tree, He took every sin we committed, which are all worthy of death, and was cursed by God so that we may be cleansed of our unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). That’s a whole ton of grace. Our God is a God of love, as seen through Christ, but sin is so serious, that the only way we could be reconciled to God is through the cursing of the Son of God Himself.
Don’t forget: God has every right there ever was to judge us all now and treat us as our sins deserve. It is only by grace that He sent His son to suffer with us, so that we may live eternally with Him. It is only by grace you and I were given life. Under premises like the ones we are discussing, again, skeptics must assume other Christian beliefs to truly talk about why the Christian God allows people to go to Hell. The skeptic can’t argue with their own set of beliefs about the Christian God, because then they aren’t discussing God or Hell at all.
Have you heard the gospel? If not, click here.
View next week’s section to read the fifth and final claim I am responding to.
Works Cited
NIV Quest Study Bible. Zondervan, 2011.
ESV Bible, The Premium Gift Edition. Crossway, 2016.