Saturdays Inspiration

Morning Inspiration with James Merritt

"Could a loving God send people to Hell?

This almost seems to be the trump card that a lot of people play against the concept of hell. After all, God is a loving God. In fact, God is love. But let’s take this statement, “A loving God would never send people to hell” and break it down, because believe it or not as is that statement is absolutely true. I want to show you three words in the statement that make it absolutely, misleading, if not false.

The first word is “loving.” God is a loving God, but not in the sense that most people think. God’s love is not some warm fuzzy feeling that is tolerant of everything and everybody. His love is a holy love, a righteous love, and a just love.

God is so loving that He doesn’t want anyone to spend eternity in hell. He said, in 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. Turn! Turn from your wickedness, O people of Israel! Why should you die?”

One of the twelve disciples, Peter, added this thought.

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you,[a] not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”(II Peter 3:9)

Make no mistake. God hates hell and He hates the fact that people would go there, but God’s love is so merciful and so real that He allows people to choose hell if that is what they want.

This is a crucial point to understand. Hell is not going to be populated with people that God rejected as much as it is going to be populated with people that rejected God. Tell me how someone who adamantly wanted nothing to do with God on this earth, in this life, would want to have anything to do with that God in the life to come? Hell is simply the place where God gives people what they wanted in this life and what they also wanted in the life to come. C. S. Lewis put it best when he said, “No one ever goes to hell undeservingly – and no one ever goes to hell unwillingly.”

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