sub-Christian superstition. 'Who can possibly imagine a loving God tolerating such an obscenity?'
More popularly, people joke about it. 'Well, if I go to hell there'll be plenty of people who'll go with me'—as if hell were going to be some jolly party for the society of the free spirits. I do not deny that the language of judgment the Bible sometimes uses is difficult. I sympathize with some who find the doctrine of hell confusing and unpalatable. I would agree that Jesus uses symbolical language when he speaks of 'hell fire'. But I cannot believe he would use such language unless he wanted to warn us of something real and dreadful. And I cannot believe that the Son of God would have hung on the cross amid such agony if he did not want to spare us something even worse. Of course judgment is real. It's because judgment is real that we need rescue. The very word 'salvation' would be meaningless if there was nothing to be saved from.
Here is a God, I say, who sees us as individuals walking into misery, determined to be what by very nature we cannot be; independent of him. He puts up signposts in our path to warn us; he sends messengers to try and persuade us; but we despise and ignore them. He even sends his own Son, and he watches as we murder him. Yet still he persists in urging us to come to our senses. Still he persists in urging us to discover our true human destiny in fellowship with him as tenants of his world, not as usurpers of it.
But if we insist upon our autonomy, he will give it to us. In that sense he doesn't have to send any of us to hell. Our tragedy is that we are already walking there. The one principle of hell is, 'I am on my own.' If we tell God to leave us alone, Jesus says, then at the end of the day that's just what he will do: leave us alone permanently. The Bible says it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, but I'll tell you something that scares me even more. And that's falling out of his hands.
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