Cracked

I've talked with a few non-Christian friends about God and one of the most common objections is, "How can a loving God send people to hell?" Along those same lines is, "I'm a pretty good person, so I should make it to heaven, right?"

For the first one, I have lots of thoughts. One is that it's more our free will that determines where we go rather than some arbitrary judgment on God's part. What I mean is, say I was a billionaire and offered you a million dollars to come to where I live. You refuse and go to Detroit. I'm not in Detroit, so you don't get the million dollars. Whose fault is it?

"But God knows what I'm going to choose, right? And He's all-powerful, isn't He? So why can't He just make the situations in my life go so that I choose Him and not hell?"

Because that would essentially take away your free will. God's purpose for you is to glorify Him. Before you say that's awfully self-aggrandizing of Him, two things: 1. No amount of praise we can give Him can ever be enough. I don't mean that as a way to praise Him, I mean that as in nothing we can do can make Him greater or more powerful (or, conversely, less so). He doesn't need us; we need Him. 2. You can't do that if you have no free will. If you're forced to serve and obey, there can be no love. It is the love of God and love for God that you need, not to be enslaved.

"Why is there hell in the first place? Why can't we all just disappear if we're not going to heaven?"

God created us to be immortal. Could He have made it so that we just disappear when we die if we don't go to heaven? Yes, but then, we'd have no real motivation to choose Him. As for hell itself, I think (and I cannot find any Bible verse either for or against this particular idea) that the true torture of hell is not the flames or pitchforks or whatever else is there, but the total separation from God, from all hope and love, and yet being poignantly aware of the lack of it. Essentially, the analogy of you going to Detroit is appropriate here, too, because you could have gone anywhere in the world and, if that place is not where I live, you choose to get nothing because I am not there. All of those places are equally void of me and so are essentially the same. Likewise, choosing Buddhism, atheism, Islam, or even scientology is pretty much all the same choice.

"But I'm a good person. I give to the poor, haven't killed or raped anyone, and try to generally be nice to people. I get to go to heaven, right?"

I have perhaps even more thoughts on this particular question than on the first one:

1. Many non-believers think God is cruel for sending non-believers to hell if they don't believe. Even aside from the free will argument above, keep in mind that we are His creation, which really gives Him the right to do whatever He sees fit. If you made a pie, but then that pie fell on the floor, you could spend some time scraping off the part that had contact with the floor and carefully making sure the rest was hair- and dirt-free and uncontaminated or you could throw the pie away. Either decision is entirely your right and the pie, if it could talk, would have no right to argue or demand one type of treatment over the other.

2. Most of the negative feedback I hear on this topic is against the Christian God, even though all religions (that I'm aware of) have either hell or an infinite series of lives on earth (some as animals or as people with deformities, severe poverty, or other handicaps) and all but Christianity are based on works. Being good enough gets you to heaven or nirvana or wherever. You just never know until you die whether you've been good enough. Christianity is the only religion that accepts you as you are, and once you get that, it changes you. There are no requirements of service or prayer a certain number of days or giving to the poor. Service, prayer, and charity are encouraged, even commanded, but are nowhere used as the basis for salvation. In other words, while Christianity may be the most adamant religion in that you have to be pure and holy to get to heaven, it is also the one in which heaven is most easily attainable and the one in which we can be assured of heaven while still alive. All we have to do is accept who Jesus is and what He did for us and we're in.

3. Some people complain that with other religions, you can mess up and still get in, whereas with Christianity, one mistake and you're done for. It's true; if you reject Jesus, the only way into heaven is absolute perfection, which we've all fallen short of. Think about it in terms of the law: if you rob a gas station at gunpoint, the judge won't care that you give money to charity, attend church every Sunday, and coach the local Little League baseball team. You go to jail, even if that's your first offense.

If you have an egg and you notice a crack in it, you probably throw the egg away. Why? Because it's contaminated. One crack may as well be 1,000. Same with most food that we drop on the floor. Whether it's down there for four seconds or four months is all the same and we throw it away. We're used to several examples of perfection being demanded or else the item in question is tossed.

With Christianity, though, there's a way to make up for any number of any type of flaws and it's free (for us, at least). Christianity is not the religion that makes it hardest to get to heaven, but the easiest.

4. When I hear people argue the Bible against Christianity, someone invariably brings up the stringent laws of the Old Testament, saying things like, "According to the Bible, if wear clothes of two different materials, we should be stoned, so Christianity is false." That law is under Judaism, not Christianity. The point of Christianity was that we can't adhere to the law and need someone to accept the punishment for our failure. The law has now been fulfilled by Jesus, so all we need to do is accept Him. After all, He's the only one who accepts cracked eggs like us.