Love Does Win

All Christians can agree that love does, in fact, win. Today, as Time magazine publishes an issue highlighting Rob Bell’s thesis about how hell is not permanent, that God will bring every living soul through to salvation before eternity is done, it’s important for us to consider the reality of love, and God’s love specifically.

For if God is truly love, doesn’t it make sense that there should be no place of eternal torment, no place where people regret their lives forever, no place where people are filled with hate and anger for as many tomorrows as may come. Right?

Let’s turn the question around. If you were God, what would you do with all those people who reject you? For years they’ve been running around hurting other people, hurting you, destroying things, killing things, hating, shouting out in anger, and just generally being barbarians. What do you do with these people?

Well, you’re God, right? So you could just force them to change, right? You could force them to love one another, to love you, to do the right thing. But wait —didn’t you say that God is love? Is it loving to force someone else to love you? No, not really.

Well, you could always just destroy them, right? Rather than letting sit out there in torment for all of eternity, you could just make them so they no longer exist.

But wait, there’s a slight problem. You see, you’ve already given them the gift of eternal life, and you can’t, really, take it back. Beyond this, if you destroy the ones who don’t want to exist, what about the ones who do want to exist? Can you really destroy one part of creation without destroying all of it? Nope —this isn’t going to work out, either.

But aren’t all people good, after all? Can’t you just declare them all good, and be done with it? The problem is that whole thing about justice; if you declare someone who isn’t good to simply be good without actually having a path through which they become good, well, then you’re just lying —and lying isn’t an attribute of God, is it? No, that’s not going to work, either.

You could always make the law a bit more lax. You know, make it so everyone can follow it, right? The problem is, of course, that no-one will follow any law no matter how lax and simple you make it. Adam and Eve kindof proved that with the whole apple thing.

What’s the other choice here? Well, if you were God, and you have the people who don’t want to be around you, because of who you are, because they can’t stand the sight of you, you could make them a place where they can go and never see you again. For all of eternity. You could, of course, make this place as comfortable as you possibly can, but you also know that when you put a bunch of people who are angry, and hateful, all in one place, well, it’s not going to be a very nice place to live, is it?

Congratulations, you just created hell. Oh, not what you intended?

This entire push to get rid of hell actually comes from our inability to see God as he truly is. We either want to see God as love, or God as justice, or God as mercy, or God as omnipotent, or God as omniscient, or… We reduce God to one attribute, and then build entire theological systems on this one thing. Either all is for God’s glory, and men are condemned to hell for his glory, or all is for God’s love, and men are never condemned to hell, because a loving God would create no such place.

As hard as it is, we must keep all of God’s attributes in site, and interact with all of them. There is a hell, because God’s justice demands it. There is a heaven, because God’s glory demands it. And there is a sacrifice which can bridge the gap between the two, because God’s mercy demands it.

But there are those who will not cross that bridge, because God created us in a way that allows us not to cross that bridge.

The gates of hell are locked, but they are locked on the inside.