To Those On Their Way to Hell
You know this, when Jesus said “Glorify me with glory that I had with the Father before the world began” (John 17.5). That, in eternity past, there was God’s Triune being.
“As regards to the Godhead, the Son and the Father are co-equal; but His being the Lord is rewarded Him by God. The Lord Jesus Christ was made Lord only after He emptied Himself. His deity derives from who He is, for His being God is His inherent nature. His being Lord, though, issues out of what He has done. He was exalted and rewarded by God to be the Lord only after He forsook His glory and maintained the perfect role of obedience. As regards Himself, He is God; as regards reward, He is Lord. His Lordship did not exist originally in the Godhead.
The passage in Philippians 2 is most difficult to explain, for it is most controversial besides being most holy. Let's remove our shoes and stand on holy ground as we review the Scripture. It seems as though at the beginning a council was held within the Godhead. God conceived a plan to create the universe. In that plan the Godhead agreed to have authority represented by the Father. But authority cannot exist alone. God must therefore find obedience in the universe. Two living beings were to be created: angels (spirits) and men (living souls). According to His foreknowledge God foresaw the rebellion of the angels and the fall of men; hence He was unable to establish His authority in angels or in the Adamic race. Consequently, within the Godhead perfect accord was reached that authority would be reached by the obedience of the Son. From this come the distinctive operations of God the Father and God the Son. One day God the Son emptied himself, and being born in the likeness of men. He became the symbol of obedience. Inasmuch as rebellion came from the created beings, so obedience must now be established in the created being. Man sinned and rebelled; therefore the authority of God must be erected on man’s obedience. This explains why the Lord came to the world and was made as one of the created men”.
“For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2.9). When Christ emptied Himself, He emptied Himself of the independent use of His attributes. Another way of saying this is that He delimited Himself. Being in the physical will limit some independent use in the Godhead of God’s Trinity. But when He died on the cross, and was raised from the dead, He recaptured that which was delimited. When you read the Bible, remember this phrase, “A text without context becomes a pretext for a prooftext”.
The Bible says the Father is loving. And the NT affirms this about Jesus. Did you know that Jesus taught more about Hell than any of the writers of the Bible? Wow!
God does not cast people into hell because they don’t accept a certain belief. For example, though one may believe in Christ, while mistakenly believing in say calvinism, that is not grounds alone to not save that person. For that person still accepts Christ for real, nonetheless, and just needs deliverance from a false doctrine. However, most calvinists, in reality do not accept Christ underneath it all (in God’s eyes), and are not saved for believing in the pride that they were premade for salvation and others were strictly made for hell. That is an evil god that teaches that (of zombiism or “stacking the deck”), and is a killer of free-will and the image of God. God wants us to us to choose His life, so that He can grace us with His life and to walk with His chosen ones. Another example is someone who never heard of Christ, who could be saved also, for if he were to hear of Christ, he would accept Him, because he does in fact believe and knows he was created by having a sense of acceptance of the true character of God of the Bible who is revealed in the 66 books of the Word.
Adam and Even had right relationship with God and with each other. Then entrance of sin and rebellion came into the world. These image bearers begin to think they are the center of the universe. Not literally, but that is the way they think. And that is the way WE think. All social pathologies – war, rape, bitterness, nurtured envies, secret jealousies, pride, inferiority complexes. All of these are bound up in not having right relationship with God. The consequence is people get hurt.
From God’s perspective, this is disgusting. What should God do about it? If God says, He doesn’t care, then He is saying evil doesn’t matter to Him. It is a bit like saying the Holocaust doesn’t matter. Wouldn’t we be shocked if we discovered God didn’t have moral judgments on such matters?
Therefore, God does have moral judgments (that is real reality), if He is truly God towards these image bearers who are shaking their puny fists at His face and singing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way”. That is the real nature of sin.
Hell is not a place where people are consigned to because they were pretty good blokes but just didn’t believe in the right stuff. God sees the deepest part of their hearts to make His decision. The reason they go to hell, eventually, is because they defy their Maker and want to be the center of the universe. God is gentle and righteous and holy. Hell then is needed for people who, for all eternity, still want to be at the center of the universe and who persist in God-defying rebellion.
What is God to do? If God says it doesn’t matter to Him, God is no longer a God to be admired. He’s either amoral or positively creepy. For Him to act any other way in face of such blatant defiance would be to reduce God Himself.
But what about torment for eternity? Sounds vicious eh? The Bible makes it clear there are different degrees of punishment so it is not the same intensity for everyone. If God took His hands off this fallen world so that there was no restraint on human wickedness, we would make hell. Thus, if you let the whole lot of sinners live somewhere in a confined place (say another dimension) where they’re not doing any damage to anyone but themselves, what do you get but a hell? There’s a sense in which they’re doing it to themselves, and it’s what they want because they still don’t repent.
The Bible insists that in the end not only will justice be done, but justice will be SEEN to be done, so that every mouth will be STOPPED. At the time of judgment there is nobody in the world who will walk away with the notion from that experience saying that they had been treated unfairly by God. Everyone will recognize the fundamental justice in the way God judges them and the world. Justice is not always done in the world; we see that every day. But on the LAST DAY it will be done for all to see. And no one will be able to complain by saying “this isn’t fair”.
Are you ready to come to the cross as a helpless sinner and receive Jesus as God, your Lord and Savior? Affirmatively!
