If you could ask God one question... "If you're a God of love, why send anyone to hell?"

In CU on Mondays we are going through the chapters of a book called "If you could ask God one question..." which is helping us tothink through the answers to some questions that we, or our friends, often have about God and the bible. Today we were tackling the question "If you're a God of love, why send anyone to hell?" Yep, that's a big one!

You see, thing with hell is, not many people like thinking about it, let alone talking about it. But then if it is one of these no-go subjects why does Jesus actually talks about hell loads? (an example: Luke 16v19-21 & Matthew 5v29-30) We reckon that it's because, like a parent who tells their child not to run out into a road, Jesus wants to warn us of the very real and serious danger.

But if God is love.. why does he send anyone to hell anyway? If he loves us, why put this danger in our path? Well, the thing is, just because God is love, it doesn't mean he loves everything...in fact there are somethings that God even hates - murder, disrespect, greed, lying, stealing, lust - just a few from the list we came up with...

Which led us to agree with this (maybe at first glance, slightly strange) statement:
...Because God is love, hell is necessary.
You see, God doesn't miss a thing, he notices all the evil in this world and he is not going to over look it - this is actually great news, can you imagine a judge who just let every criminal he saw off without punishing them - everyone would think he was rubbish! Definitely not a good judge. And God created hell to deal with all the things that he hates, he created hell to deal with evil (Matt 24v41)

But this gave us another question... what exactly is evil? and are there different levels of evil? what makes one thing more evil than something else?

In our human eyes, we give different people different sentences for different crimes. Often these sentences are different depending on how much the person can be held responsible and how great the person the crime was against is. So in our human eyes, yeah, we could say there are different levels of evil... but the thing with God is... he is INFINITELY great, which means that any crime against him is INFINITELY awful and deserves INFINITE punishment.

You see, hell only seems harsh when we don't see how infinitely serious it is when we rebel against God, and we fail to see that when we don't see how infinitely holy and good God is. "In fact, once we get the infinite depths of human sin, and the infinite heights of God's holiness, our original question will probably change to:
...If God is a God of love, how can you admit anyone into heaven?"

...more on this...!