Does God send people to hell?

What makes heaven a place of bliss? It is the delight we will experience in God and by being in His presence. But if we do not delight in Him and His presence now, what makes us think we will in ¹eternity?

It is not as if a switch suddenly flips on, filling us with delight the moment we stand before Him, after a lifetime spent with that switch turned off.  

For those who wanted nothing to do with God—and even despised Him—all their lives, being in His presence will not be a delight. It will be a shock, fearfully dreadful. This will be especially true when they realize that God gave ²clear indication of His desire for a loving relationship with them and did everything necessary to extend His love, yet they rejected both it and Him by rejecting Christ.

Requiring someone who spent a lifetime rejecting God to remain in His presence would be a greater hell than hell itself.

Imagine living in a house with someone you distrusted, ignored, and avoided all your life; not exactly my idea of fun. And not because your assessment was correct but because you believed it was and refused to believe otherwise. 

So how have we rejected God?

We reject Him when we live our entire lives as if He does not matter, even though all we are and all we have is a gift from Him—when, in effect, we simply couldn’t care less about Him. If we thought of Him at all, it was only briefly in our most ³desperate moments, and even then not for the purpose of knowing Him, but merely in order to find relief from our suffering.

If God does not matter to us and we avoid Him now, He will not force Himself upon us. Instead, He will honor our wish to live without Him.

The reality is that God does not send people to hell. They choose it themselves, day by day, by living as if God is insignificant or does not exist at all—when the truth is ⁴exactly the opposite.

To live this way is to live a lie. It runs contrary to who God is, to who we were created to be, to our very design, and to God’s loving desire for us.

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Footnotes:

¹The more we come to delight in God in this life the more we will delight in Him throughout eternity. The reward of our faithfulness to God in this life is God himself. 

https://thotsaboutgod.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-necessity-of-dependence.html

²By sending His Son and by giving us all the blessings of creation.

³But this usually passes quickly because He didn't give us the relief we demanded on our terms.

⁴Every good thing that we have and are comes from God. Nothing that is would be if there was not God. God is the source of life, love, and all things.