To Hell With the God Who Sends People to Hell
Sorry, but if God’s not nicer than you, he’s not worth following
There I was, sitting in another small group Bible study when the topic of salvation came up. Christians, it seems, are always speculating about who will be saved from the fires of Hell and who won’t be and how exactly God will decide.
I suppose there is something in us that wants to rest assured that we don’t end up on the wrong side of the ledger, and so people of faith — and maybe even people of no faith — hypothesize and ruminate on this issue.
In a TV interview, Martin Iles, the head of the Australia Christian Lobby, stated that “The mainstream Christian belief is that all people are destined for hell, from birth, unless they find salvation through Jesus.” This was certainly the belief that I was taught as fact growing up in the evangelical Church.
But I’ll level with you. I am finding it increasingly difficult to square away the idea of a loving God with the doctrine of eternal torment in the fires of Hell.
There, I said it.
In my former life, I would have called myself a heretic. Nowadays, I am kind enough to acknowledge that I am simply pulling apart everything I once believed and testing it for its usefulness and truthfulness.
