Why I Can’t Believe in a God Who Sends People to Hell
How God’s Love and Eternal Fire Don’t Add Up
When I was a teenager, the local Pentecostal Church was dropping flyers in mailboxes around the neighborhood, advertising a free theatrical production that promised to change your life forever.
I was intrigued.
It was called “Heaven’s Gates & Hell’s Flames.”
And, as a young evangelical, I had no problem whatsoever going along to check it out and even convinced some of my non-Christian friends to come along with me by promising that there were lots of girls at the Pentecostal Church.
My secret agenda, though, was that I was hoping they might watch the play and come to faith in Jesus Christ. I was taught that it was my job to save my friends from the bowels of Hell, and was frequently on the wrong end of some guilt-inducing sermons where the preacher would paint terrifying scenarios of the people I love pleading with me…. “Why didn’t you tell me about Jesus?”… before they were thrown into a lake of fire to suffer for all of eternity while I watched on in horror.
If the preacher got us to merely imagine it, then the play “Heaven’s Gates & Hell’s Flames” left nothing to the imagination. For an hour and a half, we watched person after person “dying” on stage…
