It's a question (and ultimately an important one) that gets thrown at us Christians often. And it's one I was discussing with a friend recently, with the following reasoning being where we landed:
In this life, we are given a choice between 2 options:
1) accept, rejoice in, and be all-consumed by the glorious love and grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ... surrender to His Lordship and allow yourself to accept that He is God, not you.
2) reject Him. Choose to live apart from His extraordinary grace and love. Choose to worship the created things rather than their Creator.
It is the alignment if your soul with these two options that determines your eternal destination. God, being loving, just, and fair, allows you to choose. If you choose to live under His authority and in His love, He welcomes you into the full revelation of Himself for all eternity in the glory of Heaven through the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ as the atoning sacrifice on our behalf. Scripture says that in this way, God is righteous to forgive our sins. Choose God in this life, have God for all eternity.
Aligning yourself with the second option, rejecting God, choosing to live outside His love and grace, and in His love, justice, and fairness He will not force any of us to align ourselves with these things. So, as an ultimate example of this, if we choose, in this life, to reject God, He will not force us to be in His presence for all eternity but instead He will grant you an eternity spent fully removed from His grace and love. This is the reality of Hell, an existence fully devoid of the presence of God.
As bad as our world currently is, every person under the sun is living under the presence of the ordinary means of grace of God's love. It's something that He bestows on us all as a glimpse into His sovereign beauty. This leads to the reality that the choice to live a lifestyle outside of the bounds of God's will is a choice to make this world, and this life, be as close to God's glory as you will ever encounter. If you choose a life lived under the will of God, you are as far from God, in this life and world, as you will ever be.
If you are fed up and believing that there is no God because of the current state if this world, know that the only way that it gets better is to seek God, draw close to Him and discover the eternity of His glory that He has for you... it's that simple...
People are not in Hell because God is unfair, unloving, or unjust... God is simply unwilling to force someone to spend eternity with Him after they spent their whole life indicating that they don't want to live in His presence. The choice is each of ours... the decision to follow God is up to each of us to make for ourselves. The means by which we are able to do so are up to God. The how is lined out in the Bible, and God, being God, gets the right to decide the terms of our agreement to follow.
To echo Francis Chan... I wish I could tell you that we could all choose to live however we wanted, with no regard to eternity, and no worries about the ramifications of our actions and still, at the end of the day, we all go to heaven... I wish that we're true, it would be easier, but it's just not Biblically true.
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