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What Does the Bible Say About..Sending People to Hell?

If God loves us so much, why will he send us to hell? And if God decides when to take someone’s life, will he tell the man who kills people on the street then make him go to hell for doing Gods dirty work?

Answer

You are obviously not a parent or you could never ask that first question. Sometimes love and justice have to combine, resulting in punishment. A parent can love a child even while punishing them for doing something wrong. In extreme cases, when a child refuses to change, a parent may have to cut off relations with that child, as much as it hurts him to do so. When one continues to refuse to obey God until death, God’s justice has no choice but to punish.

Looking at it from another, more scriptural, perspective, God doesn’t send anyone to hell. “But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.” (Isaiah 59:2) “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9) “"Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: but when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons." (Galatians 4:3-5) These scriptures say that we are the ones who separated ourselves from God (condemned ourselves to hell). God doesn’t want that, so he provided a way for us to go back to him. If we choose not to return to God it is our choice, not God’s, that we go to hell.

Your second question makes a couple of unfounded assumptions. The first is that God has set when each person is to die. The second is that God makes people do things. Neither assumption has a basis in the Bible. I may die because of my own or someone else’s actions that may not have been what God would have wanted. For instance, I may be killed by a drunk driver or your killer on the street. I may die as a result of my own foolish actions. Nothing says that God determined ahead of time that such a thing would happen. God allows man choices. If someone makes a bad choice that results in my death, he is liable for his choice; God is not. “God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.” (James 1:13)