God has all of the bases covered so that all will make it home.
What is really a shame is not so much that so many don’t seem to believe this but that so many don’t seem to even want this to be.
No. You’re still completely wrong. You’re making God a tyrant who forces His love onto all His creation instead of a loving Father who radically respects the freedom of His creation even to the point of their own self-destruction.
Love must be chosen freely or it is not true love but forced coercion.
God will NOT force salvation onto people who refuse it and who refuse to obey His truth and goodness.
It’s utterly absurd and offensive to mischaracterize people like myself who absolutely want everyone to be saved but at the same time, with God, accept the fact that NOT all want to be saved.
By insisting that all are saved you are denying human nature by denying free will. God is not a spiritual rapist but a gentleman, and we must be free to turn Him down. And if our souls at death enter into eternity in that state, after there is no more time for change or repentance, then we must endure the identity that WE have chosen eternally.
Even if after death what if one still refuses, even a family member of a beloved friend? If we are always free, we can always refuse. If it becomes necessary that we accept God, that acceptance becomes unfree.
What you are saying is that after death human beings loose their own nature or essence.
From C.S. Lewis:
"If the happiness of a creature lies in (free) self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself, though many can help him to make it, and he may refuse. ** I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully, ‘All will be saved.’ But then my reason retorts, ‘with their will or without it?’ If I say ‘Without their will,’ I at once perceive a contradiction: how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say, ‘With their will,’ my reason replies, ‘How if they** will not** give in?’
In the long run the answer to all who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question:** “What are you asking God to do?”** To wipe out their past sins, and at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? ** But He has already done so, on Calvary. ** To forgive them? ** They* will*** not to be forgiven.
To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does."
(C.S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain”, chpt 8, “Hell”)
God practices what He preaches: love the sinner and hate the sin. The reprobate are those who refuse to dissociate themselves from their sins by repenting. And every sin must meet it’s necessary fate: exclusion from heaven. If we glue ourselves to our sins we glue ourselves to that fate.
This is just a fact that even Christ testified to. Universal salvation is not in accordance with the truth.
The absolute lack of concern of some people’s “conception” of those in heaven toward those in hell is to me quite mind-boggling and makes it sound as if the heaven of their “conception” is quite hellish and self-centered and totally lacking in human empathy much less Divine empathy.
Another absurd and ridiculous remark which is also ignorant to the effect that sin has on a person’s soul.
Christ specifically said, “those who commit sin make themselves a slave to sin.”(John 8:34).
There are also several parables where Jesus refers to those who show up too late to repentance(meaning that they died without accepting the gift of salvation), “I never knew you.”
He does not know and see and worry about the damned. This cannot be divine ignorance because of the fact of God’s omniscience. It is fact because the damned have lost their true reality. Though they exist, they are not in heaven, and heaven is the standard of all reality. The closer to heaven you are, the more real you are; the farther from heaven, the less real. The reprobate are like ashes, not like wood.
The blessed in heaven do not mourn over what the reprobate once were-real wood, real men and women-because they do not live in the past.
In heaven we will be more like God, not less. Can one reprobate soul in hell destroy God’s joy for eternity? Does the existence of Satan or his angels, which are also His children, rob God of His joy? Can either they or we blackmail God? No.
Therefore however it is done, it is done: the divine joy, which we shall imitate, or in which we shall participate, will not be disturbed by hell. And it cannot be because of ignorance or lack of love, since God is all knowing and all loving.
Those who wind up in hell have abandoned any and all personal identity. They are no longer distinguishable from their sin that they refuse to be parted from.
1)God who is love wants lovers who love Him freely, not by force.
2)True, God is perfect mercy and forgiveness. But lets be clear about what that means. Forgiveness appeals to freedom, it must be freely given AND freely accepted, like any gift. If we do not REPENT and ask for forgiveness, we do not receive it-not because God holds it back but because WE HOLD OURSELVES BACK.
3) God’s love us also truthful. Love is NOT blind; love is accurate. God’s love is utterly realistic. It is reality itself; in a sense there is nothing else. The room you are sitting in is God’s love in the form and limits of a room. Thus all that refuse God’s love refuse reality, and there is no alternative to reality except “outer darkness”.
Those are the facts.**
