How do I love a God who will condemn most of my loved ones, and why?

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mmzpop said:
I cannot understand how I am supposed to love a god with all my heart who will destroy most of my family, loved ones and most of mankind in general, and that he created us with these flaws knowing most of us would suffer eternal damnation.
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Those flaws are due to the sin of Adam, our first family, who caused us many problems, God die not them them flaws. The fact is, people are intelligent enough to make the right choices if they want to. God can be known by the natural light of reason. Despite that most people are simply not interested in God, so it’s by choice that they don’t want to spend eternity with Him, because if they don’t want to be with Him now then they are not going to want to be with Him in eternally are they? It would make no sense.

Hell is the absence of God and to have God absent form their lives is most peoples choice. St Monica worried about Her son all her life until he converted finally after decades of her prayer. Pray for your family’s conversion but like St Monica love God first. She loved God first and St Augustine second.

I’m sure that most people in this forum have the same problem, as do I (ie that most of our family do not “have time” for God). We should pray for them. Without God we would not have our family so we must remember that as-well.

Think of it like this, God created each one of us individually and we exist for Him, that’s the purpose of our existence. Secondarily it is also true that God has given us certain people like family and certain things we are blessed with and qualities, but we have them as an extension and we should be thankful for that. But God is not optional in our lives, God is our number one, and while we should not “shun” our family the way some Protestant groups do, we should still remember this. At least we have not been asked to sacrifice our family like Abraham who was asked to sacrifice His son to God (this was only a test). He passed that test and the moral of the story is that we love God first and then everything else will fall into place, but without God everything will fall apart.

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Painting by Caravaggio titled ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’; painted for Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII.
 
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mmzpop said:
I cannot understand how I am supposed to love a god with all my heart who will destroy most of my family, loved ones and most of mankind in general, and that he created us with these flaws knowing most of us would suffer eternal damnation. Clearly, our nature is weighted against us and it just seems cruel, meaningless and unnecessary.
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So there are a fallacy that you have in this statement. You are assuming that God created mankind with sin, and that he condemns us for this. While you are correct in saying that we are condemned on account of our sin, you make a false assumption that we are created sinful. If you read Genesis 1, God created us in his image and called us good. Sin was not part of God’s creation of man, rather it was a foreign invader into the human experience. It is mankind that sinned against God of his own volition, and it is mankind that remains a slave to that sin apart from God’s grace. This puts the responsibility for sin squarely on our shoulders, not God’s.

The blessing is that God has acted to defeat the power of sin, death, and the devil by sending his son in the flesh to die for our sin, and has justified us by faith. While we justly deserve God’s judgment he offers his Son. Rather than God being cruel, he has demonstrated that he is both just and merciful.

I think you would benefit from reading John 3, particularly vs. 3:16-3:21. These verses capture God’s grace as well as the reason for why we are condemned.
 
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  1. They condemn themselves, having heard the truth and then rejecting it.
  2. We will be delighted that those in hell received God’s perfect justice.
  3. Really.
 
  1. God loved us so much that he took on human flesh, lived a human life, and went to the cross to pay our ransom. When thinking of God, look at Christ crucified.
  2. There is a devil who is looking to pull as many as he can into hell with him. We are in a battle here on earth. This life is not neutral.
  3. Before you get out of bed to start your day, pray. Tell God you want to hold his hand into the day ahead, and that you want to go to heaven at the end of your life. Make that choice today. Know that there will be evil that will try to pull you off the rails.
 
Those in hell choose hell. God does not “gotcha” anyone, ever.
 
Yes, that’s what I said above. Not sure if you are trying to correct what I said or just add to it?
 
Please correct me if I’m wrong but I have heard that Saint Faustina said that Jesus encounters every soul at the moment of death and gives them the chance to ask forgiveness…(or something similar to that)…my apologies if none of that is true…but the Catholic Church doesn’t say there is anyone in hell because only God knows and can judge
 
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@toi_nhan Ironically, my mother just recommended tuning in to Bishop Barron’s Easter service (I wish I did). Thank you, that was helpful.
 
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I am a convert to the Catholic faith and when I was a new Catholic I was also disturbed by some of the Fatima stuff so I know where you’re coming from. The way I look at it is like this:

I believe in the apparitions at Fatima, I just choose not to read much about it. I believe there is a hell. I don’t deny the doctrine. I know there are probably many there, but it pains my heart to think about the damned so I choose to focus on God’s mercy. (However, not to the level of denying sin as many do today.)

Remember that to go to hell you need to be in mortal sin and remain in it till the end of your life. But many people don’t even know about mortal sin let alone know that they themselves are in it. The reality of it is that there are many things that cloud the view of faith for many. For instance, there are millions of people who are not taught by their parents anything about God and sin. Instead they are taught that abortion, homosexuality, pre-marital sex and masturbation, for instance, are all good things. They are taught by the culture that making money and achieving things is the main purpose in life.

It’s very difficult for people to find God today with the influence of so many other religions such as the New Age and we are even more distracted now since the arrival of the internet and smart phones. Even the poor example of believers is a factor in keeping people away. There are so many factors that keep people from believing that they need God. We believe that God is mercy. So it makes sense that Christ would present Himself to souls at the moment of death, as St. Faustina explains. I personally don’t see how his Mercy couldn’t extend even to the moment of death.

Although, depending upon how they live, how much darkness they allow into their lives, some people may still turn away at that moment, so that’s another reason why evangelization is so important. Here is the quote from St. Faustina from paragraph 1698:

“God’s mercy sometimes touches the sinner at the last moment in a wondrous and mysterious way. Outwardly, it seems as if everything were lost, but it is not so. The soul, illumined by a ray of God’s powerful final grace, turns to God in the last moment, with such a power of love, that, in an instant, it receives from God forgiveness of sin and punishment, while outwardly it shows no sign, either of repentance or of contrition, because souls [at that stage] no longer react to external things. Oh, how beyond comprehension is God’s mercy! But—horror!–there are also souls who voluntarily and consciously reject and scorn this grace! Although a person is at the point of death, the merciful God gives the soul that interior vivid moment, so that if the soul is willing, it has the possibility of returning to God. But sometimes the obduracy in souls is so great that consciously they choose hell; they [thus] make useless all the prayers that other souls offer to God for them and even the efforts of God Himself…”

Continued…
 
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Continued…

Interestingly, Padre Pio also believed that God’s mercy would extend to souls at the moment of death giving them a true understanding of sin:

“I believe that not a great number of souls go to hell. God loves us so much. He formed us in his image. God loves us beyond understanding. And it is my belief that when we have passed from the consciousness of the world, when we appear to be dead, God, before he judges us, will give us a chance to see and understand what sin really is. And if we understand it properly, how could we fail to repent?”

Even St. Gertrude the Great, who lived in the Middle Ages, said something similar. Jesus explained to her about those who were dying: “When I behold anyone in his agony who has thought of me with pleasure or who has performed any works deserving a reward, I appear to him at the moment of death with a countenance so full of love and mercy that he repents from his inmost heart for having ever offended me and he is saved by this repentance."

So I think we have good reason to be hopeful. Again, that doesn’t mean we don’t continue to evangelize, but that we can at least hope that those we can’t reach for one reason or another may eventually see and know their need for God.
 
Sorry, not really sure what you’ve added here StudentMI.
 
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You’re welcome! Just don’t give up because of these types of things that disturb your soul. I went through several of these things when I was a new Catholic. I got over them and was able to continue on in the faith journey, growing closer to God. You will too. As the song says: “Don’t Stop Believin’”.
 
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