Do you really have a friend or family member who is so into himself that he’d deny God once he is confronted by God?
I have an atheist friend, and others who believe in God but don’t practice their religion. I cannot imagine them denying God once they are confronted. I’m pretty sure they’ll be spending some time in Purgatory along with me.
I’ve stated ad infinitum that the night my own father died, he appeared in my bedroom in the flat where I was living.
While we talked and argued, it was obvious that most of his attention was on something I couldn’t see as he was either looking over my head with an expression of awe, or he was trying hid his face behind his hands as though he didn’t want to see what was being displayed. I think he was either looking at the Godhead when he had the expression of awe, and seeing the less savoury aspects of his life when he couldn’t bear to watch what he was seeing. That’s my take anyway.
I only saw him.
At the very end he turned to his right (my left) and it was very clear something else was coming for him which terrified him to the core, as he screamed in absolute terror. Then he disappeared.
So I suppose he qualified as a “loved one” who went to Hell. As far as I’m concerned he did, and I still remember the sheer terror just before he disappeared.
However I hated his guts by that time, as I’d experienced 20 years of pretty much unrelenting, deliberate cruelty at his hands, mostly verbal humiliation, but it just went on and on and on.
To give one example - somehow I managed to get 4 x 7’s and 4 x 6’s in my year 10 exam, which was eqivalent to 8A’s in the old system.
HIs fatherly response?
“You’re not getting away with this!! I’ll makes sure you don’t succeed!! You’re not showing me up!!” Then he stormed off.
And that was typical of the sort of exchange I put up with for 20 years - 24 years really, except that I wasn’t around much for the last 4 years of his life.
So he didn’t really qualify as a “loved one”. More of a “despised one”.
However my mother didn’t go to church either, but she was the glue which kept the family together. She was basically a good person, but she walked away from the (Anglican) church a long time ago. I suspect suffering had a bit to do with her abandonment of formal religion - lost an older brother at two, a younger sister when she was about nineteen; I think a boy friend went down on the HMAS Sydney, and then she married my mongrel of a father, and put up with his cruelty for 24 years. After all that I think she thought God’s love wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. So she walked away from the (Anglican) church, and never went back, other than weddings, funerals and so on.
I sometimes wonder where she is.
But at one stage in the exchange with my father on the night he died, he exclaimed “I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!”
I argued back, saying “That can’t be right!” I was an atheist at the time too.
He replied, “Oh, it’s right all right, you can see that from here.”
And later in the conversation he admitted “I was WILLING!” (to act in the way he did, and keep acting that way).
So I don’t know how we’ll come to grips with this issue. I suppose we’ll find “it’s right all right. You can see that from here” when we front up for our own judgement.
It’s a tough one, and I don’t see much point in worrying about it, because there’s not much you can do about it.
So I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Even Christ could be a bit cavalier at times about the lost despite His love. When one would be follower requested he be allowed to bury his father first, he got back the somewhat blunt reply “… let the dead bury the dead”. “If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the ditch”.
To the Pharisees - “Blind guides! How can you hope to escape being condemned to Hell?”
I think we’ll have to wait till we’re in front of the judgement seat ourselves before we have the answers to a lot of these questions. In the meantime we “see through a glass darkly”.
It is certainly not for us to decide who is in Hell.
So be it.