Do you think it’s a bit harsh that a Person that is generally good…
but has a couple of failings will go to hell forever ?
considering a person lives for less than 80 years., just seems an imbalance…
thank God that in the teachings of Jesus… if you believe in me you shall be saved…
I know what you’re saying. I sometimes wonder where my own mother is. I’m pretty sure my father is in Hell, but then I had the peculiar experience of him turning up in my room the night he died, and then disappearing with one almighty scream. However he definitely lost his faith, and was very cruel to his own family. It was deliberate too.
.
My mother on the other hand was the glue that kept the family together. And she put up with a hell of a lot of mistreatment from her husband. I’ve got a couple of complaints about her, but they pale in comparison to what my father was like.
However she didn’t go to church, and basically walked away from God fairly early on. I think part of the reason was the things she put up with - lost an infant brother in the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic; lost a teenage sister from meningitis after watching her suffer for three years (walked around with her head up for 18 months, then walked around with her head down for 18 months, then died); lost a boyfriend on the HMAS Sydney which disappeared with all hands during WWII and was only located in 2008; witnessed the cruelty of World War II and the deprivations of the Depression; married my father and went into a marriage from Hell for 25 years; had a miscarriage between me and my sister, which my father may have had something to do with; and was pretty well penniless when she died.
So I think she thought God was pretty cruel if he existed, and quietly rebelled. I think she wondered what she’d done to deserve all that. She’d lived a quiet life; had no great sins; and was generally what you’d call a good and very responsible citizen.
At her funeral, and around the time she died, her friends and those who knew here were adamant she was a saint. Former neighbours were in fairly heavy attendance at her funeral, whereas **not a single one **turned up for my father’s funeral 20 years earlier, when they were all 20 years younger and mostly still alive. I know that my old pastor happened to visit a former neighbour who was dying of cancer, and his words to the pastor included a commentary about my father - “He was a miserable, bad tempered b----d!! Pardon the French, but no-one was sorry when
he died!” That sort of indicates the sort of marriage she put up with.
Yet I didn’t join in the chorus about her alleged sanctity, but merely nodded my head, since I’d become a Christian a few years before, and as far as I was concerned it was God who judged, not them.
But I wonder just how tough the judgment is.
Personally I think it’s pretty tough. On the other hand, I find it a bit hard to believe she’s in the same place as Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin, or a number of other people I could name who willingly served the devil.
So I just leave it with Him. I don’t know, and I don’t like the idea of her screaming her head off the way I saw my father screaming his head off, just before he disappeared for the last time. Going to Hell is not pretty, if my own peculiar experience is anything to go by. Whenever I see those stickers on cars, “Hell was too full, so they sent me back”, I always feel a bit cynical. They’ve got no idea of what they’re talking about. They think it’s a joke.
I don’t believe that I have read such a concise and clear statement on this anywhere. Welcome to the forums.