How can a God of Love send somebody to Hell?

How can a God of love send somebody to Hell? This article explains the counter balancing action of God’s love versus God’s wrath.

God is Love

1 John 4:7-8 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

If God defines Himself with the concept of love, how is it possible that God Himself sends anyone to hell? This problem becomes clear when we understand love. The point is that love is so good that when someone scorns and betrays such love, anger is logically provoked. In other words there are two persons involved in order to have love. The one who originates love, and the beloved who receives that love. But love can be only one-sided. The beloved or receiver of that love MUST respond correctly by returning that love. Honor, respect, pleasing the person who loves you is inherent in the concept of love. Despising, making fun of the person or taking actions that deliberately are opposed to the pleasure of that person who loves you is exactly rejecting that person and their love.

Exodus 34:14 For you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

“Jealousy arises when one feels that a loved one is paying too much attention to another person, and that the other’s interest in you is diminishing in return.” https://definicion.de/celos/

Defining Love Biblically

Love can be defined as a relationship between two people when the lover sacrifices of their own self, resources, energies, etc. to benefit somehow the beloved (person receiving that love). Love has to be defined as a relationship between two people. Two people in a public transportation do not love each other even though they may be sitting shoulder to shoulder together on an airplane. Love is engagement between the two, both participating.

Moreover, love is a spiritual activity. In 1 John 4:7-8 cited above, true love is defined as the same thing that is being born again. This phrase is used by Jesus in John 3 to define salvation. Jesus implores the urgency and necessity of being born again. Without being born again, a person will not go to heaven when they die, and in actuality, when they are spiritually born again, that eternal life-salvation begins at that moment, and for eternity their have or possess that salvation. Their quality of life is affected because they do not live the good way of God. That is true to the material things as well as the spiritual things in life.

How can you say love is required before you are saved? Because of John 3:16.

John 3:16  For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Our salvation is dependent upon recognizing the love that God shows towards us by sacrificing Jesus, the Son of God, a member of the Trinity and fully God. His coming to earth, taking on the sins of the world, and dying for those sinners is the greatest show of love that ever there was. Note that even though that great love was shown to every single human being that has ever lived, most do not get any benefit from that love sacrifice because they do not appreciate it for what it is, a sacrifice given in love for them. So they live without God, and when they die, God gives them exactly what they have said that they want during their life. They don’t want God in their lives.

Psalm 14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

Why is love a Spiritual Activity?

Luke 6:27 But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, Luke 6:35 But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.

You can only classify this divine action of loving as a spiritual activity, because it is independent of love first initiated by the other person. You decide to love using you soul, your will. True love is not solely reactionary. A reaction to somebody first loving you. But it is valid to respond to that first, new love by somebody else to you. You spiritually decide to love them back in response to their love to you.

This spiritual activity is what God is all about. Without this understanding in a sinner, without this response in his heart, he will not see heaven but suffer in hell.

But as we have seen in Exodus 34:14 that true love is jealous. It is very particular about sharing its love. In typical family life, a wife is very jealous of her husband having social closeness with other women, especially if they are attractive and flirting with him. So love is unique in that it gets righteously jealous when somebody or something else tries to move in on that love. There are many a wife who gets jealous when their husband spends too much time in work related things, or sports, etc. So the woman rightly sees a life stealing activity from outside, and she righteously responds with jealousy. Men are the same way. They get very upset if some other man takes up attention, energy, etc. from his wife.

Yet this is not always true. Because when a man and a woman come together in marriage, because of love, most of the time there comes little ones into their love relationship, and there is really no competition between a wife attention and devotion to her husband as against that same intensity towards their children. Love produces good fruit. The husband enjoys his children just as much as the mother.

Is God good? Is He the best there is?

We answer yes, but our lives often don’t support this answer. We let other things, people, and even ourselves and our pleasures take control and priority. God gets jealous with us over that.

Matthew 6:24 No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. Luke 16:13

Only one can be what you truly desire. Again, having all your priorities focused on one, in God is integrity, or wholeness of self devoted to a single priority.

Exodus 20:3 You shall have no other gods before me.
Exodus 20:5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.
Deuteronomy 6:15 For the jealous God, the Lord your God, is in your midst, lest the anger of the Lord your God be kindled against you, and He destroy you from the earth.

In this verse, God affirms His love with jealousy, a powerful emotion that takes control. At the same time He affirms His love for us, He affirms His wrath upon us if we despise, scorn, or mock His love.

Isaiah 42:8 I am the Lord; that is My name: and I will not give My glory to another, nor My praise to graven images.

Nor is love for oneself, but from one side to the other, love is only when it is toward another person. Love is between two people, each responding to love with love. Love for oneself is a mockery of true love.

2 Timothy 3:2 For men will be lovers of self, covetous, boastful, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy,

Love is “my sacrifice for your benefit.” How can there be sacrifice for another person if the other person loved is yourself? This is selfishness. It is seen by God as a sin. That is the essential reason why God created, because a self introspection of love is wrong. You need to do love outside of yourself. That is also the reason why God is perfect, and in eternity past before creation, God is one, yet God is more than one person, i.e. the doctrine of the Trinity. That love has to flow (like wind, i.e. the Spirit), and it has to flow out of the person who has love.

Love for others, putting others before oneself, service, and sacrifice are the remedies for this evil of selfishness.
If the quality of love is so good, and it absolutely is, then it is an insult, an assault on this love, when someone receives love and scorns it.

Romans 12:9 Let love be without dissimulation (sincere). Abhor what is evil, cling to what is good.

Evil is the opposite of what is good. But we must insist that sincere love is also the opposite of evil. No one can embrace and prioritize evil and at the same time, good, love. As we saw in Matthew 6:24 it is one or the other.

How does this Affect an American Citizen?

Firstly, if a person does not enter into that love relationship with Jesus Christ the Saviour, he is condemned, and his life is cursed. One bad decision is followed by another until “he stinks”, i.e. becomes a dislike to everybody around him. In salvation God uses spiritual soap and water, the Word of God, the Holy Spirit (water), the example of Jesus Christ, the perfect and wise will of God the Father, to make a person clean and pleasant to others.

That kind of person is a good moral citizen of whatever country they live in, wherever they find themselves. But when a person rejects love and God, all the goodness that comes with God in your life, they affect everybody that their life touches with that same evil that they are clinging to. Why would any sane person want to bring that kind of person into close proximity? They have rejected the goodness of God, and until they deal with that by confessing their sins and coming to the Savior, they are just bad news.

While a good person laments the poor conditions of life in these countries where these immigrants are coming from, but our heart of mercy has to close just as God´s heart closes when people reject that which is good. Note that the problem here in not that they are in a bad country. The real problem is that they are in a group of people that reject the good way that God has indicated. They are not just in that group of people as a co-citizen, they are fully the same as the rest of them.

If the United States is so good that everybody in the world wants to come to the States, why don’t the people in these foreign countries that are trashy and great problems for their own people to live in, why don’t those people change their own country to be like the United States? There is nothing stopping them from doing that.

The problem is in that they want the good that the United States has generated for itself by following God’s ways, but they don’t want God himself. They reject America’s religious heritage (Christianity). This is the real problem. It is galling for an American to see we open our borders to such people in desperate and depressing situations back in their home country, and once they are producing income in the United States, they send their income back to their home country which is economically failing. America becomes the one who is abused.

Moreover, it is extremely disturbing to see the Muslims that have entered into our country, and instead of becoming Americans in thought and spirit, they want to enforce the Shaira laws that repress their countries of origin. If those laws and customs are so great, why did they leave their home country in the first place? Why is it acceptable to Americans to have some other customs that we see clearly are bad and counter productive to the good of our own country come in and take over and force everything their way?

Mambani is a Muslim running for the office of mayor of New York. He clearly wants to force Muslim customs and laws on New York, and if he can, he would force it upon all other cities and states. While it is great that most Americans have a big heart, there is a teaching in the Bible that even God rejects eternally to punishment and suffering those who reject Him, and reject His ways. Why should we accept the destruction and ruin of what is good in our own lives just because we have a good heart?

I am not again any race or country per se. I am against what is evil and bad for me and my country. That is called being a loyal American. While other Americans like the Democrat Party abuse that goodness within me, I resent what they are doing. I oppose it, and I denounce it. I fight against it as I can.

God is not evil because He cannot tolerate fools. Why do we tolerate them then?

How can a God of Love send somebody to Hell?

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