Faith with Father: "Made for Eternity, Made for Love"
“Why does God create some people if He knows they will go to hell?” Quite a few classes have asked me this question recently so I thought I would give some time to it in this column.
Let’s say there is a boy named Eliot. His parents aren’t perfect. They try their best and they send Eliot to Catholic school. In school Eliot learns that he was made in love and that he will always be loved by God but to him it’s all theory. He never makes the effort to get to know this supposed God who is love. He is blessed materially (well-nourished, his family loves him and cares for him, he has a good education, etc.) and spiritually (God really does love him).
Yet for some reason Eliot is not thankful for all that has been provided for him by his parents and God. He doubts whether God really cares about him because he still feels he is missing out on something. He looks at other people who the world calls successful or happy and he thinks he is being deprived. He develops a way of thinking that is centered on himself. Rather than seeing God as a loving Father and others as his brothers and sisters meant to be loved by him, he views them as competitors, as obstacles to his own fulfillment. So his investment in relationships with them depends solely on whether or not they can serve his own desires.
This is not what he was made for. He is going down a path that contradicts his nature and in which he can never truly be happy, only temporarily gratified. Eliot is now in his 30s. This pattern of thinking has become his second nature, a false nature. There are people in his life who try to call him back to his true nature, his parents, maybe a coworker, maybe his wife who has started going back to church but Eliot continues to go down the same path. To the end of his life Eliot never decides to change and has fully embraced his self-centered life to the end. He wants Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way” to be played at his funeral. Everybody in his life was just an instrument for his own gratification.
Eliot might be in Hell. However, his existence still served a purpose. God created him and knew all the choices he was going to make yet he didn’t force Eliot to make them but every time a person met Eliot’s selfishness with a loving response they grew closer to God. Unintentionally, Eliot served as an instrument for Jesus in helping others become a more beautiful and loving person through accepting suffering with love. At any time Eliot could have chosen this path too. Even after all his bad deeds, even at the very end. Why didn’t he? This is the truly mystifying tragedy that can’t be explained: Why did Eliot never love God while God will always love Eliot?
Things to remember:
God is love.
God does not change.
Humans are meant to relate with God and each other in perfect love.
Humans can change. They can deny their nature and purpose.
God is just.
It would not be just for people who ultimately want to be self-centered to not suffer consequences for their choices in this life while others suffered the consequences of their own and other people’s sinful behavior in this life but chose to love in the end.
God’s wrath is not the same as the human emotion of anger.
God’s wrath is rather that God allows a person to reject His love. In rejecting God’s eternal love, joy and peace a person embraces the suffocating absence of these, suffocating because these things aren’t just nice options for our existence but rather they are the soul’s oxygen. God gives us over to this type of existence in eternity if we choose it.
Every person is made for eternity. Every person that has ever existed receives sufficient grace from God to accept salvation. No person is forced to receive this grace.
