Why does Hell exist if God is all-powerful and loving? Joe Heschmeyer addresses the common question about the existence of Hell in light of God’s attributes. Discover how free will plays a crucial role in this complex theological issue. Understand the concept of human choice and its eternal consequences.
Transcript:
This person simply says, if God is all powerful and all loving, hell shouldn’t exist in the first place.
That’s right. It shouldn’t. It was because of our rebellion from God that it does. The idea of God being all powerful doesn’t mean that his power deprived me of the free will that he gave me. And that is the frustrating part of free will is that God in his goodness knows it’s good for us to have free will and he’s powerful enough to give us free will. And let’s notice that takes a tremendous amount of power. We can’t create free will ourselves. The closest we have is artificial intelligence and that’s not really free will. It just is a nice illusion of free will. It’s still a heavily controlled kind of program. We are not programs. We have free will and God interacts with our free will, but he doesn’t eliminate it. And this means that we can choose to allow him to satisfy the longings of our heart or we can choose for him not to. And if we choose for him not to, there’s no other option. God is the infinite uncreated source of all goodness. If I say I don’t want that, there’s not some second infinite uncreated source of all goodness that I can turn to. And so I’m necessarily going to be tremendously unhappy having said no to the only thing that can satisfy my heart.