The following is a response to an e-mail I received. It is my humble attempt to make an argument for God's goodness.
So, this is going to be a very long response. I took notes for the past hour from your message in order to make sure I hit all of what you spoke of. I want you to know that when I read your message this morning my heart was filled with sorrow for you and I've been crying to God for mercy and humbly asking that I might be able to share something from His Word that might shine a light on the part of your heart that I know longs for God. That is my prayer going forward with this message. I would encourage you not to immediately respond to this e-mail, but really go through each and every point that I've made, look up the verses for yourself, and take time to let it soak in.
I want to first address your question, "What about the above statement is inaccurate?" There are a lot of things that you said that do not agree with sound doctrine from Scripture. I've done my best to contrast each of your comments with verses from Scripture and I will then do my best to unpack those verses to illustrate where your conclusions have broken down before lining up with Scripture. I don't claim to be an expert so please know that I do this in all humility and as gently as I can because I love you, and I care about your well being, both here and now and in eternity.
In the first response, you said that you know God is good, but in this most recent response, nothing you said indicates to me that you really believe God to be good. That's ok, but I want you to take an honest look in your heart and see if you really believe God is good. I'm not worried about proving that to you because I know that God is good. I know that He is confident of His goodness and eternally unchanging in it. Here's why I know this and I'm never worried about losing this knowledge:
The Cross is the highest trump in the card game of life. No matter what anyone throws out as proof that God is not good, God says, "Look at the Cross. My Son gave His life there and bore the sins of the entire world so that those who call upon His name will be spared from My wrath and instead ushered into My eternal Kingdom where I will lavish upon them all the riches of my glorious grace as they praise Me alone because I alone am worthy of praise and adoration."
God is good. The Cross proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt. I am convinced by Scripture that you will never find peace or victory in these doubts/struggles/frustrations unless you put your faith in this truth. Please, please, please consider stepping out in faith even if you don't see one iota of a reason to believe God is good. Step out in faith that He is good. He will prove to be good and faithful.
Now to the specific points from your e-mail.
1. Hell was created for Satan and his angels that rebelled. It was not created for human beings. Matthew 25:41 "...into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels." I am not denying that people will be cast into Hell. I am simply refuting your claim that Hell was made for unrepentant sinners. For God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." 1 Timothy 2:4 And again, "The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance." 2 Peter 3:9 It is God's grace that keeps sustaining life on this world so that more people can be saved and be ushered into the Kingdom of God!
2. Salvation is so much more than just being saved from God's wrath. Although, that would be plenty glorious to me if that was the whole deal! Colossians 1:13,14 says this: "He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." God has transferred us from a hopeless, dark, miserable, empty existence void of the thing that He created us for (relationship with Him) into the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the Righteous One of God! This is grace and it is amazing, wonderful, awesome, unbelievable, and indescribable! God goes so far beyond just saving us from Hell. The only way to miss this truth is to be hardened to its reality!
3. You downplayed (perhaps missed the point) of Adam and Eve eating the fruit. The idea is that God gave man a choice to obey Him and remain in fellowship with Him or to disobey and sever relationship with Him. God did not force Adam and Eve to follow Him, but He did give them a rule to follow that gave them a chance to say, "God, you are loving and good and we choose to obey your command." That was a gracious, loving thing that God did. He gave them a choice to love and honor Him or disregard Him.
Take a look at Deuteronomy 6:24, 25 and 10:13. In both of those passages, God says that His commands are for our good. God's commands have always and will always be for our good. He loves us and so He instructs us in the ways that bring superior satisfaction and joy because they bring us to Him and He is our ultimate satisfaction and joy.
4. The "Me-Monster"
Take a look at Psalm 148: 13, Psalm 98:1, and Psalm 95:3-5. Throughout Scripture, all people are in agreement that God alone is to be exalted, praised, adored, glorified, honored as King. Even the pagans bow down when the Lord is mentioned. Look at King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 3 for an example.
God is jealous because He is worthy of all of our attention, praise, love, etc. He knows He is worthy because it is His very nature to bless us beyond belief. Everything God does is good and righteous and just. Everything. And He alone is to be exalted.
God is not arrogant. God is not prideful. But God is self-aware that He is the most spectacular Being and longs for us to acknowledge this because He made us and He gave us ability to know how great He is! And instead of us acknowledging His sovereignty and righteousness and goodness, we ignore Him and exalt ourselves above Him. Of course He is jealous when this happens! The perfect, unchanging Creator has been replaced by our frail, puny, limited human arrogance. It's a gracious thing that He is jealous or else I don't believe any of us would stand a chance at reconciliation. If God isn't jealous for me after what I've done to Him in violating His commandments, then He's probably just pissed and will destroy me before another keystroke on this iBook.
5. I want to briefly touch on what seems to be a very human view of salvation that was a theme of your letter. "If you want to be saved, you have to love God, etc." How are we saved? By grace alone through faith alone. When we see our wretchedness held up to God's righteousness and holiness, we respond in agony knowing that we are not worthy to be in His presence. We cry out for mercy because we can't love Him like we should and we cry out for grace because we need Him to save us! That is our response. Not loving God more. Not doing more things to earn His forgiveness. Realizing that we cannot earn it and don't deserve it and never will be able to understand how God can still love us despite our sinfulness.
6. You brought up all the animals that you believe died in vain. Those animals died as by God's grace to show that their blood was not adequate to atone for man's sin. It only covered it temporarily. The shedding of animal's blood was designed by God to point those under the Law to the Messiah, Jesus Christ who would not cover their sins but cleanse them and wash them white as snow.
7. At the heart of all of this, I believe the biggest issue I see is a lack of understanding of the Gospel. You make many statements about being saved from damnation, praising God for saving us from Hell, and death at the end of this life being sufficient as God's punishment. Where is Jesus in all of these statements? I want to clearly outline the Gospel and hold it up to what you have argued it to be.
The Gospel literally means "Good News." It is the capital "G" Good News of salvation through the blood of Christ that atones for our sins and imputes onto us God's righteousness. It is the most incredible gift imaginable. It is completely free infinitely beyond the world's definition of free. It is glorious beyond compare. The Gospel is about relationship. It restores relationship between man and God that man severed but God restored. We failed. God redeemed. We sinned. God sacrificed and restored. We=bad. God=immeasurably good. Look to the Gospel if you struggle with God being good. If you don't find His goodness on display at the Cross where Jesus died, you won't find it anywhere.
The rest of the issues you have brought up can be addressed by Romans.
"For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse."
Romans 1:19, 20
Every human who has ever lived has clearly perceived that there is a God and that He is glorious and marvelous. Every human.
"For when Gentiles, who do not have the Law, by nature do what the Law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the Law. They show that the work of the Law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day, when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus."
Romans 2:14-16
All people prove to have the Law written on their hearts when they speak of morality and good vs. evil. All people. God has GRACIOUSLY written the Law onto the hearts of all people so that they might repent and turn to Him for salvation.
The Law was never made to make us righteous. "Now the Law came in to increase the tresspass..." Romans 5:20. In other words, when God brought the Law, people wanted to do the very things that the Law told them not to do! The Law proved that we are sinful and bent on disobeying God.
And again, "We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the Law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the Law, because by the works of the Law no one will be justified." Galatians 2:15, 16
Here is Paul, a Jew, saying that he was wrong to ever believe that the Law brought justification and righteousness. The Law was designed so that anyone who was honest with themselves would admit that they cannot keep the Law! It is impossible to keep and the Jews who were humble and honest admitted this. It is all through Scripture. Look at David, Joseph, etc. They knew they needed to cry out for mercy because the Law convicted them of their sins.
The life of joy we live now is not because we are PRAISING the Lord for saving us from wrath. We are praising the Lord because He has promised to restore everything back to God's original design of eternal happiness, joy, rest, peace, love, worship of God. Jesus accomplished everything that was required for this to come to pass by way of the Cross. Now, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, we are groaning until the Day that Christ comes back and makes everything perfect. That is why we rejoice. That is why we preach the Gospel to those who don't know Christ. Because without the Gospel, there is no peace, joy, love, grace, light, truth.
One last point. Eternity is not measured in minutes or days or years. Eternity is not bound by time. To say billions of years is only a human attempt to comprehend eternity which is in fact a state of being. In eternity, we just are. Time is nonexistent. God made creation within the bounds of time so that we would not remain bound by the presence of sin forever. Eternity marks the end of that bondage to the presence of sin for those who believe in Christ. So, to say that a billion years in Hell doesn't satisfy God's wrath is inaccurate because there is no time in eternity. It will feel as if time has stood still in a terrible way for nonbelievers and a glorious way for believers.
Notice one more thing from the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. God never commanded them not to eat from the Tree of Life. God created Adam and Eve to live forever in His presence in paradise. As humans, we are made in His image and made for eternity. That was His design from the start. So, yes, death at the end of life, or 10,000,000,000,000X10 years is not enough to atone for our sins against an eternal God. Once Adam and Eve chose to sin against God, they died in two ways. First, they died spiritually. This was immediate and fixed for eternity from their standpoint. They also began to die physically because God removed them from the garden so that they would not partake of the Tree of Life. This was gracious on God's part because if they ate of the Tree of Life, they would have been stuck in bondage to sin forever. Notice that God Himself performs the first sacrifice in covering their nakedness (sin) with the hide of an animal (you have to shed blood to make a hide). Every human since Adam enters into this spiritual deadness, but thanks be to God, Jesus Christ has given us all the way of redemption.
It's all about Christ. Everything. And we have been missing that fact for thousands of years even as God graciously displays the Gospel in creation, in our hearts, and at the Cross where Christ died.
Jesus Christ is the treasure of every person who has ever lived NO MATTER what they believe. No one will EVER find a greater treasure than Jesus Himself. He is priceless, preeminent, matchless, beyond compare because He alone is righteous and He alone has saved us into a glorious eternity.
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