Some say God cannot be good if he would send some people to Hell. How can God possibly be merciful? Just because some people don’t believe in him, he chooses to torture them forever?
Here is one more situation where people try to put God in a box. In fact, they put God in a position where he is either cruel or uncompromising. If God does not give us free will, then he is a master of an army of automatons. They all think and do exactly what he wants. How fulfilling would this relationship be for God? Doesn’t he already have the angels as his servants? What if I don’t like God? What if I don’t want to be around him? Then I just have to go to Heaven and spend eternity with him anyway?
However, if God does give us free will, then we can choose to love and serve God, or some other alternative. What could that alternative be? Whatever it is, it cannot include God, or else there would not really be a choice.
The alternative he gives us is: not serving God. That includes not loving God, not relating to God, and not being near God. Not being near God means separation from God. Separation from God means unhappiness and a feeling of emptiness. Add to that a realization that you have made a mistake in not choosing God, because he really did create the universe, and the sad fact that you can never undo your mistake. You will never feel love, comfort, or any good thing again, because all good things come from God, and you have chosen to separate yourself from him. Does that sound hellish? It would be constantly be eating away at you that you will always have this empty feeling and that you were wrong to close your heart to the truth.
On earth, we experience some measure of God’s spirit in our everyday lives: the beauty of nature, the joyful laugh of a child, the love of a mother for her baby, the comfort of others in times of need. All these things are absent outside God’s spirit. He is the source of every comfort and joy in our lives. In the fullness of God’s presence, all is good and no evil is present. We call this heaven.
What is supposedly God’s cruelty is actually the natural consequence of separation from God: emptiness and thirst for comfort. God is true to his original idea of giving us free will, and allows us to decide whether we want to be around Him or not.
Notes: We must be redeemed because to come into God’s presence with unrepentance would upset the natural order of heaven as a perfect place. How can the fullness of the joy of God’s presence be realized if there are some in Heaven who won’t “be good?” They might cause pain to others, making Heaven a less-than-perfect place, which goes against the definition of Heaven. So, as a consequence of allowing each person to choose good or evil, some must be excluded from Heaven and separated from God.
Is the world a perfect place? Or does Murphy’s Law usually apply: If anything can go wrong it will.
Think about how you could make the world a perfect place. What would you have to change? What’s the first thing you would have to change? If you fixed the environment, people would mess it up again. If you made all the poor people rich, somebody would come steal from them or take advantage of them. Less than one generation later, you’d have some people being poor again. So what do you have to change to permanently make the world heavenly? Change people. But people can only change voluntarily.