https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaJaJL6hCjA

Few doctrines produce as much hand wringing and wincing from Christians as the real possibility of damnation and hell for those who do not follow God. And it isn’t so much from their own fear of going to Hell, as much as it is the apparent cruelty of the doctrine as somehow incompatible with the notion of a God who is Love.

One commenter on one of my videos said “What kind of God punishes people with infinite suffering for finite decisions?” And if you do the math like that, then ya, it does seem completely unjust. If justice is like a balance of the scales, how do we account for finite crimes on one end and infinite suffering on the other?

This video is going to include some book recommendations at the end, so stay tuned for that, but before we get there, I wanted to promote my friend, Dr. Ryan Topping’s Christmas book that just came out. This video isn’t sponsored by him or his publisher, but he’s just a brilliant friend and his family has been a blessing to our family and I want that for your family too, so if you go grab his book, you’ll get a dose of that too.

It’s a handpicked Christmas compilation of stories, poems, and reflections to read with family or by yourself around the fireplace. It would, obviously, make a great gift and you can pick it up on Amazon so I’ll try to remember to include a link wherever I post this video.

I think a big part of the hangup we might have with the idea of eternal damnation is that it descends from an understanding that says that if we don’t follow all the rules that are in the Bible or accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, even if we’ve never heard of him or if we have, it came from some pretty terrible examples, then he’s going to consign us to an eternity of torment and torture.

And that just comes across as arbitrary and cruel. So yes, I get it. So this is why I think it’s important to point out that this isn’t what historic, apostolic, Christianity teaches, and to offer something with little more accuracy.

It would be better to say that God gives us a life and he creates us with faculties like reason and will and we are expected to do whatever we can to make the best use of these faculties to produce the best outcomes.

He gives us a certain measure of influence over the outcomes of our lives through the decisions that we make. And all of those decisions, big and small, are subordinate to or a reflection of the ultimate decision which is to accept his grace and love and to live in harmony with goodness and truth.

And every choice and act we make transforms us into a being that is more selfless or more selfish – in other words more blessed or more wretched. Because the more we make decisions that only serve our own interests at the expense of others, the more self interested we become.

And if you don’t believe that your decisions can have this effect of change on you, take a moment to consider what training is. When you train for something, like let’s say a marathon, you are repeatedly making a decision that reinforces a larger decision (running in a marathon).

Each time you put one foot in front of another in a sequence of training, you are transforming yourself from someone who can’t run a marathon into someone who can. You are changing yourself through repeated decisions.

Our entire lives are like that. The more you make decisions based, exclusively, on self interest, the more you are training yourself to be self interested and less interested in God or your fellow neighbors.

And eventually, after a lifetime of doing so, you may find yourself in the end, utterly self interested and utter closed off from God and others. Your training will be complete. And God, in the end will let you have your reward – yourself and only yourself.

And this is one way of understanding Hell. You will become closed off from all that is good in life and all that makes it worth living. That isolation means no love, no hope, no meaningful exchanges with others because you trained yourself to reject these things. This is the torment, despair, and wretchedness of damnation.

So what about the apparent injustice of eternal punishment for finite sins and thought of that way, infinite seems to tip the scales of justice compared to something finite.

So I would say a few things about this. When we think of infinity, we seem to have an idea of quantity in our mind. Like infinite is really big, and finite, not so much. But infinity isn’t a measure of a quantity that can be compared with a finite quantity. Because you can’t affect infinity by adding or subtracting to it. Like what’s infinity + 1? It isn’t affected.

So it’s not the same kind of thing as a finite quantity which means that comparing the two is like apples and oranges.  

I find a better understanding is one of finality. An eternal outcome is another way of saying the final outcome. It’s the end result. It is no longer open to change as the mathematical demonstration reinforces. Again, you can’t add or take away from what is infinite.

If a person has lived their life in rejection of what is good, then the end result is an eventual permanent rejection of what is good - which is love of God and love of others.

And when you understand it in those terms, you understand that those finite sins, weren’t finite sins. Goodness is not a finite thing. It’s something that transcends all space and time. So, to reject it, is to reject something with an eternal quality – the end result being, the permanent loss of this eternal thing.

And we experience something like this every day. We all have mistakes we’ve made in the past and those mistakes are permanently etched into our ledger. You can’t redo them. You can learn from them and when similar occasions arise, you can do better, but you’ll never be able to go back to when you were 16 and take that final exam again. It’s done.

A good example would be to think of relationships that have dissolved because of some serious infidelity. You could look at that and say, why should someone be punished for the rest of their lives for a momentary mistake. But that’s the result. A momentary mistake can have permanent, irrevocable, consequences.

But what about second chances? Isn’t God a God of mercy? Of course, but at a certain point, there needs to be an accounting. At a certain point, the curtain must fall, the whistle has to blow, the buzzer has to ring. If it doesn’t then the whole thing is pointless.

To insist that life go on ad infinitum without any real consequence for the measure of how we live our lives, is to render life meaningless. Like imagine a football game that never ends. You’ll never find out who wins. It would be pointless to play it.

Life acquires the meaning that it does because it is all moving towards a definite finality which makes the decisions we make now important and meaningful. If we want there to be a real possibility of Heaven, then the trial has to end at some point and that means that there must be a real possibility of Hell.