The Injustice of Hell

About this sermon

Find Ryan Topping's Christmas book here: https://www.tanbooks.com/index.php/literature/christmas-around-the-fire-stories-essays-poems-for-the-season-of-christ-s-birth.html Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com 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.

Topics

• Justice & Mercy
• Hell & Judgment