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If the Lord Gave Us Free Will, Then Hell Is a Thing
I know that some people don’t believe in Hell. I want to give those folks an opportunity to change my mind, so my short essay today will be to argue for the certainty of everlasting hellfire and damnation being a possible fate for any person.
I begin with the stipulation that man has free will. The Lord made man in His image, which means that we, like the Lord, can choose our actions.
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states,
1730 God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. “God willed that man should be ‘left in the hand of his own counsel,’ so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.”26
The Lord is not merely pretending at this, like a parent who knows that no matter what willful stubbornness a child may display, the whole family will be showing up for Aunt Martha’s jubilee on time, dressed to the nines, with smiles pasted on.
We really do have free will, so we can really choose God, or we can choose not-God. The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger and rich in compassion, so I’ve been told, and He really, really wants us to choose Him so the opportunities are many, but for each person there comes a moment of final judgment.
As my Catechism says,
1022 Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven–through a purification594 or immediately,595— or immediate and everlasting damnation.596
In other words, at the moment of our deaths, the Lord will allow us to see our lives clearly and understand them and the just judgement that He renders will either be for us to live with Him forever in Heaven, for many of us after we are made perfect through a purification (we call it Purgatory — pray for those souls), for others who are already ready to live immediately in the fullness of the Lord, or, to live without Him forever in the state of Hell.
Hell is not other people, but rather the absence of the Lord, so it really is a choice that we men are capable of making.
One might argue against this point by saying that, well, like a loving parent, who knows that the child will be happier if he is made to attend Aunt Martha’s party well dressed and pleasantly behaved, God, who is so much more loving than any parent can be, would want our happiness and would not allow us to choose Hell, so it can’t really be a thing. His mercy is infinite!
I disagree. I believe in mercy, but I also believe the Lord’s justice is without end, and I know there are really depths in the human soul that are capable of great evil. Some people choose Hell, of this I am sure.
And the Lord who loves us all with a boundless, infinite love, gives it to them. Of that, I am also sure.
Published in Group Writing
I see no Torah support for the idea that G-d knows the future. Since He changes His mind in response to our own words and deeds, the opposite seems to be true.
I think the entire idea of G-d knowing the future is based in more Greek logic games. G-d created the world – a finite thing. He gave us responsibility for it – along with the free will. To do this, G-d had to limit Himself. Which is why there is space for us and the physical world around us.
So defending the existence of free will is trivial as far as I am concerned.
How are we to reconcile the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1 and the genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3 ?
Here’s Matthew 1:15-16
Here’s Luke 3:23-24
There are conflicting genealogies. They can’t both be right.
Was one of the Gospel writers simply mistaken?
Sure they can. Names mean things. They show the pathways to Christ consciousness through other states of consciousness.
Malachi 3:6: if G-d does not know the future and does not change, then R”L He knows nothing. Or maybe that’s a logic game.
I, for one, choose not to believe in free will.
Or do I?
What choice do we have?
No.
Ummm…how about the Abrahamic covenant?
At that point, there was no nation, just Abram. Fast forward 400 years. Lo and behold, hundreds of thousands Israelites (“a great nation”) left Egypt for Canaan, and after a 40-yr vacation in the Sinai, took possession of the land (“a land I will show you”) promised in Gen 12:1-3. Abram, later renamed Abraham, is revered by all three major monotheistic faiths (“I will make your name great” and “and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”).
Surely this counts as a prophecy that was fulfilled?
It counts as a promise that was fulfilled. Prophets speak messages from God, and God is more than powerful enough to fulfill his promises.
Yes.
But I was responding @iwe’s comment:
My point, which you apparently agree with, is that God achieves whatever result He wants, which, I think, means the God does “know the future,” at least to the degree that He determines the future.
I’m not sure that God changes His mind. Here are a couple of excerpts from two meditations on this issue:
R. C. Sproul – In regard to Numbers 14:
Don Stewart – In regard to Exodus 32:14, 1 Samuel 15:11, and Jonah 3:10
Limited, physical, fallible, humans can never completely “know” or “figure out” an infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent God. God is God; we are not.
I wouldn’t call it a prophecy, exactly – it was a promise. I did not suggest that G-d break His promises!
This is exactly the kind of “analysis” that drives me nuts. Where in the Torah does it say that G-d is omniscient? Or perfect? Or unchanging? Or infallible?
NOWHERE.
This is an invention of Christianity, deeply influenced by Greek “logic.”
And yet the entire world is knowable – we have to ask the right questions, but after thousands of years, not one of G-d’s natural creations has thus far been beyond our ability to penetrate and learn and know. (Though women are pretty challenging…)
Why is G-d any different? After all, He endowed US – and gave us the the fruit that allowed us to comprehend the world.
Just repeating this one.
Yes, we have the capacity to investigate and attempt (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not so much) to comprehend the world. The world.
The fact is that we still can’t comprehend the world – everyday we hear of some new discovery, or more often, some discovery that what we always thought was true, was not true at all, or true for a different reason, or in a different way.
We’ve been building larger and larger telescopes, and larger and larger hadron colliders, but it’s always the same: we still haven’t found “bedrock,” the true ground of being. How could we, since the true ground is not of this world at all.
Of course we can. The technology we have developed speaks directly to this – compare our material wealth to 100 or 1,000 years ago.
Since I think “true ground of being” is an unprovable religious belief that has nothing to do with my religious persuasion, I’ll leave you to your own beliefs.