There are a couple of things that God reveals in the Bible that are tough to accept. One is the severity of the punishment for sin. Sin can manifest itself in people in ways that are not that destructive. Still, unless it is atoned for by Jesus minor sins are as damning as major ones, and damnation is serious and permanent.
The other difficult thing is that some fairly serious criminals can come to faith and be saved, while other nice people never do and, yes, they are lost. That doesn’t seem fair to us, but we have the wrong perspective on the situation. It is almost inherent to our being to feel that good people deserve good things and bad people deserve bad things. Other world religions fall in line with this tendency. But that is not how it always works in this situation.
If I were to add a third difficult thing to accept it would be that a God of love would accept this arrangement. To sort this out, we have to take a deep dive into the character of the being who has created all things and who is the ultimate judge of what is good and evil.
The first thing to note is that God didn’t create any being in order to damn them. He foresaw that certain individuals would rebel against His primacy and that sin and evil would be a real thing, but rather than scrap Creation God had a plan from the beginning.
4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.
Ephesians 1:4 (NIV)
The plan wasn’t for every creature. It doesn’t have a way to save or reform Satan, a cherubim/seraphim. It doesn’t have a way to save rebellious angels/demons. Their rebellion is different in a way. They choose out of a completely free will to reject God. Adam and Eve did not conceive of evil on their own. Satan deceived them. The rest of us are deeply influenced by our “sinful nature”. This is some sort of genetic abnormality created by the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3) and passed along to everyone. Other creatures are dragged into this cycle of sin, death, and decay unwillingly.
The plan shows the primary characteristics of God, which is love and justice. He is willing to make to ultimate sacrifice to save. The Son of God becomes a human and absorbs the main penalty for sin Himself. But God doesn’t just forgive because He can. He keeps His law in tact. Jesus even asked if this could be done a different way as He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. The Father’s commitment to not arbitrarily change His own law led to Jesus going through with the plan.
25 God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26 he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
Romans 3:25-26 (NIV)
He is “just” (i.e. He won’t change the Law), and the justifier (He makes a sacrifice out of love to save.)
A further statement about God’s intent is found in the most famous passage in Scripture:
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
John 3:16-17 (NIV)
Because of the nature of the plan, Jesus is not an option. He is the only way to stand before God as sinless. Even very good people are sinful. We all do something contrary to God’s will every day. We are all modified physically from what we are meant to be. When we call somebody “good” or think of ourselves as “good”, we are speaking relative to others we have known or heard about. We don’t meet that criteria relative to God.
“Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good.”
Matthew 19:17 (NIV)
Even knowing the interplay between God’s love and God’s justice, the situation of those who are not connected to Christ can be disturbing. Especially if we know them personally. It is not a bad thing to be disturbed. God is disturbed. It should move us to do what we can. We can tell people of the pertinent parts of Jesus’ story and urge them to read it if they can. We can tell of the promise and the Bible’s description of our human situation. We can even share the rational proofs for the reality of the Bible’s revelation. (Please look at my other blog: http://givingchrist.com for some of these.). We can also demonstrate the love of God through action. God must do the rest. If there is a chance of connecting them to Christ, God will do whatever He can during life and possibly beyond it until Judgement Day. But people will be lost, and some of them will be “good people”.
afterdeathsite 