Hell for many is an uncomfortable topic. We typically focus on attributes of God such as His love and mercy, but less and less on His holiness, justice, and yes, I’ll say it, wrath. The issue I would like to discuss here is God’s relationship to hell.
I often feel that contemporary Christianity has a distorted view on hell in relation to God. Allow me to lay out some basic truths regarding God’s relation to hell and the damned.
First off, God does not delight in the damnation of souls. He does not enjoy condemning individuals to hell. This is one truth that most do accept and hardly any misunderstand.
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Christians have faith in a large variety of things. We are very trusting people. For example, when we go out to eat we have faith that there is nothing wrong with the food we are eating. Or, if we fly in an large commercial airplane, we have faith in the pilot whom we most likely have never met and know no very little about. When we take extended trips we trust that the gas stations we will need to continue our journey will actually have gas despite the fact we never called a head of time to check if this is so (in fact, we don’t even check to make sure there are gas stations where we are heading; we assume and trust). The list goes on. There are countless other regular things that we never doubt or have second thoughts about.
What I would like to do with this article is present to you some popular Gospel clichés, as I like to call them, and provide some rather brief thoughts on each—-nothing exhaustive or too in depth, but just some thoughts to make you think about them, their use, what they seem to be saying, their accuracies and inaccuracies, etc.
Before I can present to you my eight cautions for teaching people to pray a prayer to be saved, we must first set the basis of how one is actually saved.
Often times a plainly strange thinking finds its way into our perception of how humans/we relate to God. This false thought (although not often purposed) is thinking that instead of man being made for God, God was made for us, that God is for man, not properly vice versa. And of course the first problem with this statement is the word “made,” for God is eternal. He is the Creator, the maker, not “the made.” But not only is this the first problem, from here other issues develop.
Kirk E. Miller 