Meet Our Sponsor - 3

The Bible everywhere asserts that God loves every human being, but it also states that he cannot simply overlook or excuse our rebellion or let this state of affairs in which vulnerable people are getting hurt to continue indefinitely. As stewards, we are accountable to him for our actions against him and each other. God will not let us destroy his world nor permit his authority to be forever flouted. He will intervene to put this world to rights.

However, God will not force people to do his will. He is too conscious that human freewill is the indispensable attribute that constitutes our humanity. We are free to love him precisely because we are free to hate him; take away that freedom and we are no longer human but robot.

God’s judgement of human sin is just because he gives us precisely what we desire. We have insisted that we do not want God ruling us and telling us what to do. We want to be left alone. So in great sadness, God ratifies our will. His sentence on people who rebel against his authority is to withdraw from them, and place them permanently outside his presence. But because God is the creator and sustainer of life and everything good, those outside his presence must experience the loss of those things. This is what the Bible calls death and hell; it is not the cessation of being but an everlasting, God-less existence.

It is a dreadful doom to contemplate but infinitely worse to undergo. There is nothing more terrible than to be under this judgement of God. Yet because we are all guilty of rebellion against God’s rule, it is a prospect everybody faces.

Is there no hope then, no alternative for us save everlasting separation from God and eternal ruin? Fortunately, and thanks to God’s own intervention on our behalf, there is just one way to avoid that judgement, one way that provides hope and deliverance for our eternal