by Margaret Radisich Sleasman

Created on: November 18, 2009

I just read an article by someone who believes there is no free will and God chooses some to go to heaven and some to hell and therefore the ones in hell cannot suffer. He used scriptures to confirm this belief and I am still in shock from reading his comments, but I suppose many believe this line of thinking because they cannot believe God would send people to suffer for an eternity.

The God of eternity is all-powerful, all-knowing, and fills the past, present, and future all at once; there is no time as far as He is concerned. I believe in free-will and I believe God gave us free-will to choose Him or to not choose Him. The difference is that God, being all-knowing, knows our life from beginning to end and knows how we will choose. He gives us opportunity after opportunity to choose Him even though He knows we will not.

God is a righteous and holy God; He cannot look upon sin which is the reason He turned His back on His Son at the cross. Jesus was filled with all the sin of the world and God was forced by His holy nature to abandon Him while He suffered and died. Jesus Christ was the sinless sacrifice that was required in order that some of us could choose God and choose to be saved from suffering an eternity in Hell.

God can do all things; there is nothing that He cannot do. He could have made us all puppets to serve Him, but He wanted us to serve Him willingly and to love Him for who He is. Therefore, He created man with a free-will so that we could choose. If Adam had not chosen to sin, would Jesus have had to die? Probably, because He would have had to die for Eve; but since God knows ahead of time what we are going to do, He knew what Adam would choose, and He also knows what you and I are going to choose.

We cannot base our beliefs on what if this and what if that, the Bible is very specific about what God requires from mankind, it is also very specific about hell - how to go there and how to avoid it. If you remember that when Satan rebelled (which God knew ahead of time that he would), God created hell for the devil and his angels; He had no desire to send anyone else to that horrible place. He is a just God and sin must be punished. If He did not punish sin, then He could not reward good and he would not be a just God.

We know that God can do anything; we also know that by His very makeup there are things He cannot do. He cannot reward those that rebel against Him and He cannot make puppets of His creation so that we blindly follow Him. With this in mind, you can be sure that if you do not repent and accept Jesus as your Savior, you will go to hell and suffer in an eternity without God. You can also be sure that if you do repent and accept Jesus as your Savior, you will be with God for an eternity and once you accept Him, you will not slip through His fingers - you will be sealed by the Holy Ghost and will remain His child, forever, from that very moment.

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