I'm sorry...I dont know were this passage is in the Bible..but I know it is there. What I grew up beliving was that it means most people go to hell.
I have struggled with this during my life and the idea of hell and it even for a year or so cuased me to loose my fiath completly.
I still can not understand it, but I have accepted that I must trust that God is all loving with an ever lasting uncondistional love.
He is just.
But hell seems like something no human would be evil enough to subject someone to for any reason.
And so I can not understand everlasting torment for any being, comming from a God like my Jesus who loved sinners and sat and ate with them in love not caring what the religouse poeple thought.
Too many people try and judge God by human standards...God is not human! And as much as we can study His attributes that are revealed to us, we will never full understand Him. But I think it's important to understand that while God is fully loving, He is also fully just. When we really understand that, it helps a little with the notion of hell.
Let me put it another way. We struggle to comprehend just how heinous sin is against a holy God. Sin is so bad, our rebellion so complete, that it took a huge act to make a people like us righteous. It took the death of Jesus....that's an almost incomprehensible price...the death of God Himself in our place!! But in that we see just what it took to 'make us right' again. So it's a sign of God's justice, but it's also a sign of His love! It took
that much to redeem us, but He loves us so much, He took that price from us and put it on Himself! Now, I think it helps if we look at it a bit like this....God extends that exchange to all, and some take it with thanks and praise, but others reject it. They choose to try and pay 'that price' of sin by themselves. They deny God, from the outright anger against God, to a mild rejection that He even exists. The result is still the same. They remain lost with a cup of wrath sitting before them. Jesus has already taken that wrath from me, and those who place our faith in Him.
It's still hard to think of 'hell', but for all the speculation of it, we just can't know what it will be like. I think all that speculation does is make people angry at God and unsure of His 'love'. This is where trust comes in, I think. We do know Him to be loving and just, so in that we can rest in that what ever happens to unsaved people, will be those things.
I think it's hard for us to comprehend true and complete love and justice. We see it from sinful eyes that can be biased and influenced. Just think about it for a minute. How can God be perfectly loving....fully loving, without also being perfectly wrathful? Good and evil do exist...so if God fully loves...His children for example...how can He see evil happening to them or through them, without Just wrath? To love that evil is to
be evil! There must come a point where love leads to wrath...He cannot only be 'love' and feel that 'love' even when evil is in play. He cannot only feel 'love' when people wilfully disobey, murder, cheat, lie and hurt one another. He cannot only feel 'love' when every day we try and be our own gods, doing our best to displace God from His own throne. He is God! He is holy! He cannot be fully loving with also being fully wrathful at our treason.
God will always seek His glory, and as one pastor says, every single person in existence will end up glorifying God and doing His will. Some will be doing it through His grace and mercy, others through His wrath. It may be confusing to us, it may not even seem fair to us, but ultimately, it's not up to us and what we deem fair or not. God is not some all powerful human wizard that still must hold to our moral standards. He is God, He is all, and we must rest in our trust of His judgement, love, goodness, and even His wrath. It will all work out as He wills it, and that will be perfect...
l safer
