If Love Is A Choice, Then So Too Is Hell

I have often wrestled with the idea of heaven and hell, good and evil, as most of humanity has. I ask myself how could or would God allow so much evil to exist in the world. So today, we are going to take a roundabout way of getting to the conclusion that makes sense to me and my logic-oriented brain, so bear with me on this, and I promise by the end, it’ll make sense…… I hope

When I first began asking this question, it was for a purely selfish reason. One day, I found myself asking God why He would allow me to invest in a relationship that was doomed to fail. Because if God knows all things, then He knew it would fail, so why didn’t He stop me and save me from the trouble and pain? I began asking not for the love of others but because I was hurting, and I wanted justification for my pain. In this pain, I asked myself, “if I could have somehow forced someone to love me, would I?” If I could remove from them the choice to leave me, would I do it? Would I take their free will from them so I could have what I wanted? If I could have my will done rather than theirs, would I? Anyone reading this must think me a psychopath for even considering such a question, but it was a question that led me to personal revelation in my walk with God.

Suppose I could take from someone their free will and force them to love me. Would that be love, or would that be slavery? The answer is obvious when framed like this, but I think we often get so caught up in what we want in life that we don’t consider what it would mean to have our wants fulfilled. We want what we want and don’t consider who it might affect. We allow our passions to rule our hearts and minds. Rarely do we consider the consequences of our wills and wants.

The more significant point here that I want to consider is that love can only be given freely, without compulsion; it is something we must choose to give freely. We know this truth intuitively. We know in our hearts that “to love” is something that each of us decides to do and to be able to choose something, there must be the ability to choose. Without choice, there is no love, and it is only servitude. So, allow me to get philosophical for a moment. If God created humanity to have a love-filled relationship with Him, then by design, we had to be creatures created with free will with the ability to choose to love Him or reject Him. The apple had to be an option in the garden because if there was no apple, there was no choice, only servitude. 

(Side note: I find it funny to realize that in the beginning, God gave us thousands upon thousands of options in the garden, all of creation was made for the pleasure of humanity, and we only had one prohibition: only one tree was forbidden out of all of creation. We were told to avoid it, not to keep us from anything good or pleasant. We were forbidden for our benefit, to keep us from harm. I think so often we as human beings believe that God is some cosmic buzzkill; why is He so restrictive? But the reality is God keeps no good thing from us. He only wants to keep us from things that ultimately hurt and harm us. He gives us all these options, yet in our now fallen nature, we naturally drift toward things that are not good for us because the world is tilted away from God. I imagine it like this: When Adam and Eve sinned, the world was tilted away from God. Today, we are at the bottom of a hill, and though it may only be a slight hill, we drift away from God naturally. Like a ball set on a hill, it will naturally roll downhill if left alone. We do the same thing. In our broken world, because it is tilted away from God, we roll away, and so when we are not actively pursuing God, we drift away from Him just because that is the natural state of the world. Only by choosing to follow Him can we slowly change the direction we are tilted. Okay, back to the main subject.)

We are creatures made in the image of God, part of that image is our free will, and free will is necessary for us even to have the capacity to love. With that said, on to the second part of this idea that hell itself is something we all choose in the end. 

So if God is love and His character, His being is wholly perfect love, then He must allow us to choose Him freely. So if we reject God, we ultimately choose hell because hell is a complete and utter lack of God. It is the complete and utter lack of anything good, and there is no common grace in hell as is seen and experienced on earth. The common grace I mention here is the idea that here on earth, there is laughter with friends, there is the quenching of thirst, and there is the satisfaction of a good day’s work done. Hell is the complete and utter absence of God. If our free will is needed for love, then hell, in the end, must become the absence of free will because there is no love there.

God does not compromise our ability to choose. God is so loving as to allow us in the end to choose Him, and though it pains Him and He wants nothing more than for us to choose Him. In the end, He allows us to reject Him, not because He hates us but because He loves us, and He must then enable us to choose Him freely or to reject Him. 

Often the hardest prayer we can say is “Thy will be done,” and we wrestle with it in our human nature because we think we know what is best, and as the saying goes, “the heart wants what the heart wants.” We want something so badly because we think we know what is best for us. We often seem to think we know better than God when we pursue a job or a relationship. But when we can submit to God and say, “Thy will be done,” in the end, we can be confident that we will have the best outcome. Because God is ultimately good, and though we may not be able to see what that good is, we know that God does know, and He wants nothing but the very best for every one of His children. 

The paradox is that God gives us free will so that we are capable of love, but we can only fully love Him when we choose to give up our will for His.