Before the Throne of God Above

Before you read the rest of this post, take a moment to finish this sentence on paper or in your head:

"The God I believe in would never..."

Think about that for a moment. The omniscient, omnipotent, sovereign God of the universe would never... do what? Our God is in the heavens; He does all that he pleases. What can we say he would never do? Yet many people have an answer to that question, and it often comes in the form of another question:

"How can a loving, merciful God send people to Hell?"

When people ask themselves this question, they are leaving out several important attributes of God and some important background information that answers itself.

The first thing we need to understand is that God is holy, and we are not. Holiness is perfect, spotless righteousness. If God came into contact with sin, He would no longer be holy. Since every single person is a sinner, we must therefore be eternally separated from the holy God. The physical place where God is not found is Hell. People don't choose whether or not they are going to Hell, but rather we all have no choice aside from Hell due to our unholiness.

Okay, so God is holy. But He is still loving, so how can He send people to Hell?

A second important attribute of God is that he is just. People often confuse 'just' with 'fair.' We must realize that they are not the same thing. Fairness means everyone gets the same thing. Justice means everyone gets what they deserve. In this case they would originally result in the same thing: everyone would go to Hell. In fact, everyone is born headed straight there. However, we must remember the attribute we are more comfortable with: God is merciful. While justice means everyone gets what they deserve, mercy means everyone gets more than what they deserve. Therefore God sent His son Jesus, who lived a righteous life and took on all of our sin, and died on the cross as punishment for them. The illustration my youth pastor used today was that we are all in a river to Hell. God is not sending to Hell, but we are making our own way there. This is not merely due to rejecting the gospel. We are making our own way to Hell because of all of our sins, that sin included. But God, being rich in mercy, rescues us by pulling us out of the river of our sins.

If we were comparing this to a court of law, we would see it in this way: God is the judge. He looks at us and says, "You are guilty, and you deserve death, but I forgive you." That explanation makes sense. But that's really not the best explanation of what happens when those in Christ are judged. A better illustration would be God the judge looking at us and saying, "You are NOT guilty." It has to be this way because if we were guilty, it wouldn't matter if we were forgiven. We would still not be holy and therefore would still be unable to stand in the presence of God. The only way to stand in the presence of God is to be holy; to have no guilt. And only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ can we say that our sins are dead, and we are hidden in Christ's life, and therefore not guilty.

The best way I have heard it worded is in the song, Before the Throne of God Above:

Before the throne of God above
I have a strong and perfect plea:
A great High Priest, whose name is Love,
Who ever lives and pleads for me.

My name is graven on His hands,
My name is written on His heart;
I know that while in heaven He stands
No tongue can bid me thence depart
No tongue can bid me thence depart.

When Satan tempts me to despair,
And tells me of the guilt within,
Upward I look, and see Him there
Who made an end to all my sin.

Because the sinless Savior died,
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God the just is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me
To look on Him and pardon me

Behold Him there, the Risen Lamb
My perfect, spotless righteousness,
The great unchangeable I am,
The King of glory and of grace!

One with Himself I cannot die
My soul is purchased by His blood
My life is hid with Christ on high,
With Christ, my Savior and my God
With Christ, my Savior and my God

We will never be able to fathom the depth Christ's love for us. How can we even try to understand God's grace? We could never count the vast amount of sin in our own individual lives. Yet Jesus paid for all of it, and we have been given the gift of salvation. One day we will inhabit the New Heaven and the New Earth and our creator, the one, true, holy God will dwell among us. That is not something that ought to be taken for granted.

The final attribute of God that is important to answering this question is that God is sovereign. He is in complete control, and He does whatever pleases Him. We struggle to understand this sometimes, and I think we probably always will. We simply need to understand that God does whatever he wants to do, and he doesn't have to explain it to us. The illustration in Romans 9:20 puts it into perspective nicely. God is the potter and we are the clay, and we have no right or reason to ask God why He does something. We should always remember Romans 8:28. No matter what the situation is, God is working it together for our good on the eternal scale because we love Him, even if we cannot see it.

So we should not be asking ourselves how a loving, merciful God could send people to Hell. We should be in awestruck wonder that the holy, just, sovereign God rescued us from Hell. And we should more importantly be sharing it with others and glorify God in everything we do because He has rescued us.

"For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ." -1 Thessalonians 5:9