“Ask a Priest: If God loves us so much, why does hell exist?”

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Q: How can a loving God send anyone to hell? I was always told that God loves us unconditionally, but if that’s true, then why does hell exist? Doesn’t that prove that God’s love is conditional? Couldn’t God, who created the magnificent universe, come up with a better alternative than hell? Why would God create a place that makes Jesus’ death on the cross ineffective for all who go to hell? Christianity teaches us to love our neighbor. How can I love my neighbor and forget the souls that are burning in hell? We can’t pray for them. Hell is eternal. If I end up in heaven, God willing, how can I enjoy heaven knowing that trillions of souls are burning for all eternity? Bottom line is, God’s love and the punishment of hell are in direct opposition. Some people have told me that hell is God’s justice. When I read Jesus’ words on hell, it doesn’t display justice to me. It displays hate. Hell is something that I despise. It is a creation of God that I believe should not exist for any of his children, no matter how bad they are. We must never forget that nothing happens that is not according to God’s will and that includes the people that are going to hell. I refuse to believe that my heart is kinder than my doctrine … kinder than my Lord and God. I hope I haven’t offended you with my questions. -C.

Answered by Fr. Edward McIlmail, LC

A: I appreciate this chance to try to answer some of your heartfelt questions. First off, though, I need to emphasize that in no way should Jesus’ words on hell ever be interpreted as displaying hatred. Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6), and whatever he revealed, he did so for the sake of our salvation. And he did this for love for us.

The heart of your question, I think, is your sense that “God’s love and the punishment of hell are in direct opposition.” They are not. Rather, they are two sides of the same coin.

To understand this, we need to remember two realities: first, who God is, and second, what hell is.

Scripture tells us that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). God is pure love, infinite perfection. Words couldn’t begin to describe his greatness. So loving is he, that he created us in order to share his love with us. Now, if God is good, so loving, so perfect, what possible excuse could a creature have for disobeying him?

God didn’t create us as robots. He gave us free will so that we could love him freely. His perfect will is that we obey him — he wants the best for us. But his permissive will extends to us a freedom that we can misuse.

Our parents, Adam and Eve, disobeyed his will, damaging themselves and the human nature that would be passed down to their descendants (such as us). This damaged nature is one way of thinking of original sin, which we inherit. Among the effects of original sin, even after baptism, is that we have a tendency to sin, also known as concupiscence. “Concupiscence stems from the disobedience of the first sin. It unsettles man’s moral faculties and, without being in itself an offense, inclines man to commit sins” (Catechism, No. 2515).

Now, some sins are grave, or mortal. Mortal sin involves a radical rejection of God’s love (for more, see the Catechism section that begins with No. 1845). A person who dies in the state of mortal sin faces the consequences of that radical break with God. This is what hell is about.

Hell was not an invention of God. Rather, according to Pope John Paul II in a 1999 audience, “It is not a punishment imposed externally by God but a development of premises already set by people in this life.”

Hell, in other words, proceeds from the very nature of mortal sin. God doesn’t send people to hell; it is something they choose for themselves.

An analogy might help. Imagine you are on a ship that is searching for survivors from a sunken ocean liner. You see a passenger struggling in the waves behind you. You throw a lifeline to him, but he refuses to grab it. You beg him to take hold of the lifeline, but he ignores your plea. Eventually, he sinks below the waves and drowns. Does his drowning indicate that you were indifferent? When you begged him to grab the lifeline, were you displaying hate? Was his drowning your fault?

The answer to all these questions is: no. The person in the water, for whatever reason, refused your help. His drowning was the consequence.

It is similar to God’s love. He throws lifelines constantly to people who have fallen into serious sin. He had even sent his Son to teach them to take hold of the lifeline and to warn them what they risk if they don’t. To help people gain salvation, Jesus was even willing to die on a cross. Yet, he won’t force salvation on anyone. He respects their free will too much.

I want to reiterate: God never stops reaching out to us as long as we are here on earth. The Catechism makes this clear: “Although man can forget God or reject him, He never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life and happiness” (No. 30). When explaining how someone might end up in hell, the Catechism makes this point again, from a different angle: “God predestines no one to go to hell; for this, a willful turning away from God (a mortal sin) is necessary, and persistence in it until the end” (No. 1037). God loves us too much to force any of us to go to heaven. He respects our freedom, and it is possible for us to use that freedom to reject his friendship forever.

To sum up: God doesn’t send anyone to hell. People choose it for themselves. Hell wasn’t part of God’s original creation. Rather, it is the result of the choices made by people (and angels) who reject God’s love.

If you make it to heaven, and I hope you do, your first question, there in the presence of God, might be, “How could anyone ever reject such perfect Love?” Fortunately, the mistake of others won’t faze your own happiness. For being in heaven by definition means being as happy as you can be. (By the way, keep praying for the deceased; you never know who still needs your help.)

You say that you refuse to believe that your heart is kinder than Our Lord’s. I agree. No one can top Our Lord in kindness and love. Let’s pray that everyone embraces that truth. God bless.

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7 Comments
  1. Human reasoning is great for solving temporal problems. It is terrible at everything else. Take compassion, for example. Human reasoning utterly fails most of the time when it comes to compassion. Human reasoning is worse than useless when it comes to making sense of spiritual things. This might have something to do with our fallen nature. Anyway, there are a lot of quite reasonable people out there saying that Hell and God’s love are contradictory. This makes sense to our human reason. But when it comes to true and complete knowledge of God, only one Human ever got that right. Only His word can be trusted on the matter. We just have to trust Him, even if during all of our limited little lives we struggle to make sense of most of it.

  2. I still have difficulties in believing in Hell. For example; if I found that my son was a unrepentant serial murderer, I would be heartbroken and realize that he must be removed from society. But even so, my love and pity for him would remain (along, of course, with profound sorrow for his victims), and the idea of him being in an eternity of torment would be unbearable. If my imperfect, human love, forgiveness and desire for mercy is just that – human and imperfect; then, how can a God of perfect love for his children be less than that?

  3. Sincerely, you use as part of your argument Adam and Eve’s Original Sin? Get it straight! Does the Church believe the world is 6,000 yeas old and Adam and Eve are the first human beings or is it a story to explain why things are as they are? Hell may very well be true (and I believe it is for those that will never love God or admit they were wrong on Earth) BUT it seems a trite human invention to be so black or white. If God is love then God would wait for us to turn to Him. The Prodigal Son is a parable that teaches God loves us even when we sin but rejoices when we come to love Him. The parable states, “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found'” (Luke 15:11-32). So even in death we can come to our senses and love God. God knows how hard this world is and how confused we can get; but if we cannot be saved by loving God or a loving God then how dumb is the act of contrition seconds before death that wins us a place in Heaven. How impotent is the love and power of God? Is God so human to damn a human for eternity when he loves us despite our prodigal ways? Just my 2 cents.

  4. Not everything happens according to God’s will. people go against his will all the time. every single day. Because of sin, the cross was the only way to save us from hell. I think instead of complaining about what God done, we should all be thankful he loved us that much. For we are undeserving. I would assume that generally the people who are gonna end up in hell are very evil and wicked and love satan. But God’s will is that no man should be lost or perish but man still has that choice. Isn’t god’s fault if people end up in hell. It is their own faults.

  5. I’m having a few issues too. But 1st, I would like to say that I lost my companion due to his overdose. Just 3 days before he died, God saved his soul. I was not even there and didn’t need to be. God saved him right before he died… that’s Love in the midst of serious sin.

    Yet, I do have a question. God is love, Free will must exist where love exists and I get why.

    My problem is why would God create us, knowing that we would sin and create hell for ourselves ahead of time.

    My logic brought me to the need for Him to Express His Great love. But why did He have to Express it this way? Isn’t that kind of selfish?

    But love isn’t selfish right? I’m confused. Who can answer this?

  6. I found the concept of hell with literal fire and torture to be so immoral that I was considering leaving the faith. On Sunday Dec. 8, 2019 I went to communion and asked Jesus how there can be hell fire. The answer I got was hell fire is a metaphor. The Son of God opened my mind that our free will rejection of God and his way produces a spiritual consequence in our soul that is utterly horrible and only the analogy of being burned by fire can express the pain. God is perfect love and would never hurt us in any way, He literally suffered and died for us so that the world and the devil could never say we are unforgivable no matter what sin was committed.

  7. The analogy given by Fr. Edward McIlmail, LC, in my own opinion, is an extremely a poor one. Comes of more like a rationalization. If the person in the water was my child and my child was refusing to grab the life line, I would jump in the water (with the life line) and grab my child and together get pulled back to safety. His analogy is completely out of context since the person in the analogy is human, and God is an all powerful deity. Here’s my analogy; let’s say that I own a home, I love dogs and breed them. I notice that there’s a hole in the fence but decide to not patch it. As much as I try to train my dogs to not use that hole to get outside of the property, they do so anyway. One fateful day, one of the dogs escapes through the hole, runs into the street and gets hit by a car and dies. Do I just shrug my shoulders and say to myself, “well, the dog made his own choice” and continue to move forward without patching up the hole? If so, I would be considered reckless and not worthy of owning dogs. The problem I have with fundamentalists, is they just don’t think things through! Here’s something to think about; I’m sure most believe Hitler is burning in hell, but consider this, what if God instead had placed Hitler’s soul in a child with down syndrome…do you still think his soul would have ended up in hell? And how about this? About 150,000 souls die each day not ever hearing about Jesus and/or the gospel. Do these souls get a free pass into heaven. How would this be fair? My suggestion to all….please get on youtube and start listening to people’s testimonies about their “near death experiences (NDEs). After you have listened to about 20 of them, you’ll see that when they experience the other side, God’s love is indeed unconditional…and that when you experience your life review, you are the only one who judges. My suggestion; start with Dr Eben Alexander. Also, please see the movie, “The Shack”. This movie depicts God the way I believe God truly is.

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