Opus 2024-374: Deserving

In a previous post I talked about how people get what they deserve.  In that I was talking about You Tube videos and government.  As I put away my iPad and started looking up and thinking about God again I began to wonder if people don’t get the eternity they deserve.

Like many statements and propositions, there are two sides to this.

In one sense, we don’t want the eternity we deserve.  Theologically we are all sinners, and bound for hell.  Theologically there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves.  We are totally dependent upon the grace of God.  All of that is true.  We deserve an eternity in hell.

But also theologically, we have free will, and we make choices.  The Bible is full of references to the fact that some people choose righteousness, and some people choose evil.  It also has statements to the effect that the vast majority of human beings will choose the way of evil.  It may be a very low-key evil, just simple self-centeredness, but it is still evil.  And that self-centeredness is the seed that grows into the gross evils of our society.

So yes, in terms of eternity God gives us what we choose.  In the big picture it may not be what we really deserve because we’re all sinners, but it’s what we choose by either accepting or rejecting God’s offer of salvation.

I have a theory about how and why.  I can’t remember if I have shared it before here, but it says that most people, if given a choice, will go to hell on purpose.  The reason for this is that they find the righteous glory of a holy God to be so offensive that they would prefer the fire of Hell.  They will flee an eternity with the righteous one because it offends their sense of being god themselves.

Might be heresy.  Might be true.  Remember God knows our hearts and minds better than we do.

homo unius libri