Go to Hell – but Only If You Choose to Go

In a nasty political argument, a Massachusetts senator shouted at this colleague the vicious epithet, “Go to hell!”  the insulted politician asked the governor (and future president Calvin Coolidge to do something about it. Coolidge calmly replied, “I have looked up the law, Senator, and I assure you, you don’t have to go.” 

Nor does anyone. Any soul can choose to fashion its own eternity. “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you…may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

The greatest love story the world has ever known is the paradoxical drama of a God who loves enough to hate evil. He loves us sinners as his precious children, and he hates our sin because it is the evil that poisons us. So in the book of Judges and elsewhere it is recorded that he disciplined Israel repeatedly in efforts to entice his people to abandon idolatry.

God cares enough to be angry with the trivializing of evil and the refusal to acknowledge the need for his mercy. He cares enough to be angry with the devil-inspired distortion of evil as mere petty legalism. The Lord protests, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live” (Ezekiel 33:11).

Amazingly, as angry as God is with the sins of humankind, he came not to condemn: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17), for “God our Savior….desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4).

Because God revealed himself in the mirror image of his Son (see Colossians 1:15), in Jesus we find an accurate picture of the balance between God’s love for us and his wrath toward evil. He loved us enough to warn us of pending judgment (see Matthew 25:31-46), while assuring us that his love is equal to his hatred of sin” “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). Jesus loved enough to overturn the tables of the money changers desecrating the sacred temple (Matthew 21:12).

Any father is angry at the disease that ravages the body of his sick child. So does God detest the moral sickness called evil or sin that contaminates his dear children, whom he loves most tenderly. “As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear [reverence] him” (Psalm 103:13). “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance,
 said Jesus (Luke 5:32). 

We cannot afford to misunderstand the relationship between the love and justice of God. Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, wrote that “justice alone is not enough” to correct the ailing world. We need God’s mercy and we need to be transmitters of that mercy to convert those deserving of justice.2 That sublime thought might be stated simply as “Many persons who cry loudly for justice would soon beg for mercy instead, if justice were done to them.”

Jesus did not come to condemn us but to save us from our sin and from destruction by the infernal punisher, into whose hands our unrepented sin would drive us. Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). The truth is that God’s mercy is infinite and equal to his justice. Yet he seeks to apply his mercy to prevent the need for his justice.

This excerpt is from the book The Awesome Mercy of God, by John H. Hampsch,C.M.F., originally published by Servant Books. It and other of Fr. Hampsch's books and audio/visual materials can be purchased from Claretian Teaching Ministry, 20610 Manhattan Pl, #120, Torrance, CA 90501-1863. Phone 1-310-782-6408.