Hell, the Lake of Fire, and Eternal Judgment (Part 3) – Questions and Objections About Hell

Click here for the Entire Series and the Outline.

Click here for previous sermon.

1.      Why do we all deserve hell?

1. All have sinned (Rom 3:23).
2. There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not (Ecc 7:20).
3. We are all as an unclean thing before God (Isa 64:6).
4. We are all by nature the children of wrath (Eph 2:1-3).
5. We all deserve hell for the same reasons the wicked reprobate do: because the elect in their natural state are no different than they are. (See Section II,6,G,ii – Why does God send anyone to hell?)

2.      Why did God allow Adam to sin, knowing that Adam’s transgression would condemn the human race to an eternity in hell?

1. God did not cause Adam to sin.
2. God doesn’t tempt men with evil (Jam 1:13).
3. God never commands people to sin, nor does it come into His mind to do so (Jer 19:5).

iii.    Adam was no different.

1. God knew that Adam would sin because God knows everything (Psa 139:1-6; Psa 147:5).
2. God created Adam as a perfect sinless man (Gen 1:31).
3. God gave Adam a law to keep (Gen 2:17), which was holy, just, and good (Rom 7:12).
4. God gave Adam freewill to choose to obey or disobey Him: Adam had the ability to freely eat (Gen 2:16).
5. Adam knew the punishment for His sin before he committed it: thou shalt surely die (Gen 2:17).
6. Adam willingly and knowingly chose to rebel against God.
7. Adam was drawn away of his own lust and enticed (Jam 1:14).
8. His lust conceived and brought forth sin, which brought forth death (Jam 1:15).

iii.    God allows people to sin by giving them over to their own lusts (Rom 1:24).

1. Nobody, including Adam, can blame God for their sin (Jer 7:9-10; Jam 1:13).
2. By creating a perfect human being with freewill to choose to obey God or rebel against Him, God can never be accused of not letting us have it our way: God is justified in His sayings and He will overcome when He is judged by wicked sinners who blame Him for their sin (Rom 3:4).
3. No man can ever blame God for his sin.
4. No man can ever condemn God for not giving man freewill.
5. The clay has no right to complain to the potter and ask, why hast thou made me thus (Rom 9:20).
6. No man can say that he would have done any better, given the chance, if a perfect man couldn’t keep God’s law.

3.      Why didn’t God prevent Adam from sinning?

1. God can restrain the sin of man if He chooses to (Psa 76:10).
2. If God would have restrained Adam from sinning the first time, he would almost certainly have sinned in the future.
3. God then would’ve had to continually restrain Adam from sinning.
4. God would have had to restrain all of Adam’s progeny from sinning as well, since once they sinned, they would pass their sinful nature down to their children.
5. If God restrained all men from sinning all the time, then the human race would not have freewill and would be as robots living out a preprogrammed life.
6. How much glory would God receive from a bunch of automatons?
7. We show our love to God by keeping His commandments (Joh 14:15).
8. God would not receive love from people who did not willingly keep His commandments, but were instead forced to by Him.
9. If God would have limited our freewill, then the same people who complain about God allowing Adam to sin would complain that God didn’t give them freewill (if they had the freewill to complain).

4.      Why did Adam’s sin pass down to all men?

1. When Adam sinned, spiritual death was the result (Gen 2:17 c/w Gen 3:6).
2. That spiritual death passed from Adam to all of his posterity (Rom 5:12).
3. Adam’s children were made in his image (Gen 5:3), not in God’s image as Adam was (Gen 1:27).
4. All living things pass their nature to their children through biological generation.

iii.    Dogs produce dogs with dog natures; cats produce cats with cat natures; humans produce humans with human natures.

1. We are by nature the children of wrath (Eph 2:3).
2. Nature – 1. a. The essential qualities or properties of a thing; the inherent and inseparable combination of properties essentially pertaining to anything and giving it its fundamental character.
3. A clean thing can’t come out of an unclean thing (Job 14:4; Job 25:4-6).

vii.  Think of our spirit and soul as having spiritual DNA.

viii.When a mutation happens in a woman’s mitochondrial DNA, it passes down to all her daughters, who pass it down to all their daughters.

1. Our “spiritual DNA”, which is corrupted by sin, was passed down from Adam to his children, and it continues to get passed down through each man to his children (Rom 5:12).
2. This is evident because all have sinned (Rom 5:12).
3. Babies are conceived in sin (Psa 51:5).
4. The wicked start sinning as soon as they are born (Psa 58:3).
5. Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child (Pro 22:15).
6. Man’s heart is evil continually from his youth (Gen 8:21).
7. Jesus Christ is the only man to whom a sinful nature did not pass down because Jesus didn’t have a human father (Luk 1:35), and He was therefore born without sin (2Co 5:21).

x.      This answers the question: How could a just God punish an aborted unelect baby, who like Esau, has not yet done any evil, by throwing him into the eternal Lake of Fire, where he will consciously experience unspeakable unending torture?

1. Because an aborted unelect baby is conceived in sin (Psa 51:5) and is by nature a child of wrath (Eph 2:3) who will grow up to be a wicked sinner, God is perfectly justified in condemning him to hell.
2. God sees the end from the beginning and sees what that person would be when they grew into a child and then into a man: a wicked, vile sinner.
3. A similar question could be asked: How could a person find a nest of termite eggs in the floor of their house and be so cruel to crush them all before they hatched and actually started eating their house?
4. Because they are termites by nature and they will turn into full grown termites when they hatch and then will start eating up the house.
5. This is a good analogy since man is likened to an unclean worm (Job 25:4-6).
6. A man likewise would be justified in crushing rattlesnake eggs that he finds in his bedroom because he knows they have a rattlesnake nature and will turn into deadly snakes when they hatch and mature, even though they have not caused any harm yet.
7. This is another good analogy because we are all by nature children of the devil (Eph 2:3 c/w Joh 8:44) who is a snake (Rev 20:2).
8. With spiritual death came judgment and condemnation for all men (Rom 5:18).
9. Because we are all by nature the children of wrath and we all have sinned, we all deserve to go to hell (See Section II,6,G,ii – Why does God send anyone to hell?).
10. No one can blame Adam or God for their condemnation because they themselves chose to sin and continually choose to sin (1Jo 1:8,10).

5.      Why didn’t God choose to save everyone and not send anyone to hell?

1. If you understand how holy God is and how wicked and filthy sin is, the question should be: Why did God choose to save anyone instead of sending us all to hell where we deserve to be?
2. It is not unrighteous for God to choose to have mercy on some and not others (Rom 9:10-18).
3. We have no right to question God about whom He chose to have mercy on and whom He didn’t (Rom 9:19-20).
4. God is the potter and we are the clay, which is a sinful lump of mankind, which God has the right to do with as He chooses (Rom 9:21).

iii.    Adam fitted the lump to destruction (Rom 9:22 c/w Rom 5:12).

1. God, in mercy, prepared some of the fallen lump unto glory (Rom 9:23), and left the rest to suffer the punishment they deserve.
2. God hasn’t told us why He chose to save some sinners, but not all.
3. God’s ways and thoughts are infinitely higher than our ways and thoughts (Isa 55:8-9).
4. His ways are past finding out (Rom 11:33).

iii.    The secret things which God was not revealed to us belong unto Him (Deu 29:29).

1. Don’t argue with Him or question Him (Rom 9:20; Isa 29:16; Isa 45:9; Jer 18:3-6; Job 9:2-4; Dan 4:35).
2. He doesn’t have to give an account of Himself to us (Job 33:12-14).