The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important that Happens in Between

by Gregory Koukl

Banishment from God will not be the pleasant experience some have imagined. God himself is the source of all things good—all pleasures, all joys, all satisfactions, all comforts. Everything wonderful you have ever experienced came from him.8 Even if you have never believed in God, he has still been good to you. All the pleasures of this life are only possible because he is gracious, even to unbelievers. But that will not last, because to be banished from his presence is to be denied every goodness that makes any enjoyment possible.

It is correct to say God is love, if you are very careful with your meaning. Love is a true attribute of God, but he is more than just love. Other qualities are essential to God, too. One of them is justice. Wrongs must be punished; debts must be paid.

If you still insist that a loving God would never send anyone to hell, then you must settle in your mind that desperately evil acts will forever remain unpunished. God will simply “look the other way” when evil is done, as if nothing had happened. That is what you must accept. Yet isn’t part of our complaint about evil that evil people get away with the evil they have done? Have you thought about what that would mean?

I want you to see that they come together in a breathtaking way when his love and his justice and his mercy all converge at a cross. “God is the only comfort,” Lewis has written. “He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need, and the thing we most want to hide from.”14

Maybe some great saints have felt unsoiled sometimes, but I never have.

Jesus was a true human being, just like you and me. But there was something more. He was the Word made flesh, the unique God-man, the King of the universe who came down and got low for us. Jesus did not come to spread social justice, but to live the life we ought to have lived, then to trade his perfect life for our rotten ones. That trade happened on a wooden cross on a crop of rock outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem—a place the locals called Golgotha, the skull.

For now, God extends his hand of mercy, offering free forgiveness for sin and pardon to rebels. He will not delay dealing with evil forever, though. His patience will give way to action. In the end, all will be raised, the rebellious to perfect justice, the penitent to perfect mercy. The heavens and the earth will be remade, and evil will be no more.

But now you may be at a kind of crossroads. You have one of two choices. You can bend your knee to your Sovereign, beg for mercy because of Christ, be welcomed into his family as a son or daughter, and belong to him. Or you can reject the gift, stand alone at the judgment, and pay for your own crimes against God, such as they are.