That is why it is a travesty to picture God casting people into a pit who are crying ‘I’m sorry! Let me out!’ The people on the bus from hell in Lewis’s parable would rather have their ‘freedom’, as they define it, than salvation. Their delusion is that, if they glorified God, they would somehow lose power and freedom, but in a supreme and tragic irony, their choice has ruined their own potential for greatness. Hell is, as Lewis says, ‘the greatest monument to human freedom’. As Romans 1:24 says, God ‘gave them up to . . . their desires’. All God does in the end with people is give them what
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