Only in your imagined and limited ‘rationality’ which cannot allow for God’s sovereign and omnitemporal providential interventions.
Yeah, that is a limitation of rationality. Lucky for you you don’t suffer from that constraint.
There’s a sad picture … a tyrant leaning threateningly over his cowering subjects … “You WILL call me your Lord, and after you do, I will commence with torturing you.”
What a vindictive and petty god that would be! The abusive, drunken worldly father is even more righteous by comparison, because unlike the tyrant god, the worldly father’s family gets a break from his tortures while he sleeps, and he occasionally might lapse back into fits of kindness during his better moments. Not so, the wicked little god. Such a one would be worthy of nothing more than our extreme loathing.
I thank the true God that Christ was sent to show us the truth.
And you expect there to be no mystery with God and that you can surround him with your so-called ‘rationality’, never mind your futile sideways dig.
You pretend that God is not inscrutable, as it is noted that he is here and here.
…that pretends that there is no ultimate justice and that God does not use the threat and fear of punishment as one means of changing hearts.
That is definitely the world’s take. It rather ignores a few things.
Love is perfectly scrutable.
So is justice.
Agreed. I do think hell exists (though certainly not as it’s imagined in pop culture caricatures). the refiner’s fire is very real and serves a purpose. One that we will in the end recognize as good, and we will rejoice to have gone through it that we be fit for God’s company.
So along with that I’m firmly convinced that when “every tongue confesses” … it will be a freely given expression of joy; not one of ugly compulsion and extraction.
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Ugly choices have been made.
Yeah, social justice is, equality of outcome for all. A taste of heaven.
Some are not socially just, and there are not lollipops for all.
Ugly choices have been made, and God is under no obligation to save anyone. Especially me.
Thank you all for refraining from liking “Especially me.” 
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Some don’t need lollipops. We privileged few. All need saving.
God is under every obligation to be responsible to and for all He has had to create autonomous. He’ll make it up to every living thing that’s ever suffered. As He has been doing infinitely forever. What intrigues me at the moment is did Jesus open the floodgates that had been damned up for humans for at least 40,000 probably 200,000 years? Or were they all transcending along with cuttlefish and all other suffering creatures since the pre-Cambrian? The Incarnation formalized all that?
You are free to believe what your ‘rationality’ compels. Just don’t expect God to conform to it.
I think the error here is the implication that these are the only two possibilities and the examples of encounters between Jesus and demons told in the Bible shows this up. Just because someone has terror of God in the Bible doesn’t mean God terrorized them. Nor did Dale say anything of the sort. This was inserted by you Mervin. It doesn’t even follow that doing something unwillingly means that God compelled them. For those like me who believe that the problem is sin not the wrath of God, it is sin which robs us of our free will and compels us – not God.
I am not so convinced, because I don’t see this in the response of demons to Jesus. And it doesn’t follow that therefore they must be compelled to do so by force of God. Those who choose to rule and be ruled by fear, and power, and their sin, may well have fear of God. And I would certainly refute the idea that such fear of God is all it takes in order to have salvation.
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Indeed he is not.
To be sure God takes all the responsible of a parent for His children. But no parent can take all the responsibility for their children. That would rob them of their life, which must include a freedom to make their own choices about who and what they will be.
Again we are confronted with these two extreme positions “God judges us” and “Jesus saves” made into two exclusive things as if we must choose between them. In truth, it is both. God is neither the uninvolved observer nor the watchmaker designer, for we are neither experiment nor machine. God is a shepherd and parent, for we are children with our own life and choices.
This is not to say that salvation is work shared. That is the work of God alone. But it is a gift not an assault. You cannot call it a gift if no acceptance is required and accepting a gift will never make it something earned.
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