Why does God create people He knows will go to hell?

Ques.—How can we reconcile God's grace in providing for the salvation of all, and His perfect power, wisdom, and knowledge, with His creating a class whose destiny is the lake of fire?

Ans.—John 3:18-21 is the explanation. God has created no class of beings for the lake of fire. God is love, and everything He creates has perfect love for its destiny. When Satan rebelled against God, and other angels followed him, God prepared a place in which to shut them up, that they might not disturb forever His dominions. Either the God of love must remain sovereign, or His revolted creatures become that and drag all down into misery. Revolted men who choose Satan for their master, spite the proofs of God's love to them, spite the unspeakable pains He has been at to bring them back to Himself, spite of every means He has put out to win their hearts and lead them to repentance, must share Satan's final retribution.

If any one ask why God created beings with such great and high and solemn responsibilities, the answer is, “O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus?” (Rom.9:20). Every purpose of God is like Himself—light and love. He has purposed none to be lost, none to be unhappy. But they who resist or despise His purposes must learn that He remains sovereign forever; and they must bow down under His judgment.

The works of the fallen do not come in here. The Worker here is God. As we have already seen, it is God, rich in mercy and great in love, who has quickened us with the Christ. It was infinite mercy, but the spring of that mercy lay in the love of His heart. It was not like the love bestowed upon His people Israel, which went not beyond His ways with regard to His government of this world. Nor was it just the same as His love manifested in His only begotten Son who died for all, for God desired the salvation of all, and therefore did He by the cross of His Son open up a way of salvation for all. This was love more in the sense of pity. No, this is a love that goes back before His works of old, before the line of time began to be traced, the line upon which all mysteries of eternal counsels are being fulfilled and perfected. He chose us in Christ before the world’s foundation. We were the objects of His love then. We cannot suppose that God did not know that Adam would fall, and that we should be fallen with him. Perhaps you say, Why, then, did He make him? That is His business, not yours. You say, I am involved in the resultant ruin. You are, but He has made a way of escape from the judgment to which you have made yourself liable on account of your sins. But why did He not make man incapable of failure? His infinite wisdom was concerned in all that He did, and He made man as He pleased, perfect and sinless. Yes, you say, but he fell, and therefore I find myself a sinner, and about to be judged for the deeds done in the body, deeds of which you affirm He disapproves. Where is the justice of that? How can you, who are not yourself just, call God to account because you think you have found injustice with Him? Do not forget that you are nothing but a poor weak creature who has no rights at all. You make whatever kind of instrument you think will serve your purpose, and if you find it useless you throw it on the scrap-heap; and if you are found fault with you say, Have I no right to do what I will with my own? Oh, you say, the question of right or wrong, justice or injustice, does not enter into my relations with that which is the work of my hands. True, but if you could make a rational being, endowed with faculties such as are common to men, and if you could place this being on the principle of responsibility, with penalties attached for disobedience, would you consider yourself unjust should you attempt to enforce those penalties, if he hearkened to your enemy, and so sought by acts of disobedience to raise himself to your level, denying your lawful authority over him; especially if at infinite cost you had showed great mercy to him, and opened a way of salvation for him, which he scorned to avail himself of, would you not consider yourself justified in leaving him to the consequences of his own wicked folly?

But has He whose purpose is to bring many sons to glory been defeated? It is clear that God cannot maintain the creature in active rebellion against His beneficent sway, and give him licence to corrupt for ever His fair creation. Must He then destroy the human race, and confess Himself unable to give effect to His eternal purpose of blessing? Must He confess that He has been out-manoeuvred by His implacable enemy? Far be the thought: He who makes the wrath of man to praise Him, and restrains the superabundance, can in His infinite wisdom make the puny efforts of every rebel creature serve to the fulfilment of His eternal decrees. No sane person could ever suppose the Creator overreached by the creature. All His creatures exist for His service. Elect angels have been upheld in their primal perfection, and others have been allowed to fall from their first estate, and for these we do not read of recovery. Man made in the image and likeness of God fell, and brought into existence a fallen race; but to these mercy has been manifested, and a way of salvation devised. But if preserved in their first and perfect condition, or if allowed to fall, all is for the wise purpose of God, and all are made to serve to the fulfilment of the purpose of eternal love. He does not bring about the fall of any one of His creatures, but where a creature is placed on the ground of responsibility, obliged to fulfil whatever obligations are imposed upon him, he cannot complain if by the exercise of his own will he finds himself a ruined sinner.

As regards indifference, i.e., absence of preference, foreknowledge does not imply the direct appointment of the fact, but it does suppose a necessary consequence, though it may be necessary if - thus, if a creature, being imperfect, be exposed to temptation, he will certainly fall; I may act on it, as a certainty, i.e., God may, who perfectly knows the bearing of all things, without the smallest compulsion on the person - He may have seen it right to leave the creature exposed to it, and have this moral trial. There was way to escape, no necessity, no predisposition to evil - it was the necessary imperfection of the creature, a question whether there should be any free creature at all, and moral condition exist in the world; if there were, it could not be otherwise, issuing in the bringing about the previous purpose of redemption, purposed before, not based upon the fall of man.

The fact that man is a tri-partite being with spirit, soul, and body may be one reason why he is recoverable. I am sure of this, that He who made him had in the making of him redemption before Him: for after all, the first Adam was a figure of the Last (Rom. 5:14). And in that last Adam we who are believers were chosen before the world’s foundation. Neither the fall of angels nor of men has taken the blessed God by surprise. Everything that would enter into the universe, and all that creation would come to, were well known to God before His works of old. And the evil that has come in was by Him permitted. He could have kept it out had He so pleased, but He allowed it to enter that it might serve His purpose; and He has made it, and will continue to make it, serve to the fulfilment of His counsels of love, and then He will cause it to find its eternal home with him who brought it into being, in the lake of fire. At present He makes the wrath of man to praise Him, and that which would do anything more He restrains (Ps. 76:10). Everything God has made must serve Him: its love, its hate, its lawlessness, its obedience, must serve the end He has in view. Should the creature lift itself up against Him, it will do it to its own destruction, and it will learn in its utter defeat and humiliation that all its wicked and mischievous activities have, through the infinite wisdom of God, done nothing but help to the fulfilment of His beneficent purposes. The enemy may make a pit for another, but he is certain to fall into it himself. His mischief is sure to return upon himself, and his violent dealing descend upon his own pate. The Creator cannot be defeated by the work of His own hands.

The one solemn fact confronting omnipotence itself was that He had to deal with sin — with sinful men. He might, we might well conceive, have let judgment, swift and final, fall at once upon our guilty parents in the Garden of Eden. But His counsels of grace were not to be thwarted. Those counsels centered in His beloved Son, and must be fulfilled. Man is a free moral agent, and thus responsible. He is away from God, and must be brought back. He is not to be forced back against his will, nor will this wondrous work be effected without fullest opportunity to manifest the utter and hopeless alienation of man.

The absolute authority of God over the creature has been so laid down that none can fairly dispute it. But this is far from being the whole case: His power is unlimited, His title incontestable. "And if God, wishing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much long-suffering vessels of wrath fitted for destruction, and that he might make known the riches of his glory on vessels of mercy which he before prepared for glory, us whom he also called not from among Jews only but from Gentiles?" (Ver. 22-24.)

The mind of God was to display His wrath in this evil world and to make known His power where men easily and willingly forget Himself. But the way adopted was admirable and worthy of His nature. Arbitrariness there was none, but "much long-suffering." So He bore long with the corruption and violence of guilty man. Could man then justly tax God either with lack of compassion for himself or with haste to mark his iniquities? Impossible that a holy God could have fellowship with evil or be indifferent to it! But instead of promptly blotting out of this life the rebellious creatures who make of the world a field for incessant warfare against what they know of God, or who at least live negligent of His will though He has revealed it fully, the history of the world since nations began is the fullest proof of endurance on God's part. He never made them as they are; but the sin of man now fallen He endured spite of countless and constant provocation. They sinned, they transgressed, they despised His mercy, they braved His wrath; but He endured with much long-suffering.

(Vv. 8-10). The Apostle has exposed the foolish arguments of the scoffing materialist who, willingly ignorant of the word of God, takes occasion by the delay in the fulfilment of God's promise to deny that the Lord is coming. He now entreats the beloved of the Lord not to be ignorant of the reason for this delay. First, let the believer remember that what may seem a long delay in our eyes is but a brief moment with the Lord, for “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”. Secondly, let us never forget that the promise of His coming is “His promise”, and that His word cannot fail. Thirdly, there is a reason for the delay. It is not that the Lord is slack in the fulfilment of His promise, but that He is longsuffering, “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance”. In His grace God gives space for repentance before the judgment falls; in his unbelief man takes occasion by the delay to deny that judgment will ever come.

But what about this long waiting time, which, as we know, science would enormously protract, in which God has been going on with such a world as this? The apostle has a word to say about this. "Let this not be hidden from you, beloved," he says, "that one day, with the Lord, is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." In the presence of God's eternity we must not reckon things just as we are prone to do. After all, how can one compare all the length of time that might be granted, and the largest claim that could be made, with that immeasurable eternity which can furnish no proportion whatever to it? But there is another thing. "The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some account slackness." His slackness is but His longsuffering. He "wills not that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." This is what is in His heart, His desire for men, however little they may respond to it. Yet that day of the Lord, so slow to come, will yet surely come, and come as a thief, stealing unwelcome upon men who put the thought of it willingly away from them, and thus invite deception. "But the day of the Lord will come,." "in which the heavens will pass away with a rushing noise, and the elements burning with heat shall be dissolved; the earth also, and the works in it, shall be burned up." We must not confound this with the coming of the Lord for His saints, nor even with His after-appearing with them, and the judgment which will take place upon the earth when He appears. We have, as we know in the after-revelation, the very interval measured which will be between this judgment of the living and the judgment of the dead before the great white throne; and it is in connection with this last, as Peter also speaks here, that the earth and its works will be burned up. We must realize the difference, too, between "the day of the Lord" and "the coming of the Lord," and must not wonder if "the day of the Lord" stretch over 1,000 years or more, if it do not reach on, indeed, to eternity. It is the day when the Lord will be once more manifestly supreme, and all opposition to Him be put down with a strong hand. Thus it may begin from the time of that appearing of the Lord itself, and so in its first beginning come as a thief, surprising the world; while, in the course of it further, the earth itself is subjected to His power and things are put into that condition, ready for the coming eternity which the reign of Christ as Man over the earth is ordained to bring about. Every enemy is to be put down, and death itself and Hades cast into the lake of fire; and then, at last, with no enemy or evil occurrent, "the day of the Lord" shall be peace, and nothing else but peace. Christ as "the Father of eternity" shall introduce the reign of peace forever.

Rom. 9:19-29. But man does complain, and a second objection is: Since the sovereign God decides everything, why does He any longer find fault? For who has resisted His purpose? And what I am, I am: I can only be what He pleases. Nay, but thou, man, says the apostle, who art thou that answerest again to God? Does the creature of the dust dare to judge the Creator? God does what He will, and renders account of His acts to none. Thus man complains of God's righteousness when it touches himself, as he dislikes the grace which justifies others freely and absolutely. And to this indeed the question will be found to come: Is God to judge man? or is man to judge God? In the entire answer there are three propositions. First, as we have seen, the apostle maintains, in all its strength, the right of the sovereign God — the authority that He has to do just as He will with His creatures. Has not the potter power over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honour and another for dishonour? Next, he comes to the facts, and sets before us, that God, even when minded to show his wrath and make His power known, endured with much long-suffering vessels of wrath fitted for destruction — vessels which He did not fit, but had long endured. Thirdly, there is the revelation that He had afore prepared for glory vessels of mercy. The vessels of wrath were fitted by themselves — by their sins — for wrath; but the vessels of mercy were prepared of God, for in truth no man is prepared of himself for glory: grace alone effects His work in favour of the elect. The passage is written, if we may so say, carefully, by the Spirit, that we should not impute the fitting of the wicked to God. His title to act sovereignly is asserted as a general and abstract truth in Rom. 9:21. But when we come to the facts as they are, Paul declares that it is not by God's act that they are fitted to destruction. On the other hand, it is expressly said that God endured vessels of wrath, (Rom. 9:22) and that he prepared vessels of mercy. Such are the cases supposed. Who or what, then, prepared those vessels of wrath? Sin, without doubt. Nevertheless, the word on this point preserves silence. What profound revelations result from the existence of sin — from God's way for us and for His own glory in respect of it! God alone suffices to Himself, and His power is necessary to the maintenance of everything, as it was needed to create all. The creature can only fall, if it be not sustained. The moment it seeks an independent existence it is fallen, and that even before committing a positive act of sin.