The Justice of God

It is often said that God is loving but He is also just, as if the two were entirely separate ideas. This notion is false for two reasons. First, it is wrong philosophically because it insists that God has an element contrary to His nature. For if God is Love, how can He also be just? Second, the notion can be shown wrong in actuality when justice is examined in light of love. The conclusion of this examination reveals that justice is both compatible with love (as the notion allows) and also stems from it (as the notion does not allow).

When God created Adam, He made man a person, a being with a free will. A person has the ability to choose. Whatever is set before the soul for the free will to pick and choose is a subject for a different discussion. What only matters here is the fact that man can choose to love God or not love Him. Ultimately, this is the only aspect of man's choices that God actually cares about. God does not care if the choice of a man will make him rich and famous or poor and unknown, though out of love for the man, God may manipulate the situation of a man for his own benefit. God cares for every single person He has made, and He wants everyone to love Him and every other human being. Everything that happens in a man's life will ultimately be to guide man towards a loving relationship with God. How the man views it and responds to it is entirely determined by the free will of the man. Though God knows the future, He nevertheless allows people to die outside of a state of grace, that is, in sin and on the road to hell. The question as to why He allows them to die at this point can be answered by the idea that the spiritual growth of the person (or their increase or decrease in love towards God) had stopped. At that point in their life, the person was not going to be any different. Maybe they might fluctuate over the course of their life should they have lived longer, but ultimately, they would not have changed. Those whom God allows to live some time longer than this point are probably being kept for a special purpose or purposes. Thus, it is reasonable to see why God allows people to die outside of grace. However, why God sends people to hell is an entirely different question.

God, being a just God, will send people to hell. He will judge them according to what they have done. To those who sought Him and His will in life, He will grant eternal life. Those who sought their own way in life He will send to hell for all of eternity. Why would God not forgive the sins of other people after a finite amount of time in the same way that men do? The answer can be found in examining justice in light of the love of God from the beginning of time. When God planned to create man, He did so because He wanted someone to love and someone to love Him. He did not need man, but He wanted him. However, love demands that it be free. Love cannot be forced from someone. It must be an act of a free will. That is why God gives each person a free will. If a person does not want to be with God, then God, in accordance with the rules of love, will not force that person to be with Him. However, the only thing remaining for the person to have when God allows them to leave is whatever is contrary to God, more specifically, the absence of Love. Since love is the ultimate source of the pleasure humanity so desires, and since God is love, then those who reject God are ultimately rejecting the sole source of happiness their souls are longing for. Thus, the justice of God is the assigning to each person a status based on, not what his or her soul longs for, but what their free will actually choose to pursue. The judgment of God is thus the examination of the life of a person to see if they choose to pursue a loving relationship with God. It is also the enactment of the justice of God. That is, it is the giving of each person what they want.

Hell - Why God would send people there

God is not in need of any human being for his happiness. Nevertheless, out of love, not out of some bizarre weakness of supernatural beings, God created man. This being was created not out of an act of self-exaltation, as if God needed a weak being in order to exercise his might upon (which would undoubtedly reveal a weak god). Nor was man created as though God needed him for service. Instead, man was created to participate in the community of love that at one time only the members of the Holy Trinity participated in. Yet in the Garden of Eden, man chose to be like God but "without God, before God, and not in accordance with God" (St. Maximus the Confessor ? - Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 398). The original intention of man's creation was at that point not an objective of man. On the other hand, God never abandoned the purpose for which He had made man. Nevertheless, God allows men to go to hell. In fact, contrary to what we as humans would do, God actually sends people to hell. The easier of the next to questions is "How does He?" He is God, and He has control over where people go. A person's own soul cannot directly move itself into hell, especially since God forces it to present itself to Him on judgment day, lest that person's choices caused them to move towards hell anyways and God's only part is "cutting the safety line" so-to-speak. In this case, God would not be responsible for transporting people to hell. Nevertheless, He will be responsible for sending them to hell on the grounds that He is the ultimate Judge. He gets to decide where people go. Granted, He is merely granting people their wish. Nevertheless, humans are God's children. Why should He send any of them to hell? This is the second question. If we put ourselves in "God's shoes" so-to-speak, the act of sending people to hell is illogical. If these people are our children, then we would want them all to be happy and be with us for all eternity. However, none of us is God. God, who is love, will only bring to be with him those that love Him. How could He accept anything else? Does that mean that God does not love those humans that He sends to hell? - Of course not! God weeps at the loss of His children because He loves them. When man sinned in the Garden of Eden, God wept. When a man suffered the consequences of that original sin, Jesus wept.