What is loveable about such a God?

You are throwing three asserts out here that are not necessarily true.

(1) You posit the belief that God punishes persons for "simply not believing in him." While you may find many Christians who profess that, if you pay attention to scripture, people are punished for committing evil and refusing the mercy of God.

(2) You posit the belief that God is "invisible" and "hides [H]imself." God makes Himself known to anyone who truly wants to know Him. Spend some time in the scriptures and you will see this. On occasion, He makes Himself known to persons who DON'T want to know Him as well, and it is agony for them. It is by God's grace that He is not eternally present for those who are unprepared to encounter Him. The veiling of His presence to those who reject Him is a temporary grace.

(3) You posit that those who reject God experience "eternal agony" and burn "in hell forever." While that position is quite popular in this era, it is not uniformly believed among Christians. Again, take some time working through the scripture and pay strict attention to what is said about who receives eternal life (only believers), the parables of Jesus regarding the fate of the wicked (they are destroyed, slain, burned up like chaff, etc.), and the way the Lake of Fire is described as "the second death." Those who reject God and do evil are destroyed at the end of the age. The suffering of Hell may be short or long depending upon the needs of God's justice, but it will end. God will destroy evil, not maintain it eternally in the Lake of Fire.

Your assertions sound like the opening salvos of an atheist who wants to upset the faith of naive and uninformed Christians. I have heard this stuff for years from many different people. The power of the arguments comes from the ignorance of the Christian who hears it, not any fault in the biblical revelation.

Perhaps you are the one who has heard them from someone else and are seeking help to resolve these things in your own mind. As a practical matter, I encourage you not to widely air these concerns with others because you will face a backlash from Christians who are weak in their faith and will attack you out of fear. Find one or two wise and experienced Christians and work through these things with them. Spend most of your time reading scripture (the whole thing, not just pieces) to get the big picture view before you settle on an answer to these questions.

 

That's a strange thing for a person who has read the whole Bible to say. I hear it said a lot by people who actually don't seem to have any memory of huge swaths of scripture upon further questioning, only a couple of proof-texts that are not hard to reconcile when you understand the big picture.

How long did it take you to read the whole Bible? What translation(s) did you read from?

 

Not as divided as you assert.

 

No, he has probably met serious Christians who believe that. There are also some cultists who believe that, but that is not what makes their beliefs unChristian.

Since Augustine, the most popular view of the Lake of Fire has been eternal conscious torment. However, the view of Conditional Mortality has waxed and waned through the years - always present - because the biblical evidence seems to STRONGLY support that view.

 

That's probably a major part of your confusion. Like the King James, the Douay-Rheims translation translates a number of different words with different meanings as "hell". Therefore, the word "hell" can mean any number of things, from a morally neutral Hebrew concept of the grave of a person or humankind ("sheol"), to a figurative use of an actually place where shameful acts occured ("Gehenna"), to the morally neutral Greek concept of the afterlife ("Hades"). And all of those places are different from the "Lake of Fire" (modern English translations) or the "pool of fire and brimstone" in the Douay-Rheims translation.

I suggest you find a text in modern English like that New American Standard, Holman Christian, or New Revised Standard translation that will do more to help you understand the text. Depending upon your reading speed, spending a few hours every evening read through the Bible will take you a couple of months. When I was trying to figure things out, I read through the Bible cover-to-cover in about two months, reading about four hours a night. After I finished, I had a decent sense of the overall layout of the scriptures and a sense of the main themes. Then I went back and read it carefully, cross-referencing things I had read previously to compare different passages. That took about six months. At that point, I was ready to start asking basic questions about faith, the content of scripture, how one comes to be right with God, the fate of those who never hear and those who reject God, and so on.

If you want to have a conversation about these matters, I am happy to be of assistance, but God calls each one of us to be a student and find out for ourselves what is true. Most of the deepest lessons of my faith I did not get by asked others for opinions, but by spending time with God in the pages of scripture.

 

This goes without saying!... Brother Glen

1 John 4:19 We love him, because he first loved us.

 

You have been heavily brainwashed into liberalism.

God is a good and holy God. Where evil is, God cannot tolerate. If God could tolerate evil in His presence, He could not be perfect.

God gave us a chance on Earth even though we don't deserve it. But if we live a life of sinfulness and reject God, then God has no choice. God did not choose people to go to Hell, God gave everyone the freedom to make their own choices. People who choose evil by rejecting God and righteous behavior, choose Hell on their own accord.

God is not wrong to cast those sinful evil people into Hell.

 

When it comes right down to it, God and the way He works is a mystery that will only be solved when we leave this world and enter His dimension. The only thing we who have faith really know is that a sacrifice was required for all mankind which gives us hope for the next world.

 

God = good. Devil = evil.

 

Incorrect.

God = good.
Anything contrary to God (devil or anything else) = evil.

 

It sounds like you are looking for a designer God. One you make up! Is that correct?

 

Do you think there is literally eternal life for those who believe in Christ?

 

"For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions," (2 Tim. 4:3)