You may hear something like the following: “People who do not accept God are going to Hell. How could God do that?”

Those who don’t want to obey God will reject God.  They will reject Jesus, Who is God.  We were created for the purpose of serving God.  This is the only place we can be satisfied and content, that is, in His service.  Satan was created for this also, and he fell by self-will.  When we will to do God’s will, we fulfill our destiny.

It may help to think about this in another way.  God is love.  That doesn’t make God less Almighty Creator.  It makes us understand that most of what we think of as love is actually something other than love.  God’s love is pure, holy, powerful, and good.  It is kind, gentle, and all-wise.  When we yield ourselves to God’s love, then God does His righteousness through us.  God’s righteousness is the outworking of the the Love of God through us.  It is a free gift.  We can’t work it up in ourselves.  We can’t direct it.  When we try to direct it or to do righteousness on our own, we really make things much worse.  We try to violate the basic laws of how things work.  It’s like trying to stop a train by stepping in front of it.  That isn’t the way to stop a train, and it doesn’t work.  (I’m using a simplified example to help with the understanding of this, of course.  I hope it helps with the explanation.)

So, when someone rejects God, God tries by every means to bring them to Himself.  Since He knows every person better than they know themselves, He is able to determine the best course of action.  Some just listen to His voice right away.  Some respond to gentle judgment.  Some seem to want to persist in rejecting God.  They are rebellious.  Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.  Eventually, some will persist until they force the issue and end up in Hell.  God doesn’t want anyone to go this way.  All God’s judgments are remedial, but Hell is so severe that God doesn’t want anyone to go there. Yet, some will persist. God knew that this would happen and that some would persist.  He knew every person ahead of time.  Those who would be conformed to His image for the first resurrection, He appointed ahead of time for this purpose.  He did this according to His foreknowledge without taking away free will.  We have no revelation that says that He appointed anyone to Hell ahead of time.  Those who go there do so of their own wills, not God’s will.  I don’t understand why anyone would make that choice, but people do.

There is no one who is totally ignorant of God.  Every person on the planet knows about God.  We know that by revelation.  There would be no other way to know it.  We also know that God is ultimately fair.  We are each responsible for what we know.  There will be less severe judgment for sins done in ignorance.  You can confirm this in Scripture.  (Luke 12) However, every person knows God to some extent, and God attempts to have a relationship with every person.  We can’t know enough about these personal relationships to make judgments, but God will judge all of this correctly.  The fact is that the person who is reading this page has heard the utterance of God in a very specific way and is responsible to come to Christ and receive Him.  The judgment will be most severe if this person refuses, after receiving all of this information, to give themselves to Jesus Christ in submissive obedience.  To fail to do so is rebellion.