The question almost always arrives with a picture attached. Someone decent — a kind neighbour, a grandmother who never hurt anybody — carried off into everlasting fire by a God who could have stopped it. If we put it like that we can easily conclude that a person who loves would not allow such a tragic end to occur.

Two things in the picture are wrong. One is what we have assumed about the person. The other is what we have assumed about love. Neither can be left standing if the question is going to get an honest answer.

Begin with the part of it Scripture does not soften. God does send people to hell. Jesus said so Himself, describing the day He passes sentence:

Matthew 25:41 (NKJV)

Then He will also say to those on the left hand, “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”

That fire was made for rebel angels, and it is where those who share their rebellion share their end. It is not an empty room with God absent from it. It is where God’s wrath against sin rests, in full and without end — not a temper that flares and cools, but His settled and unchanging opposition to evil, no longer held back.

Now take the first wrong assumption. The objection imagines a person standing before God with the matter still open, waiting to hear which way it will go. Scripture describes something else entirely.

Romans 1:18 (NKJV)

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Paul’s charge is not that we failed to find God. It is that we held the truth down. The kind neighbour in the picture is not a blank page; she has spent a lifetime receiving breath, food, family and beauty from a Giver she never thanked. That is the condition every one of us is in by nature, and it is why Jesus can say depart without any injustice being done.

Jesus put it more sharply still, in the same chapter of John that Christians most often quote for God’s love:

John 3:16–18 (NKJV)

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

Condemned already. Not condemned at the end, when the books are opened. Condemned now, today, while the heart is still beating. Judgment day does not hand down a fresh verdict on a neutral man. It makes public a sentence that has been standing all along. Which means the picture we started with was never a rescue God refused to perform. It was a sentence God had every right to carry out, and had not yet carried out.

John 3:19 says where the fault lies: “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” The condemnation is not that God kept us in the dark. He sent the Light into the world at His own cost. The condemnation is what men did when it arrived — they preferred the dark, because the dark hid what they were doing.

The second wrong assumption sits inside the word loving. In the objection it means something close to indulgent — a God fond enough of us to overlook what we have done.

Scripture does say God is love. It also says He is holy and just, and He is both at once. He will not set one aside to satisfy the other. So His love was never going to deal with our sin by deciding it was small.

It deals with it another way. God, who is rich in mercy, did not lower what our sin deserved. He sent His own Son to bear it in our place. Overlooking a wrong costs the one who overlooks it nothing. Bearing it cost God His Son.

There is one more question here, and the honest reader will already have it: if God can save, why does He not save everyone? Paul asked it himself, in those exact terms.

Romans 9:14–16 (NKJV)

What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not! For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.” So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say God looked ahead and picked the promising ones. He says mercy is God’s to give, and that settles it.

So nobody is treated unjustly. Those who are condemned receive what their own sin earned, and not a fraction more. Those who are saved receive something else altogether — not a lighter sentence, but mercy, and mercy is by definition something no one is owed. Nobody in hell can say he was cheated. Nobody in heaven can say he was owed.

The charge that God is unloving assumes He owed rescue to every one of us. He owed it to none of us, and He gave it anyway to more than we can number.

So God is not less loving than the objection supposed. He is holier than it imagined, and His love works accordingly: it will not call a guilty woman innocent, and it will not leave her without a way home.

That way home is open to her today. Not because her record was better than she feared, but because Christ bore what her record deserved, and everyone who comes to Him is received. She does not have to make herself fit to come.

Nor does she have to find the strength to come. God supplies that too, giving life to hearts that had none. And He loses nobody He has raised.