Happiness, Free Will, and Hell

If you were God, what would you want of your creation? You would want the same thing any parent wants for his children: You would want them to be happy. Not happy in a shallow and trivial way, but to experience meaningful, deep, profound joy..

But what is a precondition of such happiness? Free will. Can anyone be truly happy if they don’t have free will?

And here is the beautiful irony: free will is necessary for true, real, meaningful happiness…and it is the one thing that can keep you from God’s love, and hence, keep you from being happy. Indeed, cause you to be in Hell.

God wants us to be happy. So He creates us with free will. We have the freedom to choose God’s love (and our eternal happiness) or to reject God’s love (to our eternal misery.)

This eternal misery (Hell) is not punishment for our sins…it is the natural consequence of our sin (rejection of God).

Opponents of Christianity often wonder why a loving God would send his children to Hell. The answer is: He wouldn’t. But He would give His children free will, and His children may choose to reject God. That rejection, that separation from God—that is Hell. C. S. Lewis tell us that in the end there will only be two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those whom God says, “Thy will be done.”