Re: Do people who have never heard the gospel go to hell?

There is nothing in the scriptures that says the spirit of man, apart from being in Christ, is immortal.

Only God is immortal, and only those in Him will have immortality.

Ecc. 12:7
7and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

1 Timothy 6:
16 who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.

The scriptures talk about unbelievers being spiritually dead.

Romans 8:10

If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness.

Unbelievers have a "spirit" but it is not alive spiritually to God and once again, only God is immortal, so only in Him, are our spirits immortal.

The scripture you quoted, 1 Peter 3:18-19, makes reference to us being made alive in the spirit, as opposed to being dead in the spirit.

"I don't think we should/can debate whether "choice" is involved because you believe you were chosen to be saved. I believe everyone has a chance to be saved, if they will believe. So of course I believe we are given a choice. No point going off that direction for another round."

Yes, but that doesn't answer the question of how does God respect the choice of human beings, if he didn't give them a choice of whether they wanted to be born in the first place, and since they didn't desire God, now punishing them with eternal torment with no choice to end the suffering. Even Job, in his temporary suffering, said it would have been better had he never been born. You can't even begin to compare temporary suffering on earth to an eternity of torment in Hell, right? So all I'm saying is you just can't make that statement that the writer of that article you posted made that God respects human choice when they were born without choice, and because they decided they did not want salvation by Jesus Christ, are then thrown into the lake of fire to be tormented forever and ever without a choice to be annihilated. That just doesn't make sense.

But also another thing the writer of the article you posted said (I thought it was Dobson because of the website at the bottom, but I see now it was just one on his team of writers) but the writer also said this:

"In short, God has made efforts to reform people. Each of us is given a lifetime to reform and embrace God through Christ. Unfortunately, some reject God and His truths, choosing their own path rather than God's. As for eternal suffering being overkill in reference to limited or temporal behavior, this fails to understand the nature of sin and its relation to a holy God."

But what about someone who lives to be only like twenty or so? Don't those who live much longer have a much longer time to make the choice to believe in Jesus? Is that fair that some have eighty or more years to decide to follow Jesus? If I would have been killed at say twenty, I wouldn't be saved. Many people come to Christ very late in life and many on their deathbeds, but they wouldn't have been saved if they would have died younger.

Think about those people killed in Orlando recently. What if they weren't saved? None of us know their hearts, so I'm going on a hypothesis here, and for the sake of the argument, let's say they were not believers in Christ. Many were in their twenties, or early thirties.
But those young people (if they were not in Christ), that lived such a short life here on earth, will face the same eternal fate of suffering forever and ever without end as those who lived to a hundred or longer and died still denying Jesus, according to the traditional view of Hell.

Is that fair, is all I'm asking?

And you know me, I think our understanding of fairness when it comes to God doesn't always lead to the right conclusions. And so I'm just trying to show that all our ways of believing can be attacked as "unfair".



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