“For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. […] He disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness.” Hebrews 12:6, 10

“Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. […] Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.” George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons

“It pertains to goodness, that, supposing an evil to be present, sorrow or pain should ensue.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

People have a curious and badly mistaken tendency to equate love with softness. They suppose that to love somebody means to be primarily concerned with their comfort and ease; with saying only those things which they want to hear; with preserving a peaceful state of mind at all costs. To love somebody, they say, means to always make them feel good about themselves. The very word “love” conjures up all sorts of cutesy images: teddy bears and red roses and pink hearts, chocolates and flowers and naked babies with wings. When confronted with the statement that “God is love”, it is therefore no surprise that many people hear instead the words “God is soft and sweet and makes me feel good”. It is true that divine love does include a great deal of warmth and comfort; but it is a terrible mistake to assume that because God loves us, he is therefore concerned primarily with making sure that we are always warm and comfortable.

Love is not soft, except as a lion’s paws are soft when the claws are retracted. Love is not warm, but rather burning hot with holy fire. Love is not pink, but red with blood and white with purity. Comforting? Yes, love is comforting. But its comfort may be akin to the comfort in knowing that an uncomfortable operation will ultimately make you better: in the meantime the healing hands of the doctor are rough and painful. Yes, God is love—and to creatures that are not completely lovely, love hurts.

Love is action; it seeks loveliness. Where loveliness is incomplete, says George MacDonald, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected—not in itself, but in the object. We are the objects of God’s love; and whether we like it or not, God in his love for us spends himself to make us lovely where we are not. He loves us, not as we are, but as we shall be, and we are quite foolish if we suppose that getting from here to there is necessarily going to be a very pleasant ride.

The Lord disciplines the one he loves. His goal is not our immediate comfort and warmth, but rather our regeneration and growth. He hurts us sometimes—when there is no other way to make us grow he uses pain and hardship to accomplish the task. If this seems cruel, consider that the alternative would be crueler. Discipline leading to growth is unpleasant in the same way that getting a spanking for playing in the street is unpleasant; the pain of correction is insignificant compared to the pain which would result from not being corrected. It would be far more horrible to be allowed not to grow, for that would be to shrivel and die.

God’s love is often contrasted with his wrath. The picture usually ends up muddled, describing a great Father God who loves all his children, but who gets very angry when we break his law and has to visit retributive punishment on us in order to uphold his own holiness. This picture is incorrect. It is not God’s holiness that is in jeopardy when we sin, but our own. It is not for retribution that he shows his wrath, but for restoration. He is angry with us because of, not in spite of, his love for us. If he did not love us, what would it be to him if we stopped growing? The wrath that he shows us when we refuse to grow, or when we do things harmful to ourselves, is simply the restorative and disciplinary side of his love for us. The wrath of God and the love of God are one and the same.

The most obvious possible objection to this view of love and wrath is regarding the Christian doctrine of hell. The idea of eternal damnation is often described as God’s retributive punishment for sin, a sort of ‘paying back’ to unrepentant people for all they have done wrong. Clearly, if this is the case, then God’s wrath is no longer restorative and disciplinary, but punitive; and his wrath apparently outlasts his love for some people. How are we to make sense of this vindictive picture of God? Does the Maker of the Universe still punish when no good can come out of it?

God is one God: perfect, good, holy, and loving. In him there is no contradiction; in him there is no shadow of turning. There is no division in God’s nature. There is never a time when he is not wholly and completely himself. If it is true that God is love, then God is always and completely loving in everything he does. As we have already seen, this includes actions which do not always seem loving, just as a doctor does not always seem to be healing when he is setting a broken leg. However, we should be able to trust that God is always concerned with what is truly good for us and what will make us better.

The idea of hell implies that the possibility exists for a human soul to reach a point past which it is no longer possible to be made better. God spends his love upon us to urge us to grow. He is the gardener, pruning our branches and watering and nourishing our soil in order that we might produce fruit. But ultimately the choice is ours; we can cooperate or we can refuse, and he will not force us to be fruitful. If we are stubborn he will be patient and work with us, but we are warned that there comes a time when our choice to refuse him ceases to be a choice, and becomes undoable. In the same way a person may choose to be lazy at his schoolwork for only so long before he reaches the point where the habit is too strong for him to choose not to be lazy. C. S. Lewis shows us a fascinating scene in The Great Divorce about a woman who is very nearly overcome by her habit of complaining. He says (through the mouth of one of the inhabitants of heaven),

“The question is whether she is a grumbler, or only a grumble. If there is a real woman—even the least trace of one—still there inside the grumbling, it can be brought to life again. If there’s one wee spark under all those ashes, we’ll blow it till the whole pile is red and clear. But if there’s nothing but ashes we’ll not go on blowing them in our own eyes forever. They must be swept up.”

This idea of ’sweeping up’ is what the tragedy of hell is all about. As long as there is any hope for repentance leading to growth, the opportunity is given. But when it becomes clear that no fruit is coming; that the choice to refuse God has been irrevocably made; that the human soul, having cut itself off from its only source of life, is now dead; when this becomes clear there is nothing to be done but to sweep up the remains and toss them in the trash. God never stops loving any person as long as there is a real person there to love, but if once a person has become a lie all the way through, what is there left to love? There is no object left for love or wrath; love and wrath exist solely for the good of their objects, and these ex-humans have taken themselves out of the reach of goodness. Hell is not a place of God’s wrath, but rather a place without God.

Talking about such things is depressing; there is yet the greatest of hopes. It is for nobody save God alone to know the fate of a human soul; in the meantime it remains for us to love our brothers and sisters, and not to judge them, lest we be judged. Hell exists as a possibility and a warning, a reminder that the only alternative to growth is death. Of the final state of all things we can know nothing. It may be that only a remnant will be saved; or it may be that in Christ shall all be made alive. The fact is that each person’s story is a very private affair between them and God, and far be it from us to assume that we know anything about their ultimate fate. There is great hope that all things will turn out well in the end.