Let us try to make sense of the situation by looking at things through the eyes of the Creator. Moses grasped that God or Jehovah wanted the heart’s devotion of men and women. Now it is appalling to be rejected by someone you love, and who loves you; infinitely worse than rejection by someone who has always declined much intimacy with you. This is the theme of Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities; whatever other message the novel was intended to convey, it says that an affection which over-rides all conventional affection, if it cannot be consummated, ends in death. It is a waste of time trying to renounce it or sublimate it. You cannot do it. So He will have devised some spiritual mechanism whereby once he possesses the heart’s devotion, He never loses it. Even if He has to lose, or see relegated to hell, whatever and wherever that place is, nine tenths of the human race, He will reluctantly accept that to lose the many who have never given Him their loyalty is a price worth paying, for the few who have given their loyalty. Human experience tells us the same; one loves a child long, long after the child rejects you, but there comes a time when you have to let the child go his or her own way. The price of treachery if persisted in, is hell; it has to be. God does not want to be surrounded by people who are liable to betray Him at any moment. And no-one is sent to hell, without warning. They only go there, because all their lives in this world they have eagerly sought it. Speaking of the choice of life both in this world and after death, Plato in his Republic puts into the mouth of Socrates the words, “Your genius will not be allotted to you, but you will choose it; and let him who draws the first lot have the first choice, and the life which he chooses shall be his destiny.” So it looks as if we have all been agreed for a long time, that your destiny in the next world is determined by your choices in this. True the Good Book says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord”; but divine vengeance as I have observed is very slow in coming, unlike Caesar’s vengeance.
There is always ample opportunity to avoid an eternity without God; the only problem the individual may find is that he cannot see the point of doing so. But then who has made him blind, except himself? I suppose usually men, like alcoholics, do not want to be saved from their addictions. But then if Jesus’ cross does not persuade a man to repent, nothing else is going to. And the Bible is after all available for everyone to read. But it may all be much more merciful than that; one only has to remember how much most people are willing to do for their own children, with only a few shreds of gratitude in return. And one must always remember that nobody has any idea what will happen after death, which is just as well.
Suffice it to say that if we are not extinguished at death, an eternity with God has the potential of being heaven; an eternity without Him, even if one were allowed to indulge in all one’s favourite occupations, would in the end be hell.