JESUS AND DID HE GO TO HELL FOR OUR SINS?

 
Christians say that Jesus died to pay a penalty that was causing estrangement between us and God.
 
The Catholic theologian, Robert Sungenis, wrote a thick book of 750 pages on the atonement in which he denied that Jesus could have taken the guilt and punishment of the world for sin on himself for that would mean Jesus would have to go to Hell forever. Christians and the Bible deny that Jesus is in Hell.

Isaiah 53 says that God put the sins of the people on his victim. This is considered to be a prediction of the atonement of Christ. Isaiah is most likely to have meant what he wrote literally for the Jewish law said animals could atone in the place of humans so he was referring to a substitutionary atonement.

It is objected that Jesus sent sinful people into the fire made for the Devil and his angels (Matthew 25) implying that it was not for people and that sinful people could only go there because there was nowhere else to put them. This is alleged to imply that Jesus did not have to go to Hell to atone for sinners for even sinners are not meant for it.

But Jesus did not say that Hell was not for people. He only said it had been prepared for the Devil and his angels but now that people were going there it was prepared for them as well. It could have been made for them without being prepared for them until they were ready for it. Are we to believe that God made Hell for the Devil and his angels as if he didn’t know people could go there too and would?

And God could make a place to put people if he did not wish to cast them into Hell. So the argument fails.

It is objected that if Jesus was sentenced to everlasting punishment we could never be saved because God would have to wait until the sentence was completed which would be never. This is nonsense for God knows the future and knows he will stay there. The future is present to God in Heaven so in that sense he has already received the full price.

Hell is supposed to be essentially the loss of God. If Jesus lost God on the cross and was perfect then this temporary loss would have been infinite in value for he sacrificed what was infinitely precious to him. So, it was an infinite sacrifice even if it was not infinite in pain.

But God could have made Jesus suffer infinite pain like he can make an infinite ocean. He made infinite space.

People like Sungenis want reason and the Bible and they misrepresent the latter to do it for the two are irreconcilable.