If God Made the Rules About Hell, Isn't It His Fault If We Go There?

An influential apologist for atheism seems to be a man by the name of Matt Dillahunty. I’ve seen him a few times on YouTube, and recently in a short clip on TikTok. In this short clip, Matt gives the following analogy (paraphrased in my own words.) He says that if anyone goes to Hell, God is to blame for that, seeing as He makes all the rules, and needn’t have made the rule that sinners go to Hell. The analogy he then gives is that if a man makes the rule in his home that if his wife raises her voice, he’ll slap her. If, then, the wife raises her voice and he slaps her, is it not the man’s fault for making such a rule? And this argument, based on the reception in the comments section of the video, appears very wise to many people. But actually it’s quite a flawed analogy, and not a very sound argument. Why would Matt choose for his analogy a rule like slapping a wife for raising her voice over a rule like, for example, going to prison for murder? The government makes that a rule, and yet if I commit murder I can hardly say “Well, it’s the government’s fault that I’m now going to prison because they make all the rules.” So even on a human level this analogy is flawed. But when you consider that the one making the rules about Heaven and Hell is God, it really doesn’t hold up at all! The man who makes the rule about slapping his wife for raising her voice… What wisdom did he have in arriving at such a rule? What consideration did he have as to the justice of such a law? Was he right to make such a rule in the first place?

When you consider the laws of God in the Bible, you have to remember who the law-giver is. Perhaps part of the atheist's struggle here is that they take for granted that these laws were really just devised by men who attributed them to a higher authority. But let me give an analogy of my own… Imagine you start a new job and the company director tells you on your first day that there are various company rules that must be complied with. They are, for example… No deliberately turning up to work in pyjamas. No riding motorbikes inside the building. No defecating on the floor… Three examples of what nobody is ever likely to do anyway, right? Well, that’s precisely what God’s laws are like. If we did not have a sinful nature and were perfect as God created us in the beginning, His laws would appear just as absurd and needless to say. That is, they would appear to be a list of things that nobody would even dream of doing anyway. The first of the ten commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me.” If we were not sinners, this would seem just as needless to say as your boss asking you not to work for another company during the hours you work for his company. And even so, most of the other of God's laws do seem needless to say; “You shall not murder”, “You shall not steal”... well, obviously! And yet we do these things. So, going back to the analogy of the workplace, imagine that your new boss tells you that the penalty for breaking any of these rules is death. Would you care? I mean, what risk is there that you might face death? I think I’d accept that job despite the possibility of the death penalty, because I know I’m never going to do any of those things. (Note also that in human terms we may not trust our boss not to falsely accuse us of something in order to put us to death for some reason, but with God we can trust His perfect judgement.)

Now you may wish to interject that even if God is right, from His perspective, to make laws that nobody would bother to break; surely He has to take into consideration that we are not like Him and are unable to keep them? God does indeed know that we are unable to keep them. In fact, the Bible says that anyone who thinks they are without sin deceives themselves (1 John 1:8). We cannot keep God’s laws and God knows it. Who, then, can escape the sentence of Hell? Presumably nobody can. And this is precisely the gospel message. Nobody can escape the sentence of Hell by keeping God’s commandments. But there is another way, and that is what theologians call “the substitutionary atonement of Christ”. The key word, there, is substitutionary. That is because Christ, the Son of God, is a substitution for us. In dying on the cross, Christ suffered the punishment due to us, instead of us. The Bible makes it clear that salvation is by faith. That is, belief that Christ is the Son of God, and that His death and resurrection saves us. We are saved by faith (Ephesians 2:8); believing in Christ is all that God asks. Why? Because this is the only thing, when you break it all down, that makes a difference. Jesus explained that what we believe will affect everything about us (Matthew 15:18-19 for example). There are many things that should characterize a Christian, but they are all the result of that belief in the reality of Christ. Love and good works are some of those characteristics. Believing in Christ… that is, truly believing in Him… one desires to please Him. But our belief remains in His work on the cross. We can believe that our good works please Him, but we cannot believe that our good works save us. He is the only salvation that there is. And knowing that my salvation does not depend on my own efforts, I then have no fear of Hell. If it were up to my own efforts, I would certainly fail. Not one of us would succeed in saving ourselves. So Christ has saved us. More than that, He has given us the Holy Spirit to transform us and keep us in that very faith which saves us.

To bring this back to Matt Dillahunty’s point… his point was this: Isn’t it God’s fault if we go to Hell since He makes the rules? Well, the rule He’s made is that if we believe in Him then we have nothing to fear of Hell. How is that unreasonable of our Creator? This is like one of those silly rules that should be needless to say. Who wouldn’t believe in their own Creator? Who really needs to be told to? The analogy Matt used doesn't even work in human terms. The government sets the law that those who murder go to prison but those who refrain from murder can avoid prison, and nobody thinks this unreasonable, nor do they blame the government if they go to prison for murder. If the analogy fails for imperfect human laws, how much more does it fail for God's laws which are perfect? We are given a means to avoid Hell, and that means is well within our grasp. All God is asking us to do to avoid Hell is that which should be natural for us to do anyway. Believe in Him.

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do.
Romans 8:1-3