People have differing views about hell, but for Christian apologist Lee Strobel, hell is a place where there is no God. He believes the people who have spent their lives shunning God will be the ones who end up in that horrible place.
"Hell exists because there are people who decide their whole lifetime, 'I can live without God, I don't want anything to do with God.' There are people for whom Heaven would be Hell because they don't want to be with God; they reject God; they don't believe in God, and they hate God in many ways," he told The Christian Post.
Strobel has talked to some atheists who have spent their entire lives without God. For these people, spending eternity with God in a worship setting would be hell. "When they die, God seals that decision and says, 'Okay, well, for eternity you'll be separated from Me.' That — being separated from God for eternity — is what Hell is," he said.
But even in the afterlife, God still shows mercy, since He has set in place different levels of sufferings for sinners, Strobel pointed out. "The Bible suggests that there are degrees of suffering in Hell, that not everyone's experience will be the same; that some will have different levels of suffering than others. I think that's important in understanding the mercy of God," he said.
In His perfect plan, God made sure that nobody would be lost. Strobel said anywhere, in any culture and at any time, a person seeking God will always find Him and be saved from eternal damnation.
"I think that opportunity of [salvation] is available to every creature on planet Earth in one way or the other. Those that reject it, those that don't care, those that walk the other way — God will confirm that decision on their death and that will be their eternity," he said.
