This makes sense from the perspective of God being the master and basically offering us two choices, and then cosmically saying, "Welp, it's not my fault if you chose eternal torture."Mountaineer wrote: Maybe I'm off base here, but the way I see it (remember my two kingdoms discussion - vertical that deals with God and horizontal that deals with life here on earth): we have free will only in the earthly kingdom because God loves you enough to not make you a puppet. Your statement above, in my opinion, is dealing with the horizontal. So, if you choose not to believe what God is saying via his Word, I believe you, living here on earth, have made the choice for eternal punishment of yourself. God does not choose that for you, he offers you eternal life (vertical kingdom), you made the choice and thus your punishment is a consequence of your rejecting the gift. As with many bad things that happen to us (certainly not all by a long shot) "we do it to ourselves". So, God indeed does love us, we just choose not to love God.
However, I hope you can see how this does not make for an especially appealing version of God that I am very inclined to believe in. Things that spring to mind include questions about how exactly we make the choice to go to heaven. Do all Christians avoid hell, or only Lutherans? Do Evangelicals go there? What about non-Christians? Are all the Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists all going to hell? Don't nearly all religious people make this same claim about their own religion and afterlife? Are they all just wrong?