A friend told me he had a conversation with a non-believing colleague. He said he had told his colleague that he had been a believer since he was young because he didn't want to go to hell.
His colleague then asked him: "If you knew that there were no hell, would you still want to be a Christian?"
He wasn't sure how to respond to that and he asked him. I thought about it, talked it over with my wife and we responded with five points.
Why were we created?
We were made by God to worship him. We were made to glorify him. We were made to be his friends and only when we know him will we find true fulfillment and will we understand what true happiness is. Anything else is just a shadow of the real thing.
Revelations 4:11
"Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created."
(See also Psalm 148.)
What is hell?
To put it simply, "hell" is simply where God isn't. Since he is the source of everything good, the source of love and the source of righteousness, if we depart from that, we can consider that "hell" already. God does prepare a special place (an eternal place) for those who rebel against him and refuse to accept his love. The Bible calls this the lake of fire.
Isaiah 59:2
But your iniquities have separated
you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
so that he will not hear.
Where is man naturally going?
Man's natural state is in rebellion against God. We don't know him and therefore we are already bound for hell. Our lives have no true meaning. We seek the things of this earth hoping they can satisfy us but they can't and don't.
Colossians 1:21
Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behaviour.
Is everyone bound for hell?
No. In his great mercy, God saves us and opens our heart to him. We begin to discover him and when we find him, we discover true joy and true satisfaction. We are literally brought from death to life. Being a Christian is being saved from death. Saved from second death (i.e., the lake of fire) and saved from this hollow life while on earth.
Revelations 21:8
But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.
Romans 3:10-12
"There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one."
John 5:24
Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.
How does that answer the hell question?
You see, that's reality. You can't talk about God without talking about hell. If we talk about "no hell", we talk about the perfect situation, and that is what Eden was, where man had a perfect relationship with God. But looking around, you immediately know this world we far is far from perfect. We are not in Eden, and that is already in a sense the reality of "hell" (living apart from God). So we need to understand the concept of "hell" in its full sense and not just the "lake of fire". Only when we understand that, or experience that (e.g., sorrow, depression, meaninglessness of life and living, etc.), can we realise that when we talk about God, we need only look at where we are today to know that "hell" already exists. Without God, we are already dead. We need to seek him to find life.
Romans 7:24
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
Romans 8:6
For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
I hope that was a clear and sufficient answer to the question.
