It was Sunday night, and we were unpacking from a hard drive after a vacation in Arizona when Mary said, “Robert, there’s a State Trooper at the door with a warrant for your arrest.” I replied, “It’s a mistake…I haven’t done anything wrong.” Well, I had. I made a series of bad choices. I had decided to take a backroad from Little Rock to Crossett so I could drive faster. Bad choice #1. Then, a lawyer friend told me, “Hey, I can take care of that ticket and it will not show up on your record.” Bad choice #2 which yielded a Failure to Appear in Lincoln County for the Bench Warrant! So, off to the Crossett City jail I go with the nice Trooper Johnson. I had a choice of posting bail or going to jail. Fortunately, because I was a local boy, they allowed me to write a check, which took the last dime we had until payday. This was another God School Lab experiment that blew up in my face.

So, was Trooper Johnson the bad guy? No, he was doing his duty. Was the judge a bad guy for issuing the bench warrant? No, he too was doing his job. How about the original State Trooper who gave me the ticket for speeding, was he the bad guy? No, he also was doing his job. How about my lawyer friend…maybe he was the bad guy because he forgot to “fix my ticket”? No, the total fault rests on my intentional choice to ignore the law and speed down the backroad because I thought I could.

One of the questions when people discuss Heaven & Hell is, how can a loving God send someone to Hell? The answer is always found in God’s Word. It is our “Guidebook for Living”! We are all familiar with, “For God so loved the world that he gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.” John 3:16-17 But read and ponder verse 18-21. “Whoever believes in Him (Jesus) is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” John 3:18-21. Like the policemen & the judge in my situation, they gave me the consequences for my choices. When people violate God’s Commands and His warnings…when people “choose” their own way, they choose an eternity of darkness without God.

Creator God is, “But you are pure and cannot stand the sight of evil.” Habakkuk 1:13. “But when people keep on sinning, it shows that they belong to the devil, who has been sinning since the beginning. But the Son of God came to destroy the works of the devil.” 1 John 3:8