Yep, I did misread the first part. I’ll just say this: if Jesus was divine, God in human form, then I insist that there is no way he would endorse the interpretations of fundamentalists. Why would God create people who were more forgiving, indeed wiser than Him? Any God worthy of worship could never be conceived as one who would throw the most generous, loving, honest, ..., individuals into a flaming pit simply for having not said “Jesus, you are my savior!” The answer is that a wise loving God, a God worthy of worship would not.
Oh, no, you don’t.
It isn’t God who sends you to hell; it’s your own choice. It isn’t His will that any of us go there. So don’t sit there, having made the decision to spurn Him, and try to shift the blame onto HIM. He extends His love to you and you reject Him. People tell you about Him, and you reject Him. If you should end up there, and I pray that won’t happen, the responsibility would lie with you.
“No one comes to the Father but by Me”, is not an angry threat, it’s an invitation.
We ALL fall short of the Glory of God. Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Jew, and all the worlds religions. And unbelievers as well. Stack all our good deeds up, the Biblical laws we have kept, and all the hours in church or on a mission trip, or in worship on Easter Sundays, and we have not come close to deserving what God has promised.
Our acceptance by God does not come from what church we join, or how good a life we live. The thief on the cross showed us that. By doing the unthinkable, the criminal asked Jesus, who he believed was, who he said he was, to have mercy on him in spite of his worthless life. Keep in mind, he was in no position to bargain. There was no “from now on”, no turning over a new leaf for him. He was a dead man talking. He had come to an end of his miserable life. But 4 little heart-felt words “have mercy on me” had Jesus push up on the nail that pierced his feet so he could utter these words, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise”. The thief accepted the invitation with 4 little words. Words that can be spoken by all human-kind in all languages.