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to free the just who had gone before him.

If God has always been, why would He have permitted the "just" to go to hell and suffer?

If God has always been, why would He have permitted the "just" to go to hell and suffer?

It sounds as though you may be interpreting "hell" in the popular version as a place over which Satan rules, tormenting lost souls as God rules over heaven, where the souls of the blessed go when they die. This is not a Christian understanding of hell. There are at least three words in the New Testament translated as "hell"": Gehenna, Tartaros, and Hades. Hades was where everyone who died ended up in the sense understood by many of the region that had been Hellenized. The bosom of Abraham described in Luke 16:23 may have been understood as a subdivision of Hades inhabited by the just but able to be seen from other subdivisions, as though from a far distance, by those who are not so just, all of them waiting for the final judgment, however that's to be worked out. In either case, the South Park caricature of hell is not a caricature of a Christian doctrine of hell.