[HarleyD]

In other words, you’re ducking the question as to the level that God controls each individual....Am I to understand that under Reformed doctrine that man can only commit acts of spontaneity (ie God providing the entire inner principle of action and man CANNOT do any other), or does man have the ABILITY to commit acts only with that apprehension of an end

It's neither these. Man has a will. Man freely sins. God brings man to repentance and instill faith. Man still sin but now God nags him incisively until man repents. If you doubt this scenario, you go out and commit some sin and see if you don't feel creepy about it. If you're a Christian, you will repent. God will see to it.

It is a ridiculous notion that God chooses people to go to hell and adjusts their mindset so that they like it.

It isn't that God chooses people to go to hell. God chooses people to go to heaven. There is a vast difference.

The problem you have is why did God make man to go to hell. I don't know. But that is what He's done. He knew perfectly well when He created Adam that Adam would sin. God knew very well what sin and judgment He would pass on to Adam. And yet God still did it all.

The descriptions of hell are the worst possible descriptions of any environment that the early Jews could think up.

Don't make the Jews into something they're not. Towards the end of Judah they were offering their children as living sacrifices to Molech by placing infants on red hot burning ovens. The screams of these sacrifices could be heard in Jerusalem and is a type referred to by our Lord Jesus of the impending hell that is stored up for mankind.

does it really matter? No.

On the contrary, it matters a great deal to understand hell. It is only by truly understanding the nature of hell that we truly understand what we have been saved from by the mercy and grace of God. EVERY ONE of us DESERVES a lake of torment and fire, where the worms eat us forever. God is right and just to send us to this sentence. If you can't grasp this truth, then you don't understand the depths of your depravity or the glory and purity of the Lord. We have whitewashed hell so much that we fail to understand this truth.

We suffer the consequences of what we DO. And don’t do.

There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. We don't suffer consequences. Everything works for our good. If we sin and fall, God may make our path back to Him painful but it is for our benefit and we grow from that experience. It isn't a matter of what WE do and don't do. It is a matter of being ambassadors and representing Him appropriately.

[suzyjaruki]

Man has a will. Man freely sins.

An old FRiend said the following:
The Calvinist says that natural, Fallen Man is not forced to Sin, never forced to do Evil, never compelled to reject God. On the contrary, Fallen Man is absolutely Free; and so he freely wills to Sin, to do Evil, to reject God all the time, every time, for that is all he wants to do and he has the uninhibited Free will to do whatsoever he Wants, without compulsion.

The question then is, does any man naturally possess God-pleasing wants?

[MarkBsnr]

If nothing that we do matters, then what is the purpose of the Judgement and the emphasis on deeds?

Why the Sermon on the Mount? Why the Beatitudes if nothing that we do matters?

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All people are born to go to hell. God was pleased that Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and introduced death into the world God made all people and foreordained their final destination. Therefore God makes people to go to hell under Reformed theology. For proof, I turned to the:

Westminster Confession
Chapter VI
Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and the Punishment thereof
I. Our first parents, being seduced by the subtilty and temptations of Satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit.[1] This their sin, God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to His own glory.[2]

II. By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion, with God,[3] and so became dead in sin,[4] and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body.[5]

III. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed;[6] and the same death in sin, and corrupted nature, conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.[7]

IV. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good,[8] and wholly inclined to all evil,[9] do proceed all actual transgressions.[10]

V. This corruption of nature, during this life, does remain in those that are regenerated;[11] and although it be, through Christ, pardoned, and mortified; yet both itself, and all the motions thereof, are truly and properly sin.[12]

VI. Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereunto,[13] does in its own nature, bring guilt upon the sinner,[14] whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God,[15] and curse of the law,[16] and so made subject to death,[17] with all miseries spiritual,[18] temporal,[19] and eternal.[20]

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I don’t understand the ‘how’ of hell. You don’t either. Nobody does. I just understand the ‘what’ of hell. But I still direct you back to the WCF’s fascinating statements to the effect that God is pleased that so many of His people roast in hellfire forever.

[wmfights]

If you doubt this scenario, you go out and commit some sin and see if you don't feel creepy about it. If you're a Christian, you will repent. God will see to it.

Isn't this one of the many ways the LORD tells you that you are one of his? :-)