As a parent, a father, could you choose between your children to send one to heaven and the other to hell? This was the question asked in the movie, "The Shack," based on the book of the same name and starring Sam Worthington of Avatar fame who plays Mack. The movie is essentially an extended near death encounter with all three members of the Trinity in a weekend getaway to a cabin in the mountains. This happens after Mack's daughter has been kidnapped and murdered while on a camping trip with him and his other two children. He is understandably angry, in pain, and blames God. He wants to confront the murderer who has not been caught and end him right there.
During this time he also encounters Sophia, or Wisdom, and she makes him choose. He must choose to send one to heaven and the other to hell. Horrified at the choice, he chooses himself instead. If someone had to go to hell, it would be him. Wisdom's point, and what was reinforced over and over again during his encounter was that God does not choose to send any of His children to hell. That even the ones who cause the most pain are still His children, and they themselves do so because pain was caused to them. This point is driven home when God tells Mack about the man who murdered his daughter, “he’s my son, too.” He would no more choose for any of His children to go to hell than any good father would choose that. Is a human being more loving and more compassionate than God? No, of course not. He is just because He is love. He is right because He is love. He is Holy because He is love.
Showing Mack first that his daughter is well and with Him, God asks this man to forgive her murderer. To let go of the pain and anger that is destroying him inside. It’s not about the murderer. It’s about Mack. God's goal is for Mack to find peace and healing, and in the end, he does.
But the question, especially as a father myself, could I make that choice? Honestly, among my three kids, my wife, and everyone I love, I would make the same choice that Sam Worthington's character did. I can't see any good husband, father, or friend do any differently. We may be pained, we may be hurt, we may even get angry at the stupid things we see them doing, but we're not going to send them to a permanent torture forever.
If we wouldn’t, then neither would God.
Mack himself has blood on his own hands. It's revealed in the movie early on that he poisoned the liquor with strychnine which his father, an alcoholic, drank after beating Mack's mother and himself viciously. Mack himself killed his own father to save himself and his mother. And part of Mack's healing had to do with letting go of that anger, pain, and guilt. Rather than condemning Mack for his own patricide, God was more concerned about healing and restoring him.
This rings true with God's justice. It is never about the retribution, but always about the restoration. He's not willing that ANY should be destroyed, but that all should come to a change of heart and be restored no matter what they've done. That process of restoration might be rough, it might take time, but the goal is always restoration and redemption. For everyone. What God sets out to accomplish gets accomplished. Period.
It should also be noted that the person causing the most suffering in Mack's life at the beginning wasn't his daughter's murderer, though certainly that contributed. It was Mack himself. Mack himself was in a kind of hell of suffering brought on by his own anger, pain, and guilt. It was God who did not want him to stay there and took measures to rescue him from it. As He often does. We just don't always see it, being blinded by our own pain and anger and fear.
The Shack may be a fictionalized account of an NDE, but it gives us a profound question leading to a more profound truth.
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