We worship and Love God for His limitations. All Good, limitation – cannot do evil to anyone (Psalms 145:9, Palms 144:9 in the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible. Remember evil is commonly defined as lack or “absence of good” as can be seen in the Wikipedia entry on Evil). All-just, limitation – He cannot be unfair (Romans 2:11. God’s fairness cuts 2 ways, if you are justified for something you do, whether it looks good or not as long as it results in good and is good – in no case does the ends justify the means, in the end you will be rewarded whereas if you are not justified for something you do – i.e. it is evil, if your scheming made it appear you were justified, in the end you will be punished). Though, absolutely, he has the power to do anything (for instance, indiscriminately condemn all creatures to eternal pain), because of his will, which is directed toward the absolute fairness and the absolute good, because of the all-goodness of his will he will never do this and in essence can never do this. Goodness has to do with morality, and morality has to do with will. If we believe in a God that is all-powerful, all-loving, all-just, all-knowing, all-seeing etc. (i.e. the superlatives that indicate he lacks nothing ergo by the definition above is not at all evil) then an absolute morality must exist if God exists.
As a result of being all just, God could not let the offense against his infinite dignity by Adam and Eve go without equivalent recompense. He created man out of nothing and gave him only one law to obey, not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and yet man, who was made from nothing disobeyed this one law. But as one woman first disobeyed and led her husband to disobey one woman, the Blessed Virgin Mary, obeyed God’s request to bear his Son and in so doing through her life and total consent (Luke 1:38 – “and Mary said: behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to thy word, and the angel departed from her.”) gave mankind’s consent to Gods saving plan. Many that read the gospel appear unaware of how significant this event was. If Mary had said no God’s plan would not have been able to be carried out. God does not force anyone to do anything. He leaves it up to mankind’s free will. Mankind choose freewill when he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because without knowing evil there is really no free will. That is why salvation is a choice. God came and told us that by how we conduct ourselves in this world we can choose between eternal happiness or eternal unhappiness horror and pain, and he told us how to conduct ourselves, through both word and example, if we choose eternal happiness.
Only an Uncreated Being – Jesus Christ, the third Person of the Triune God, could make sufficient recompense for the offense to God’s infinite dignity because everything else He created from nothing and thereby would have no real worth to Him, in strict justice. In theory an uncreated thing could be used in recompense but before God there was nothing (i.e. no uncreated thing), so only He, one of the Persons of the triune Godhead could make sufficient recompense. It is theorized by theologians that Christ, since he was the infinite God could have made recompense by merely spilling a drop of blood. But, I’m not sure I agree with that assessment because Christ, who was also all man, had to reflect in his sacrifice the magnitude of the offense against God. With the same disregard Christ was spit on, beaten and neglected to die on the cross was the equivalent disrespect that man showed God the Father since He created man from nothing and yet He disobeyed the one law God imposed. God could not have given man any smaller number of laws to obey!
I’ve often thought, when I was younger, that the eternal pain of hell was too sever a fate for an all good God to impose. But after thinking about it, He merely makes life to allow us to choose, a few years of life to make known to Him your choice to want to spend an eternity with Him and that you want acknowledge his all goodness, so that you will happily follow all his laws in heaven to the benefit of yourself and everyone else in heaven! And I have not read, at least the way I read the Bible, that God has any hand in creating hell, He merely sets aside a place where it can exist, it is the people there that create it for themselves. Before the fall of Adam and Eve man only had the seeds of happiness/good/heaven in his heart. After he ate from the tree of the Knowledge of good and evil, he also acquired the seeds of sorrow/evil/hell in his heart. In life we choose to either burn the seeds of evil out of our heart by doing the best we can, all of our lives, for those people we come in contact with for the greater glory of God or burn the seeds of good out of our heart by doing just what we want for our own pleasure and use everything and everybody around us to gain that pleasure. That is what is so scary, in my mind, about hell. One can see what evil people on earth do to get their way, in hell there is no limit on the evil they can inflict on each other to get their way, because unlike on earth, there are no people who ultimately want God (saints), to include His goodness or His guidance, and let that dictate how they interact with their fellow man. Everybody in hell choose themselves over God and what they feel they want to do to satisfy themselves, all others, literally, be damned!
This is an extension of God’s justice, and that limitation He purposely as a result of his all-good will, imposes on Himself. Those in hell choose themselves over God (whose whole reason for creating us is for us to be eternally happy which includes how we have to interact with each other to make that possible) and will only have themselves to blame. Subjecting themselves to the will of God, while alive, would have resulted in them being subjected to his will directly for an all-loving God to give them the infinite happiness He created them for. Humankind was created for happiness but the only way we can experiences it to the maximum of our ability, in not only this life but in the next, is to learn and follow God’s way truth and life (John 14:6).
Traditional Thomistic Catholic 