The basic story is that God loves His children (those of us that turn to Him) as a good parent would. That means that God’s love for us is based on His love and not if we are basically a good person. Think about it, would you want your child to think they are only loved when they do good things? You want them to KNOW that if they mess up badly, you are still there for them. There may be rewards and consequences, but those are all in the context of never failing, unconditional love.
An important thing to understand is God is not trying to make this world a small slice of Heaven. It is a time we get to see what happens when we get to run things. The mess should drive us to Him. God sees our eternal life and this 80+/- years is a blink of an eye in that time. A parent may allow a child make a painful mistake if they think the pain will be more than offset by the character growth that will come out of it will have a long term benefit to them. This time on earth is our character lesson and our time in eternity will have that reminder that we really should listen more to our loving Father. You should have seen this in the 6-year-old word picture.
Throughout the Bible, you see our Heavenly Father offering to guide us. The more we listen, the more we mature. We also see what happens when we go against wise and loving counsel (quite a bit of that in the Old Testament). But the end story is the best as you will see in the FAQ about Heaven.
We need to come to the point where we understand that He is the wise one, not us. He has provided the guarantee of our relationship through Jesus, but we must accept that He is the wise God and not us. Heaven would not be Heaven if we all brought our beliefs there that “we are right and they are wrong”.
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