Board Thread:Bible Questions/@comment-30830071-20161223171447/@comment-31246436-20170204173133

Sounds to me like you don't understand how things work in this universe. God demands a blood sacrifice as the payment of our sin. Our own lives are hardly enough to pay this sin-debt. God offered a temporary way to pay the debt - sacrificing animals. Then He sent Jesus to be the permanent way to pay the debt. Jesus, who had no sin of His own, was eligible to pay our debt in full - past, present and future sin. His sacrifice of Himself on the cross is how the debt was paid. His resurrection confirmed the payment. He has set things up so all we have to do is believe in Him and ask for His forgiveness for the payment to be applied to our lives.

In the end, when we are all before God to be judged, those of us whose debt has been paid will enter into heaven, while those whose debt has not been paid will go to hell. Why is this? God can't have sin be in the new heaven or else it would be tainted by the sin like our earth is today. Many who don't have this payment during the judgement won't want to enter heaven even if they could. They would rather be as far away from God as possible. Hell is God's answer to these people, a place where they can spend eternity away from Him. To these people, God's presence is horrible to them yet His absence is excruciating. This is why hell is seen as a torturous place.

To refer back to your original post, our decisions here on earth determine where we are going to spend eternity. If we live for ourselves and rebel against God without at any point in our life accepting His free gift of forgiveness, then we are going to go to hell. However, if we accept this free gift, then we are eligible to go to heaven because our debt has been paid in full. So when people say that we send ourselves to hell, they are referring to how our choices and decisions we make in this life affect where we live in the afterlife.