If Jesus took the punishment for all the sins of the world on the cross, why does God also punish people in hell? Isn’t God punishing the same sins twice? It reminds me of the master in Jesus’ parable who forgave his servant a large debt, but then made him pay it anyway.
These are excellent questions. Let me start with the parable, which is found in the gospel of Matthew. We need to understand it in light of its original context.
The ancient servant-master relationship was one in which servants would be entrusted with resources to accomplish the master’s work. The king or master in this parable is said to be “settling accounts” with his servants, that is, having them account for what they’ve done with the resources he’s entrusted to them. The first servant can’t account for a huge amount of money and the master is ready to sell him and his family into slavery to collect what he can. But when the servant begs for mercy, the master says he doesn’t have to repay the money.
However, when this servant refuses to show the same kind of mercy to one of his fellow servants who owes him only a small amount, the master realizes that he wasn’t worthy of this generosity. And so, still within the ongoing master-servant relationship, the master says that the servant will have to pay the debt, and sends him to debtors’ prison, exactly where the servant sent the one who owed him a small amount.
In other words, this was not a commercial loan that was cancelled through a legal transaction, which the master then tried to renege on. Rather, these were the arrangements that the master was prepared to make within his ongoing relationship with this servant. When the servant insisted that he was operating in good faith and would repay everything, the master was willing to make a fresh start in their relationship. But when the master discovered that the servant really wasn’t operating in good faith, as evidenced by his ingratitude (if he’d really been grateful, he would have shown the same mercy to his fellow servant), the master realized that he would have to conduct the relationship along different lines, and insist on repayment of the misappropriated resources.
Whatever the specific arrangements (and it might not be possible to reconstruct them exactly from our historical and cultural distance), they must have been understandable to the original hearers, and I don’t think the master’s change of attitude towards his servant is meant to be the shocking or puzzling aspect of the parable. (Most of Jesus’ parables, by design, have some such aspect.) Rather, I think it’s the servant’s hypocritical and ungrateful response, even after being shown such mercy, that’s meant to shock us. That’s what Jesus specifically calls attention to at the end of the parable: Each person who has been forgiven by God needs to forgive their brother or sister from their heart.
I’ll address your question about hell in my next post.
Good Question 