First of all, God offers us forgiveness <i>now</i>. He's not putting it off till Judgment Day, when he has to determine once and for all whether we're to head to heaven or hell. He's decided <i>now</i> that humans are not irredeemable, that grace is extended to everyone, that we can embrace it and live in his Kingdom and pass forgiveness forward to one another and the world. Talking about God's lack of forgiveness at the End is like a homeowner whose parents have sent him $10,000 a month for years to make mortgage payments (and then some), but he spent all that money on crack, the bank foreclosed, and now he's furious at his parents for not being able to bail him out... and incidentally, keep the crack money coming.

But okay, let's discuss forgiveness on that day. Say someone came up to you and said, "I forgive you for bathing every day, even though in my religion, my god says we're only to bathe on the Sabbath." Your reasonable (though unkind) response would be, "What kind of weird god do you follow, and why do I need your forgiveness? Buzz off."

If we don't know God, or don't care to; if we have no relationship with him, then forgiveness is neither offered nor accepted. If God bothered to offer it, we'd blow it off. Even if we were expecting heaven. Of course, the heaven such people would expect would have nothing like forgiveness in it: We'd still expect to live however we wished, with no changes to our behavior, and with nobody judging us. Now, considering the different tastes and interests of everyone on the planet, how realistic is that idea? For any such world to work, we'd <i>need</i> forgiveness. But pagans don't consider that; their vision of heaven is one where everything conforms to <i>them</i>. That doesn't sound at all like heaven. That sounds like a fascist dictatorship. Or hell. Wicked either way.

Hence Jesus teaches that if we don't forgive others, God won't forgive us. If we can't live <i>now</i> like people in the Kingdom ought, we can't live <i>then</i> like people in heaven ought. God doesn't put the wicked into hell just to punish them; he puts them there to spare everyone else the hell that they will turn heaven into. And frankly, they won't want to live in God's heaven anyway. Too many rules. They never followed God's rules anyway. Hell has no rules; that'll suit them just fine.

I'd like to believe, as brother Andrew speculates, that hell isn't the end of it; that they might repent someday and get out of it. But in my experience people, unless something huge changes them, become more and more like the idealized version of themselves that they've invented (or, if they're dysfunctional, they'll sabotage themselves and become less and less like it). If they like to think of themselves as right, they're <i>never</i> gonna accept that God is in fact the one who's right. They'll never forgive God for putting them in hell, and never leave hell. Sad, but human. Still, far be it from me to preach that God can't make exceptions if he wants.

Meanwhile, in the Kingdom we're to practice living in heaven, and forgive. Any unforgiveness on our part is usually based on evil: Bitterness, anger, self-righteousness, greed, covetousness, and impatience. Any so-called "righteous anger" that we use to excuse unforgiveness is rarely righteous. When God withholds forgiveness it is entirely based on fairness, justice, and rightness, and we have no business trying to practice what he does because it can't be done without prejudice or self-interest -- which in God's hands is no problem because he has no prejudices, and his self-interest is nothing but love. In our hands, it's a huge mess.