Living Springs Q&a

Q&A: Continuation of last week, Poor Jesus and less than Christians 1. What would your response be to someone whose take on the gospel is this "Ok, so Jesus sacrificed himself to himself to serve as a loophole for rules that he made up, so that people could be saved from a hell that he created?" I've been a believer basically my whole life, but even I struggle with this at times. If God created everything, including the rules surrounding salvation, then he could just change them as needed. I know a lot of it will come down to the idea of free will and wanting people to love and choose him for themselves, but why create "hell" and, in relation to that, if Satan already existed then wouldn't he have been the first to sin? Not Adam and Eve? And if God already had a heaven full of angels that could choose him or not then why bother creating us and the universe at all? And if God is the only one who has always existed, where did angels come from? Did he create them also? Did that happen in a prequel to the creat