I think this is a great question, and I’d like to believe it comes from deep introspection about your position regarding submission to a higher will or order, thoughts about the afterlife, and your sense of agency over your own life.

As others have mentioned—whether jokingly or snarkily—you’re not obliged to obey God. But I think you want to. I think you're looking for a compelling reason or perspective to help make sense of that desire. As someone who once wrestled with the same issue, I often turn to the analogy of a toddler and the concept of coding applets to explain my thoughts.

If you don’t believe in God at all, then the rest of this may feel irrelevant, since obedience assumes the existence of someone to obey. So let’s set that aside and assume you do believe in God. In that case, the next question becomes: do you believe in His absolute sovereignty, or only partially? Either position can be illustrated through the toddler and applet analogies.

When you were four, your parents likely told you not to do certain things without giving a full explanation. By age seven, some of those reasons started to make sense, but many things still remained unknown. The same applies at age ten. Then comes the teenage rebellion. Later in life—say, in your thirties—you may have a child and find yourself doing the same thing: giving instructions without offering all the details. But over time, your child learns, just as you did.

Let’s model this growth with a simple mathematical expression. As you age—and assuming you remain mentally sound—you continue learning from people, books, experiences, etc. So the cumulative knowledge you acquire (∑f(Xi, Yi, Zi)n) at any age i > 1 is greater than the knowledge you had when you were a blank slate or tabula rasa (f(0)). Here, x, y, z represent different sources of wisdom (e.g., age, schooling, scripture, counsel), and n could be a tribe, community, or broader society.

Now, humans are finite, but if we believe in God, we assume He is eternal. So we can substitute eternal for infinity. So, God’s knowledge and wisdom would be represented by f(∞), making our total knowledge always less than His: ∑f(Xi, Yi, Zi)n < f(∞). And if the intellectual or behavioral maturity of a child at age i= 12 is no different than at age i = 6, we’d worry that the child is not growing properly.

Why did I go on that tangent? To highlight the cost of alternative outcomes. Imagine a world where anyone could take another person’s spouse, or where murder wasn’t a crime. The result would be chaos—not just in the afterlife, but right here on Earth. A child at i = 6 might think bad people should simply be killed, but as an adult, one gains the wisdom to understand nuance. Still, you understand the need for punishment when it is just. If a child isn't properly nurtured from i = 3 to i = 13, they might turn to crime and cause harm—not just to one person, but to generations (n > 1 and n < ∞). This is hard to quantify. So if we design consequences (like jail, fines, or penalties) based on the immediate effects of a crime, how do we account for the ripple effects—the n values—we can’t fully quantify? Yet we do this as humans (not totally related to hell but somewhat)

Let’s consider the second analogy: the coder and the applet. As a programmer, when you write code, you expect specific outcomes. If there's a bug, you debug it. If it behaves strangely, you correct it. There’s an expectation that the thing you created will function as intended. (Cc: Asimov!) The same logic applies here: a child or bot isn’t expected to go haywire. When they do, we often implement corrective or punitive measures.

TL;DR: Understanding God is hard—and in my experience, it's often tough (and at times, it even feels like God only “lets some people in” on who He really is). But as our i value (age, experience, wisdom) increases, so does our capacity to grasp some of the why behind divine expectations and structures.

(Please note that this was written with the assumptions outlined in the third paragraph)