ANSWERS TO HARD QUESTIONS - IF GOD LOVES ALL PEOPLE, WHY DOESN'T HE SAVE EVERYONE?

When God made you and I, he gave us free will*. He didn’t have to do this. He could have made people to operate as automated robots but we wouldn’t really be people anymore would we? We would all be identical and programmed to love God just the way we should but can you even call that love if it is forced and programmed and not willed. God didn’t create us this way. He gave us freedom to make choices and created a wonderful, beautiful world for us to live in that gives us all different experiences, making us unique.

God has made himself evident to the people he created in several ways. He left his mark on nature by creating a world so complex and beautiful that there is no way for us to know completely how it all came about except to assume that man didn’t do it. He has left his mark on history by sending his son and by acting in supernatural ways in the lives of people that have been written and down and recorded in spiritual books, namely the Bible. He has also left his mark on us, creating us in his own image, so that deep down we have wants and desires similar to his because he put them there.

Acts 17:21-23 says it this way:

The God who created the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth…He did all this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.”

God created us to love him but because of our free will we have all chosen to love ourselves instead. We have either forgotten that God created the world, which normally should make the boss, or we have convinced ourselves for some reason that he didn't create it so that we could be in charge instead of him. We have pushed God away instead of seeking and finding him like we ought to.

The same God who showed himself powerful in creating us must also be just if he is to remain perfect, which is by definition essential for God. The problem comes in that you and I who were created to recognize God’s greatness in the world and praise him for it have chosen to ignore him instead. We have hijacked God’s world, claimed it for our own and are living life the way we want to instead of how God desires. In doing this we have wronged the God of the universe and deserve to be punished as a result.

This is where people like to wonder why God, if he is so loving and forgiving, can’t let us all off the hook and cut everyone a break. If he did this, how would it be any different than a judge letting a murderer and rapist go free from trial because other aside from his few major offenses he was an all-around great guy? That would be one of the most ridiculous and unjust imaginable. Don’t you agree? In order for God to be perfect, he must be just and that means you and I have to be punished.

God’s love does come into the picture in the form of his son Jesus Christ. You and I have wronged God so much, the debt we owe for our unrighteousness is so great, and the sentence we deserve for living in hatred towards God is so large than only a man who was perfect, completely righteous, and loved God to the death could make up the difference and fulfill what we were unable to.

So we do see God’s love for all people in that he offers the death of his son as a replacement for the death we deserve and he offers it to everyone. Sadly, some ignore the gift of God’s son and a second chance to make things right. They are usually too consumed with being the God of their own self-centered life to notice that anything is wrong in the first place.

The crazy thing about God and his love for us is not that he is too harsh in keeping people out of heaven but that he is too kind in letting in in the first place far t0o many people who have no business being there.

*A quick note about free will. Free will has different meanings to different people and the theological discussion surrounding this term is so immense that I want to briefly explain what I mean by using it. In almost every way, our will as human beings is not free at all. I cannot fly if I so willed it and neither could I grow nine feet tall if I wanted to. It seems there are laws and powers in place that limit what we can and cannot do as humans and this raises the question of whether a more powerful being such as God is able to know what we do before we do it and whether our will is really free at all. I think that God, because he is sovereign, exists outside of time and knows all things past present and future, does know out choices before we make them. So while we don’t really have free will, we do have choice and are responsible for the choices we make. If I choose to lie in bed all day because I am upset that I don’t have free will and think that what I do in life doesn’t matter, I have chosen to lie in bed and that's the end of it. God will not pick me out of my bed and move me into action; he doesn't work that way. I will however, have to answer to God one day for why I mopped about it bed instead of living for him in the world or doing something more productive with my time.