God’s Love Is for All

S ooner or later, you’ve got to come to terms with your view of God. For many, God is an elderly man—long, gray beard and all—who is grandfatherly in demeanor but more than slightly out of touch with reality. For some, God is a policeman, a stern disciplinarian waiting to catch you at every slip-up. Still others picture God as a genie in a bottle, jovial and eager to grant your wishes and make your life pleasant as long as you play by the rules.

But who is God, really? God is an infinite being—holy, perfect, unchanging, just, and loving, to name a few of His attributes. God is better than we are. And although God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours, He has made movement toward us. God is eager for us to discover who He is and what He is like.

It may be unrealistic to rank God’s attributes in order of importance. But one truth is unavoidable: God leads with love. Not only is God loving, but He is Himself described as love (1 Jn. 4:8). Love is the essence of who God is and not merely something He does.

Nowhere is God’s love expressed more extravagantly than in the death of His Son. We are all needy and sinful. That’s why our loving Father sent Jesus. As Romans 5:8 tells us, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The heart of the Father moves toward all people through His love. You can see this love expressed in 1 Timothy 2:4, “God desires that everyone be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”

But the number of well-meaning Christians who take issue with the scope of God’s love is alarming. Calvinist Erik Raymond says that “Jesus died on the cross for the elect…for all who would believe, and not every person who ever lived.” Raymond and others limit Christ’s death by limiting God’s love for people. David Allen challenges this view that Christ’s atoning death on the cross was only for those who would believe it. Allen writes,

…interestingly no atonement text in Scripture states that Christ died only for the “elect.” There is no atonement text in Scripture stating that God intends to save only the elect. There is no atonement text in Scripture stating that God wills only the salvation of the elect. Those texts that do speak in any way to the intention of the atonement as a sacrifice for sins never limit the recipients in terms of God’s intent to save or in terms of the extent of the atonement.

Limiting God’s love and offer of salvation only to those who would believe Him for it, makes a mockery of perhaps the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16:

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

God gave His Son because God loves the world! And the world is everybody. To redefine world to mean only those who would believe in Jesus requires contorting John 3:16 beyond recognition. As if to remove all doubt, John reminds us in 1 John 2:2 that “Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.”

What’s at stake here is not only our view of God but also how we might communicate God’s good news to the world. If God’s love and His offer of eternal life through Christ’s death are only for those who will one day believe it, then we’ve got a problem. We cannot extend to everyone a legitimate offer of eternal life through Christ’s death if Christ did not die for all. To present the gospel offer to those who have no chance of believing it is both disingenuous and cruel. That would be like urging a drowning man, who has no arms, to reach out and grab the rope.

Of course, if Christ has not died for everyone then many are doomed to a Christless eternity before they were even born. These individuals would be deliberately excluded by God from even the possibility of redemption. Let that sink in for a second. Is that really what God is like? What kind of love is that? Is that even love at all?

Some people attempt to defend this kind of God by appealing to His sovereignty. But limiting the extent of Christ’s atoning death is a distortion of God’s sovereignty at the expense of His love. The gospel of Jesus Christ is saturated in His love and grace. And in it, we find that God’s generous invitation is to all and is freely appropriated by whoever believes in Him. R. T. Kendall’s observation is perceptive and uncomplicated when he writes, “I also wonder how many Christians would ever come to the view of limited atonement merely by reading the Bible!”

Throughout decades of pastoral ministry, I’ve been intrigued by the number of people who could not even conceptualize that they were loved by God. Some had a distorted view of God that had been warped by an abusive parent. Some lived with an enormous weight of guilt over their past sins. Many had spent years trying to hide from God, certain that God was out to get them or wanted to snuff-out any flicker of enjoyment in their lives.

But I saw light in the eyes of many who were captured by the radical idea that they were perfectly and completely loved by God. That love flows freely from God without any insistence that we must earn it or deserve it. His love is like an unstoppable waterfall that never runs dry. Moreover, once embraced, God’s love and grace can become potent motivators for living in a way that brings pleasure and glory to God.

Experiencing God’s love changes how we view life and view ourselves. We are meant to know that kind of love. Driven by love for humanity, Jesus has gone through the unimaginable for you and me. His love knows no limits. It’s not for just a few. Jesus has tasted death for everyone (Heb. 2:9). His love is for all.