"God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." - 1 Timothy 2:4
As I was meditating on that verse just now, here are some of the thoughts that ran through my head.
- Man, this verse is so hard to believe sometimes.
- If God desires all people to be saved, what is keeping him back from doing it?
- I know that hell is still glorifying to God, as his justice is revealed. Maybe God's desire for justice to be desired keeps Him from saving all people.
Once that last thought ran through my head, the following question automatically hit me:
Does God have competing desires/wills that He needs to sort through and decide between?
After thinking a little bit about it, my response (as of today, may or may not change in the future) is no, God does not have truly competing desires and wills. Here are a few reasons why. [Note that below, I use "desire" and "will" interchangeably. Also, I am speaking exclusively about God's secret, sovereign will and not of his revealed will or his will of disposition. Also, if you were looking for a response to the initial question I brought up about sending people to hell, the previous link has a good response.]
1) Competing wills implies one is superior over the other.
If God is thinking and deciding between Will A and Will B, if he chooses Will B, it means that Will A was superior to Will B, implying that God had a less-than-perfect idea. Similarly, if God chooses to make a compromise Will C between Will A and Will B, it means that God's original desires Will A and Will B were not perfect and incorrect, which I believe God is incapable of.
Another way to envision this impossibility is to imagine the absurdity of God making a pros and cons list to make a decision. God simply cannot will something that has any cons.
2) Conflicting desires implies that one of the conflicting wills cannot come to pass.
Similar to the above argument, if God has two conflicting wills and decides between them, at least one of His wills does not come to pass. This cannot be, as God's sovereignty necessitates that His ordained will always comes to pass.
3) If God needs to "think things through", He is not perfect.
Does an omniscient, sovereign God need to spend time weighing options or making difficult decisions? If He did, wouldn't that make Him less than perfect, and thus not God?
Conclusion
I think that in general, we try to think about God in our human, finite terms, which ends up being impossible. When it comes to will and decisions, God is a whole other animal. Whatever God wills, is. He doesn't make a mistake, and He always gets it right the first time. Actually, God isn't even in time and doesn't make decisions "in time", so there is no "first time" for Him. There just is. God exists at a whole different level of being, which obviously makes this all this brain-crushingly difficult to think about.
This entire post was just a really long way of saying that I don't think that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit got together and argued about whether or not to send the Great Flood or whether or not to kill off Moses right before the people entered the Promised Land (did GRRM write the OT?). This also means that God did not compromise between his desire for all men to be saved and his desire to see justice done through hell. There is no alternate ending where all people are saved and there is no hell that God is keeping from us. As difficult as it may be to come to terms with, this reality that God has set forth is the greatest and best reality.
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You hit on an interesting reality that many seem to miss: There are some very difficult tensions in the Bible.
ReplyDelete- That God would want all to be saved, though he does not save all.
- That man seems to have a "free" will, though it does not seem that man can "freely" choose God.
- That God is infinitely loving, and loves his creation, yet is described as hating sinners no less than 25 times in the Psalms, and is clearly full of wrath toward sin.
What's more is that library shelves sag under the weight of books written to try to resolve these tensions, yet God's word does nothing to resolve them. We walk a fine line on trying to maximize our knowledge of him, while being able to worship him for certain parts of his ineffability.
I think the answer is fairly simple. God doesn't send people to hell. It's not an actual place. It's the total absence of God and His light, which is tormenting by its very nature. He can't make people serve Him, that would be a violation of His own nature. I'm not saying there is no hell, so please don't interpret it that way. I'm saying that I don't think hell is what people think it is. This is the only answer that makes any sense to me, and fits with the knowledge that God desires all to be saved.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I strongly disagree with the above comment. Won't get too much into it here, but just want to make it clear that I do not endorse in any way the above comment...Just won't take it down because it's someone else's opinion.
ReplyDelete