God cannot? or God will not?

Under all the controversial Greek words and different perceptions on key Bible texts, I really feel the universal salvation debate comes down to this; If God does not save all humanity, it is because He either cannot...or will not. All the opposing arguments that can be raised against Ultimate Reconciliation, boil down to one of those two morbid conclusions. And it seems to me that both conclusions are riddled with problems even just within themselves.

God cannot?

This is the conclusion we must come to, if the Arminians are correct(this is where most of mainstream theology falls). Because they propose that although God would really like all peoples to be saved, he cannot execute it because of "free" will. This is the more "friendly" conclusion of the two, since it paints God as sortof a hopeless romantic, rather than a big-fat-meanie-face. Yet I find it poses God as either very weak, or very in lack of priority.

In this view, He seems very weak because there is a force(ie human "free" will and or Satan) that can overcome His plans against His will, and for all eternity none the less. Either that, or He seems very in lack of priority because (as I stated in last weeks blog) He views human "free" will as the most sacrosanct thing in all the universe, even in the case of it doing irreparable destruction to ourselves. And as I said before, that would not be a demonstration of ultimate love, but a demonstration of ultimate apathy for His very own creations.

If we boil the "God cannot" theology down even father, we continue to find the same apathy. Because even though God isnt barring anyone from accepting his grace, He already knows that most will never accept or benefit from it. But if God knew that all humankind could not be saved(despite His desire to) that means He brought billions upon billions of people into existence, knowing that most would be forever doomed! You can pawn it on "free" will and the Devil all day long, but the bare bones of it is that He knew, yet still made...which seems no more responsible than two minimum-wage-earning adults, purposefully having more kids than their salary can obviously support...then blaming most the kids for their starvation, instead of themselves and their bad planning. I would grandly hope God is not that ridiculously stupid.

Some will argue that perhaps God does not actually know the future, or at least does not know who will be saved when all is said and done(one such idea is open theism). That would seemingly get God off-the-hook, except that that would mean God just took a huge gamble with the eternal destinies of mankind. God created humanity, and didnt stop its condemnation, knowing at least that the outcome could be less than all souls finding redemption. This poses God both as a cosmic gambler and a haphazard, inept creator...none of which can I believe God to be.

God will not?

This is the conclusion we must come to, if the Calvinists are correct. They propose that God will save all that He so desires(which is the "elect"), but God simply does not desire to save all people. He could save all, if He wanted, but He doesnt want to...thus He will not. So yet again were presented with the cosmic gambler, who rolls a big die in the sky on who He will love and who He will not. If youre lucky, God will lavish the knowledge of the truth to you and give you eternal paradise! But if youre not so lucky, you will become one of Gods eternal stress balls.

I find this view, deeply more disturbing. Partly because it doesnt have the human "free" will scapegoat to clean Gods hands of our big sin mess(which it wouldnt anyway, but I digress). But mostly because it means that God purposefully created people that He not only knew wouldnt be saved, but didnt want to save either and finds glory in their everlasting torture. God has the ability to cure all his offspring(through Christ), but chooses only some while disowning the rest and leaving them to die. And I cant help but ask, would that even be a god you could love with all of your heart? Many calvinists or reformed people claim so, but I honestly dont think I could.

In conclusion, this is the question I ultimately came to before knowing about universalism, and I think it applies to both the Arminian and Calvinist view: Why would God even create a single, precious soul, allow them to be born into sin and yet not want to rescue them or know he wouldn't be able to? If you do not believe in ultimate reconciliation, I really challenge you to chew on that question this week.

Choice, and its various shades of grey

Choice. Its a word you often find in Christian discussion, commonly used to articulate beliefs such as "free" will. Many Christians like to use it in attempt to sort of cleanse God's hands of any responsibility, regarding His creation and their deeds(particularly choices that determine ones afterlife destination). They may use it in a sentence like "Well God loves everyone, but He loves them so much that He gives them a free will choice!" or "God nor anyone else causes people to do bad things, they choose themselves to do bad things! He wants them to do good, but its their choice!"

And of course that sounds all warm and fuzzy, and seems like a simple enough concept to grasp. I certainly accepted it for many years. But once I really dived into some of the variables surrounding "choice", I found that it appeared to lose its supposed "black and white" simplicity, and gain various shades of grey.

Lack of Information
One of those shades of grey, is lack of information about the very choices being made. For example, I typically love Asian food, so I may be given the chance by some friends to try sushi for the first time. Lets say however, that I am unaware and uninformed that sushi has raw fish in it which has a higher chance of food-borne illness...and lucky me ends up getting some sort of stomach virus from it. Would it therefore be logical to say I "chose" to have a stomach virus by eating sushi? Probably not, since no one even bothered to inform me on the contents of sushi or the risks. You could say that I probably should have investigated a bit further on the food before hand, which may be true...but regardless is not rational to say that I chose to have the stomach virus, being that the possible result was unknown to me.

In the same way, I don't think its fair to make the deduction that people choose Hell and separation from God, merely because they chose to eat the "sushi" in life(aka sin). People with lack of information on the consequences of sin, do not choose the consequences themselves; they chose the sin in ignorance.

Hindsight
Going back to my sushi analogy, if I eat the sushi and contract a virus from it, what is the likely-hood that I'm going to eat sushi again? Probably not very high. If I do, I can certainly tell you it would eventually lose all appeal to me; if getting sick was a constant result of me eating it. Hindsight and often regret is the result of many of our choices in life, but thankfully we have the capability to learn from them(even if that takes a long while, haha). Thus, it seems like an enormous assumption for mainstream Christianity to say that most of human kind will never learn from their mistakes (in choosing something other than God), and will continue their unrelenting rebellion for all time. I personally cant accept that as a reasonable conclusion to make, especially in light of verses such as Philippians 2:10-11,

"in order that in the Name of JESUS every knee should bow, of beings in Heaven, of those on the earth, and of those in the underworld(wouldn't that be "Hell"),
and that every tongue should confess that JESUS CHRIST is LORD, to the glory of God the Father."

I don't know about you, but the picture of everything in the universe bowing and confessing to Jesus...just doesn't scream "unending rebellion against God" to me. Obviously there must come a point where, in hindsight, everyone and everything realizes and confirms that Jesus is LORD!

Disbelief
This is a big one. If someone tells me that a crappy looking bridge is safe to cross, can I merely choose to believe them without any confirming evidence? If its breaking apart in certain areas and looks extremely old, chances are I'm not going to personally see the reason to believe that it is safe. Try as I might to believe this person, something needs to cause me to believe that the bridge isn't going to give way and let me fall to my death, after taking 5 steps across it.

That belief isn't something I can just "drum-up" out of thin air and choose to have, it is caused into existence by something else. That something else could be watching other people cross that bridge and not die, or perhaps reading the results of a safety inspection regarding the bridge. So its not a matter of whether I chose to believe the bridge is safe, but whether something convinces me that the bridge is safe...and therefore my belief in the bridge is born.

Misrepresentation/misinterpretation
On a more solemn note, I remember reading something very disturbing once. It said that above the doors to the gas chambers the Nazis put Jews in, read "Christ killers". Regardless of any pre-conceived notions those Jews had about the person of Jesus, do you think reading that had a positive effect on what they thought of this Christ and those that supposedly claimed to do His "work"? Do you think they were any more likely to accept Jesus into their heart in their last moments after reading that? No, of course not. The disgusting actions of Hitler and the Nazis, presented those Jews with a false representation of Christ and His followers...thus marring and probably destroying any hope of those people coming to Christ before they died. And it isn't just the Nazis who have presented people with a false representation of Christ; its happened with the KKK,the Westboro Baptists(God hates fags), "Turn or burn" preachers, Catholic priests molesting children, and even some of the most well-meaning Christians who present God as an ever angry, unsatisfied deity.
Misrepresentation and misinterpretation on who God is and how He views us, radically impacts our Earthly choices to serve and obey him. It also radically impacts whether a love for God is fostered within us. If I'm a Jew hearing about that "Christ killers" story, its very likely that I'm going to think the Christian view of God is a very-antisemitic and demented sort of God... I wouldn't love him or want to obey him based upon that false interpretation.

Choice shouldn't overshadow safety
Its really kind of puzzling to me when I hear other Christians say,

"God loves us SO much, and respects our ability to choose SO much, that He will let people rot and writhe in Hell eternally if they so choose."

As if God letting us toss and scream in our own sin forever, was somehow an ultimate demonstration of true love. If God truly loves anyone, I would sincerely hope that His respect for our choices would never be placed above His will for our eternal safety.

If I had a son who was drowning in the ocean, and I had the means to save him, I somehow doubt it would matter to me if he screamed "NO!!!". My love for his life and well being would be greater than whatever ignorance he was undergoing to think that he can either save himself or that dieing would be better. In the same way, I think there comes a point where God values our eternal well being above our choices. For him to do otherwise, would speak of a far more disturbing evil than the Christian "no-no" of God interfering with our choices.

There are really countless other variables I could bring up(and have in some blogs) that constantly effect our choices both big and small. Choice is not some black and white, free of influence decision, as Christianity would like to paint it. And I truly believe that God is smart enough to realize that as well.

Grace THROUGH faith

What is it that really saves us? My entire life I've been told that we are not saved by anything we do, but by what Jesus has done. The key verse that people back this up with is Ephesians 2:8-9,

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

People use this verse to say that grace is not of ourselves, but yet seem to think that faith is of ourselves entirely. This is perhaps why many Christians "blame" non-believers themselves(rather than God) for not having faith before they died. But if faith is of ourselves entirely, and is not a gift of God, then wouldnt we have something to "boast" in as believers? If us mustering up the faith to believe, is what makes salvation applicable, then we are doing something to save ourselves; we are in effect, saved by a work of ourselves!

That seems to be against everything Paul is saying here though. He says,

for by grace you have been saved through faith. and this...

This what? This grace? No...this grace through faith. And so what about it? It is not of your own doing; it is the gift of God. Grace comes with faith, and vice versa...Paul doesnt seperate the two components to salvation and say that one is of ourselves, and the other is not. So perhaps faith is like the vehicle, by which grace comes to us FROM God to execute salvation within us.

some might object however and say,

Well you have to accept that gift

And I think thats true to an extent, but again if that ability to accept something is entirely of ourselves, it is us that is doing a "work" to be saved...not God and His grace. So I think God has to make someone able to accept grace through faith, if it is truly not of themselves. Simon Peter didnt believe that Jesus was the Son of God all on his own, he believed because God revealed it to him. In Matthew 16:15-17, Jesus says

"But who do you say that I am?"

Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."

And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

If you get nothing else out of this blog, get this: Grace is what enables us TO have faith!

I think this more or less blows a hole in the mainstream christian theology that says that faith is up to us and our "free" will. Because these verses seem to say that it is not up to us to save ourselves or give ourselves faith; it is of God and his dispensation of revelation to people individually. And if that is so, then it is logical to say that if someone dies without having received said grace through faith, that it is not they that are ultimately responsible...but God.

But wait, God cant be to blame for the sinner that rejects Him! you may reply.

Yes, God is totally responsible for our salvation, if it is truly not by our own works. That includes our acceptance and rejection of it. Paul testified to this too in a sense, in Romans 9:18,

So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills

Did you catch that? He wills, not our wills. It is His will that some(probably most) will be hardened from the gospel this side of the grave.

But this is only disturbing though, if we think that Gods title as "Savior of All Men" will never truly be fulfilled. This is only disturbing, if we constantly beat every bible verse and thought against the doctrine of "free" will. We need to realize that God has a plan that wont fail.

The end result of those people that are hardened, will not be eternal separation(which according to what we've examined, would be Gods fault basically). They too will come to God, when He allows them to. Because it is true that no one can come to faith in God, unless God draw him (John 6:44). But it is also true that God will draw all men to himself (John 12:32). What time table God decides to do that under I will not limit him, but I will say that it is not limited merely to this short human existence we have been granted.

A Rebuttal to C.S. Lewis

This is what C.S. Lewis had to say about the issue of "free" will:

Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata-of creatures that worked like machines-would hardly be worth creating. -Mere Christianity, p. 48

First off, I love C.S. Lewis. His writings, particularly the Narnia series, have had a big impact on my faith growing up. So this is not intended to be a bash to him or to state that I am somehow theologically smarter than he was. I can agree with this quote on a basic level, but I feel it leaves out some pretty important factors in regards to our ability to choose or "reject" God. Ive already covered in a previous blog this issue of free will once before, but I would like to briefly rebuttal to Lewis's quote with three different points...

Point 1
If the only other choice that God gives humanity is suffering in an everlasting pit of unspeakable horror, than we are not really free to choose or love Him.

What would most Christians say to a husband, who openly threatens to burn his wife in gasoline if she ever leaves him? Could he then say that he has deep, true love for her?
NO! She would only stay with him out of fear...her well being depends on it! Thusly, it is insane and sadistic to say that God gives us choice under THAT particular premise.

Point 2
Mans will cannot truly be free if it is bound by Gods choices. Jesus tells us in John 6:44 that,
"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him".
This implies that God has to do something first in our lives, in our hearts, before we can even think about accepting God and is the only way to have a relationship with Him. Then Paul tells us in Romans 8:7
"the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so."
If a mind tainted by sin cannot subject itself to God of its own "free" will, then we dont really have "free" will to begin with. So therefore the people that have not accepted God yet, are merely incapable of doing so until God makes the initiative to open their heart to Him.

Point 3
Lewis is right when he says that God didn't make us as "machines" that really only love God because they are not free to do otherwise. I think we are able to make choices that are against God's wishes, a.k.a. sin. Yet on that same note, I think we need to remember God's original design for us, before sin even stepped into the picture. God says in Genesis 1:26 ,
"Let us make man in our image, in our likeness"
To me this implies that we are first and foremost made not only LIKE God(on a much less scale of course) but FOR God. So though we are tarnished by sin...Christ must be the emery to clean our hearts back to its original luster. And once at that original perfected state, we as humans cannot help but love God for all that he is.

To say that God would make any human without the potential to reciprocate love, once God begins to unbind us from sin, would be very cruel. It would mean God literally made people that were incapable of loving him, and thus could only be sent to eternal torments in response to their pre-programed desire to hate God and never change. And this is where the mainstream view comes into conflict with its own moral crutch called "free will"

Therefore, I think of the "free" will to love God, as merely the inate desire we WILL have once God cleans us from our dispositions. God didnt make us as robots incapable of doing anything else, but our will is won to him slowly and beautifully as he cleans away the devils work from every single human being. God will not give up til everyone comes to that point of purity and acceptence of Him.

Free will?

In Christianity one of the things we're first taught is that God loves us "all", but that he allowed man to be "free agents" of choice, to choose God or to reject Him. This seems like a reasonable and fair thing to accept (at least it was to me for many years) since the idea of a tyrannical dictator God forcing us to love Him just seemed preposterous. How could God ever expect us to love Him if he didnt give us the free choice to choose so? And I think the average human is already under this assumption that they have "free will" to do and choose as they please(consequences abiding of course).

But do we truly have this thing called "free will?" Did God create the world in such a way in which he has control over everything, except our hearts? Does God want all of us to be saved but is simply unwilling to infringe upon our human right to choose eternal damnation over eternal life?

I think the short, non-philosophical answer is: Yes...and no. Consider the following verses:

Romains 8:29
"For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers."

and a verse from last week
Ephisians 1:11
"In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will,"

The greek word thats translated "predestined" is the word "proorizo", which means "to determine before" according to Strong's Hebrew and Greek dictionaries. And according to the modern day Church, these verses mean that those who come to Christ are those that God determined before hand...since the beginning of time. So already we see our "free choice" being infringed upon by God "hand-picking a few lucky bums to get the grand prize of infinity nights in Gods sky hotel". But wait...I thought we had a "choice"? How can humans truly have a choice to become saved if God decided who would be saved from the dawn of time? Doesnt make any sense huh?

For so many years I looked at things, as many Christians do. Like humanity is a huge mob of hampsters that God bought one day, and sat down in a cage and said "now be good little pets!". He didnt give them shots so they all got rabies and he knew this, but he hid the vaccination amoungst his appartment hoping all the hampsters would find it. But they immediatley started rioting and tearing up His house while he was gone at the store because they just wanted to be evil hampsters. And then God came home and he was like
"I TOLD YOU HAMPSTERS TO BE GOOD, BUT YOU DISOBEYED ME!" and then God had to shoot all the little hampsters with a shotgun except for a couple fearful good hamsters that found the cure, and so they hid in the corner.

But then I realized that God wasnt like that, and nor was life that black and white (nor were their hampsters, but beside the point). He was the mass orchestrator of it all, and he wasnt just going to shoot the majority of His holy hampsters that he loves and sold His son for!!! He may punish the naughty hampsters, but he has bigger things in store than dead hampsters that didnt choose to love and obey him, or find the cure in time.

Though some would argue
"well, he reveals himself to everyone and they have a choice to choose Him or not"

But is that really the case? Lets look at what Jesus said:

Matthew 11:27
²⁷"All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." (also look at Matthew 16:16-17)

So right here we are told that it is actually God that chooses to reveal himself to us. We may have a measure of free will to choose him once hes revealed himself to us...but without that revealing of Gods choosing there is simply no way for us to choose Him.

Another thing I would like to point out is its not really us that choose the circumstances we are born into, that ultimately shape every choice and road we take in life. God allows them for whatever reasons he feels best. So to say that a man who grows up in Muslim saturated culture his entire life, is expected by God to somehow drop all his beliefs at the name of Jesus is simply unrealistic. Is that beyond Gods power? Definitly not. But the point is, is that our attitudes and choices are based on the very things that God placed us in, and our selection of Him as Lord and savior is dependent on that...and even more so on Gods choosing to reveal himself to us.

With that said...I think its fair to say that God has only chose to reveal himself(to the degree that we can "choose" him) to a small percentage of humanity. So is God merely impartial to the rest of humanity? How can God "so love the world that he gave His only begotten Son" if he only chooses to reveal himself to a fraction of us in this life? Could the answer be that his love and revelation extend beyond the grave enough so that every human to ever exsist truly has a clear "choice" to accept him as is in our very design to be complete?

I think we have free will...the ability to choose...but its firmly guided, pre-planned and placed in the enviroment that God ordains. And since He does all he wills and desires, He will lead us all to our intended destiny eventually, even through death and judgement.