Chapter 2

The God Who Wants All to Be Saved

His love, His justice, and His holiness are not three forces in tension, but one perfect character

The Verse That Started It

Here is a sentence that changed how I read the whole Bible. Paul says that God our Savior "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:3–4).¹ Read it slowly. Not some. All.

I want to ask the plainest question in this book. Does God want every person saved? If the answer is yes, one more question follows at once. If God wants it, what could stop Him?

For years I had a ready answer. God wants all saved, I would say, but God is also holy, and His holiness will not let Him save them all. I taught that. I believed it. And the thoughtful person across the table would look puzzled, the way you look when a reply almost works but not quite.² Something in the answer did not sit right. It took me a long time to see what.

The answer set two things in God against each other. On one side, His love, which wants you saved. On the other, His holiness, which will not allow it. God ends up divided. Half of Him reaches for you. The other half holds Him back. And so the question of hell turns out to be, underneath, a question about the character of God.

This is why the book starts here, before a single hard verse. Every reading of every hard text is finally a reading of God's character. Tell me who you think God is, and I can guess how you will read Matthew 25 or Revelation 20. So we begin with God. Who is He? And are His love and His holiness two things at war, or one thing seen from two sides?

A serious critic says they are at war, and that the universalist has taken sides. James De Young, whose careful book against universal reconciliation this one will engage again and again, puts the charge at the center of his own work. He says the whole question comes down to how the love and the holiness of God relate.³ And his verdict is that people like me have gotten it backward.

I want you to feel the force of that before I answer it. De Young is not being careless. He is saying that a holy God must deal with sin, that dealing with sin means real punishment, and that a faith which forgets this has traded the God of the Bible for a softer god of its own making. He stands with Oswald Chambers, who warned against a merely "pleasant view of the fatherhood of God," the sunny assumption that of course a kind God will forgive.⁴ Chambers called that assumption, when it forgets the cross, a kind of blasphemy. I think Chambers was right. So the question is not whether God is holy. He is. The question is what holiness is, and whether it stands against His love or flows from it.

Why This Question Comes First

Picture two readers with the same Bible open on the same table. One reads a verse about judgment and hears a God whose patience finally runs out. The other reads a verse about mercy and hears a God whose patience never does. They are not really arguing about the verse. They are arguing about God. And each one is reading the verse through the God he already believes in.

That is why no amount of verse-stacking settles this. We will get to the texts, all of them, the hopeful ones first and the hard ones after. But a text does not read itself. You bring a picture of God to it, and that picture does much of the work before you finish the sentence. Stephen Jonathan, in his careful study of the case for grace beyond death, says it bluntly: no one reads Scripture without assumptions. The larger theological questions about who God is have to be faced before anyone can claim "this is the teaching of the Bible" on a given subject.³⁵ So the honest thing is to put the picture on the table and look at it in the light.

Here is the picture the traditional answer paints, once you draw it out. God is love, yes. But His holiness is a second thing, and a stronger thing, that limits the love. His love would save you. His holiness says no. On this picture God's love is real but weak, always ready to be overruled by something in Him that is higher.

George Sidney Hurd, whose work anchors much of this chapter, calls the result a divided God.⁵ Think about what the picture actually claims. It says God's holiness is infinite and unchanging, while His love is limited and can be switched off. It makes love the junior partner. And it quietly turns the most famous thing the Bible says about God, that "God is love" (1 John 4:8), into something we did not quite mean.⁶

The stakes are large. If God is divided, then an endless hell makes sense, because the holy half of God has no reason to stop. But if God is not divided, if His holiness is a way His love acts and not a rival to it, then the whole frame shifts. Then judgment is not love running out. It is love at work, even when it burns.

I am not going to settle that by wishing. I am going to argue it from Scripture, which says a great deal about what God wants, what God is, and how His anger and His mercy fit together. The rest of this chapter does four things. It listens to what the Bible plainly says God desires. It asks what holiness really is. It watches how God's wrath and mercy actually behave across the whole story. And it goes to the one place where love and holiness meet in full, the cross. Then, at the end, I will name the one honest question my own view cannot fully close.

The Response

1. What God Says He Wants

Start with the plainest data. Again and again, in both Testaments, God tells us what He wants, and what He wants is that everyone be saved. Paul says God "desires all people to be saved" (1 Timothy 2:4). Peter says the Lord is "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). Through Ezekiel, God swears it with an oath: "As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live" (Ezekiel 33:11; see also 18:23).

Notice how these read. They do not say God desires the salvation of the ones who happen to believe. They say God desires the salvation of all, and takes no pleasure in the death of any. Kenneth Keathley, no universalist himself, makes the point sharply. The texts do place a condition on us, that we repent and believe. But they place no condition on God's desire. His will for the salvation of all is stated flat, unconditioned, and universal.⁷

Someone will object that "desire" here is a soft word, a mere wish God never means to act on. A parent might wish for a child's happiness without lifting a finger. Is that all this is? The Greek pushes back. The word for "desires" in 1 Timothy 2:4 (Greek thelō, "to will, to purpose") is not a faint hope. Marvin Vincent, the old commentator, glossed it as "a determined purpose."⁸ Peter's word in 2 Peter 3:9 (Greek boulomai, "to will, to intend") carries the same weight. And the Old Testament does not present God's saving desire as a wistful sigh. "The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made" (Psalm 145:9). "For the Lord will not cast off forever" (Lamentations 3:31).⁹

Look harder at that line from Lamentations, because it says something the divided-God picture cannot say. The prophet is sitting in the ashes of a city God Himself has judged. And even there he writes that the Lord "does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men" (Lamentations 3:33). Sit with that. God had every reason for wrath, and He brought it. Yet the affliction did not come from His heart. His heart is set somewhere else. Judgment is a thing God does; mercy is a thing God is. The wrath is real, but it is not where He lives.

I am not going to squeeze the full argument out of these verses here. Each one gets its own chapter later, where the objections are answered in detail. The "Savior of all" texts belong to a chapter of their own, and so does God's mercy on all.¹⁰ For now I only want the plain sense on the table. God tells us what He wants. He wants all saved. Hold that, and turn to the objection that His holiness will not allow it.

2. Holiness Is Not the Enemy of Love

Here is the heart of the chapter, and the answer to De Young's charge. The charge assumes that holiness and love are two different things, and that they can pull in two directions. I want to deny the assumption itself. God's holiness is not a rival to His love. It is the holiness of His love.

What does the Bible mean when it calls God holy? We tend to hear "holy" as "severe," a God of thunder who cannot bear to look at us. But look at how Scripture uses the word. When God explains what sets Him apart from every other god, He does not point to His wrath. He points to His mercy. "How can I give you up, O Ephraim?" He says. "My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender... for I am God and not a man, the Holy One in your midst" (Hosea 11:8–9). Do you see what makes Him the Holy One there? Not that His anger burns hotter than a man's. The opposite. He will not come in wrath, precisely because He is holy in a way no man is.¹¹ Wrath without love is common. Every petty tyrant has it. What is rare, what is holy, is a love that will not let go.

Hurd puts it as plainly as I have seen it put. Holiness torn away from love, he says, is not holiness at all. It is only a caricature of it.¹² And the Bible backs him up. Paul says love "is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:10). Jesus hangs all the Law and the Prophets on two commands to love (Matthew 22:37–40). If the whole law, the very standard of holiness, sums up as love, then holiness and love cannot be enemies. To be holy is to love rightly. To love rightly is to be holy.¹³ Theologians have a name for this. They call it the simplicity of God, and it means that there is no division, no tug-of-war inside Him. His attributes do not sit in separate compartments. They are one thing, one God, acting together. Talbott warns against a "schizophrenic" picture that pits God's mercy against His justice. Jonathan, drawing on Grudem and Keathley, makes the same point. If "God is love" and "God is light" are both true, then holiness and love are not two ingredients in God but two windows on the same reality.³³

Maybe an ordinary picture will help. Watch a good mother when her small child reaches for a hot stove. Her sharp "No!" and the hand that yanks the child back are not a break from her love. They are her love, moving fast. She is not being unloving for a moment so she can be loving again later. The "no" is what love looks like when love meets danger. Now scale that up. When God says a hard "no" to the sin that is destroying you, that "no" is not His holiness fighting His love. It is His love in its working clothes. Holiness is not a second thing in God that has to be satisfied before love can act. It is the name for love when love faces what would ruin you.

Now the old objection can be answered directly. It runs like this: God is infinite in holiness, so any sin against Him is an infinite offense, so justice requires an infinite, that is, endless, punishment. This is an old and serious argument. Anselm made a version of it a thousand years ago, and it still gets repeated.¹⁴ But watch what it does. It grounds hell in holiness alone, cut off from love. And that is exactly the mistake. A holiness that would keep a creature in agony forever, with no aim beyond the pain itself, is not the holiness of the God who is love. It is holiness turned into something God is not.³⁹ Punishment can be severe. It can be terrible. But if it comes from holy love, it will have a purpose beyond itself, and that purpose will be healing.¹⁵

3. Anger for a Moment, Mercy for a Lifetime

If God's holiness and love are one, then His wrath and His mercy should not behave like two equal and opposite powers. And they do not. Watch how the Bible actually describes them. They are not balanced. Mercy is the larger, longer, deeper thing, and wrath serves it.

Listen to the pattern. "For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning" (Psalm 30:5). "He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever" (Psalm 103:9). "For a brief moment I deserted you, but with great compassion I will gather you... but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you" (Isaiah 54:7–8). Read those side by side and a shape appears. The anger is real. It is not pretended. But it is measured, and it is brief, and it is always in service of a mercy that outlasts it.¹⁶

The prophet Micah ends his whole book on this note. "Who is a God like you," he asks, "pardoning iniquity... He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love" (Micah 7:18). Read the reason he gives. God does not hold His anger forever, and the reason is not that sin stopped mattering. The reason is that delighting in mercy is the deepest thing about Him. His anger has a bottom. His steadfast love does not. Micah even pictures God treading our sins underfoot and casting them into the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19). That is not a God hunting for a reason to condemn. That is a God hunting for a way to redeem.

This is why the Bible can speak of "the kindness and the severity of God" in one breath (Romans 11:22) without splitting Him in two. The severity is real. But it is the severity of a physician, not a torturer. It is the wound that heals, the discipline a loving father gives, which Scripture says he gives "for our good" (Hebrews 12:10). God's word, Hurd notes, is a two-edged sword. One edge wounds and the other heals. One kills and the other makes alive. If you only ever see one edge, the Bible looks like a book of contradictions. See both, and it holds together.¹⁷

I should be careful here, because a fair reader will press me. Does "his anger is but for a moment" settle the question of hell? By itself, no. A critic can reply that these verses speak of God's dealings with His covenant people in this life, not of the final judgment. That is a real point, and I grant it. I am not resting the case on a single verse. I am pointing to a pattern that runs from Genesis to the prophets: God tears, then heals; God wounds, then binds up. The direction of the whole story matters, and the direction is toward mercy. Whether that pattern reaches all the way into the age to come is the question the rest of the book takes up, text by text. What "eternal" and "forever" mean in the judgment texts is a large question of its own, and it has a chapter of its own.¹⁸ Here I only mark the shape.

4. The Cross, Where Both Are True at Once

If you want to see love and holiness meet without either being softened, do not look to a theory. Look to a hill outside Jerusalem. The cross is the place where the whole question is answered, not in words but in blood.

Think about what the cross refuses to do. It does not wave sin away. God does not simply decide to overlook the wrong, the way a tired parent stops keeping score. Sin is dealt with. It is judged. It costs. Paul says God put Christ forward "as a propitiation by his blood," and that He did this "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:25–26). Read that last phrase again. Just and the justifier. Both at once. At the cross God is fully just, because sin is fully judged, and fully merciful, because the sinner is fully loved. Holiness is honored to the hilt. Love is poured out to the last drop. Neither one bends.¹⁹ As Jonathan observes, the cross is the single clearest place where God's love and God's justice work together rather than against each other. God's justice requires a reckoning with sin. God's love wants the sinner home. And in Christ both are met at once.³⁷

The Old Testament saw this coming and sang about it. "Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other" (Psalm 85:10).²⁰ That is the cross in a line of poetry. Righteousness and peace, which the divided-God picture keeps apart, lean in and kiss. They were never really enemies. It only took the cross to show it.

And do not miss who moves first. We did not talk a reluctant God into mercy. Paul says the opposite. "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). The cross is not us reaching up to soften an angry God. It is God reaching down, at His own cost, to meet what His own holiness required and His own love desired. The same God who must judge sin is the God who steps in front of the sentence Himself. That is why the cross does not look like holiness and love at war. It looks like one God, of one heart, doing one thing.

And this cuts two ways, which is why the cross is such a good place to stand. It cuts against the sentimental believer who thinks God forgives because He is too nice to bother with sin. Here I stand with Chambers and with De Young: a forgiveness with no cross behind it is not the gospel. It is a wish.²¹ But the cross also cuts against De Young's charge that universalism forgets God's holiness. It does not. The universalism this book defends does not skip the cross. It sends the cross to everyone. It says the full, costly, holy price that Christ paid was paid for the whole world, and that in the end it will not be wasted on anyone. That is not a small view of holiness. It is the largest view of the cross there is.²²

5. The One Honest Limit

I promised to be honest, so here is the one place my own view cannot claim proof. I hold that God will bring every person, in the end, to a free "yes" to Christ. But I will not pretend the argument is airtight, because of one thing I believe about love. Love does not force.

God woos. He draws. He pleads and He purifies. But He does not hold a gun to the soul, because a "yes" that is forced is not the "yes" love wants. And here is the catch that honesty demands I say out loud: a real "yes" has to be a free one, and a free "yes" means a "no" was possible. You cannot have genuine love without genuine freedom. Philosophers call the freedom I mean libertarian freedom, which only means that when you choose, nothing outside you forces the choice. Persuasion is not force. A father who reasons with his son, who pleads, who shows him the truth, has not overridden him, even if the son finally comes around.²³

So I cannot rule out, by pure logic, that some creature might hold out against God forever. What I can say is that it looks vanishingly unlikely to be the final word. Think about who is doing the persuading. A God of perfect love, who knows exactly what each person would freely respond to, with all the time of eternity to work, meeting each soul in His own unveiled presence. Seeing God face to face does not take your freedom. It takes your ignorance. Even the demons "believe and shudder" (James 2:19). The question is not whether the holdout could keep saying no in the dark. It is whether anyone keeps saying no once the lights are fully on, when every lie has burned away and only Love is left in the room.²⁴

That full answer, how a free "yes" can be both free and finally certain, is the largest single question in this book, and I hold it back for the end, where it belongs.²⁵ For now I only want to be clear about the shape of my honesty. This is my one genuinely open point. And I will tell you my fallback, in case that one point ever cut the other way. If some soul could finally, freely refuse God forever, then Love would not keep it in torment. Love would let it go. My fallback is that the finally unrepentant simply cease to be, which the Bible calls the second death.²⁶ It is never, ever endless conscious torment. That, this book will argue, is the one thing a God of holy love could not do.

Where the Battle Lines Fall

Let me name the voices in this argument plainly, so you can see where each one stands and where this book stands with them or against them.

James De Young is the critic at the center. I take him seriously, and you should too. His charge is not silly. He is defending something worth defending: that God is holy, that sin is real, that judgment is not a bluff. And he is right that some versions of universalism are guilty exactly as charged. They do make love a soft master attribute that cancels everything hard. Where De Young lands that blow, it lands. My disagreement is narrow and it is this. He assumes that to honor holiness you must let it stand against love, and that a punishment which heals is no punishment at all.²⁷ I have argued the reverse. Holiness is love facing sin, and a healing punishment is the most holy kind there is. His premise, not his passion for God's holiness, is where I get off the train.

Michael McClymond presses a related but distinct charge in his massive two-volume study. He argues that the effort to extend grace to all has again and again ended up undermining grace itself. What looks like "all grace" turns out, he says, to be "no grace."³⁸ McClymond traces this pattern across nineteen centuries: the gnostic spark, the Kabbalistic return, the Enlightenment thinning of the cross. Where that blow falls on those versions, it falls rightly. But this book defends a universalism built on the cross, not around it. The grace in view is costly, bloody, and particular to Christ, even though its reach is universal. That is not an eclipse of grace. It is grace at full stretch.

Thomas Talbott sharpens the same point into a clean puzzle. He lays out three claims and shows you cannot hold all three. First, God truly wills the salvation of all. Second, God is able to accomplish what He wills. Third, some are lost forever. One of the three has to give.²⁸ The Calvinist gives up the first: God does not really will to save all. The Arminian gives up the second: God wills it but cannot pull it off. The universalist keeps the first two, which the verses in move one seem to demand, and gives up the third. I find that the honest place to stand. God wants all saved. God can do what He wants. So in the end, all will be saved. And Talbott does not stop there. In a later chapter he argues that God has only one moral attribute, and that is loving kindness. His justice, his wrath, his holiness are not separate forces pulling against that love. They are what love looks like when love faces sin. If that is right, then justice does not compete with mercy. Justice requires reconciliation.³⁴

Hurd is the resident guide for this chapter, and his phrase for the traditional view, "a divided God," names the whole problem. Keathley, who is not a universalist at all, still hands the universalist a gift when he shows that the saving-will texts are unconditioned. And Oswald Chambers, whom De Young quotes and whom I quote gladly, keeps us all honest about the cross. No forgiveness without it. On that, the sentimentalist is wrong, De Young is right, and so am I.²⁹ The line does not fall between people who love God's holiness and people who love His mercy. It falls between people who split them and people who do not. R. Zachary Manis, a philosopher who is careful not to claim the universalist label for himself, reaches the same conclusion from a different angle. If we take seriously the claim that God wills the highest good of every person, then love is not at odds with justice. Perfect justice itself requires reconciliation and restoration, not mere retribution.³⁶

Two Honest Pushbacks

After all that, a fair critic will still press me on two points. Let me put each one in its strongest form and then answer it.

I agree with the objection, and it does not touch my view. I am not preaching a God who simply forgives. I said it at the cross and I will say it again here: forgiveness without the cross is not grace, it is sentiment, and the New Testament will not have it. The universalism this book defends is not "everyone is fine." It is "the cross was for everyone." Every person who is saved is saved through Christ, through faith, through the blood that was really shed. Sin is not waved away. It is judged, and the judgment falls on Christ or, for the unrepentant, in the refining fire that this book takes up later.³⁰ Costly grace, applied to all. Not cheap grace, applied to none.

No. My master is not love as one attribute beating the others. My master is God's whole character, and the place I see it whole is the cross. At the cross, love does not defeat holiness. Holiness and love act together, in one motion, and neither is bent. When I say love wins, I do not mean love overrules justice. I mean the God who is holy love finishes what He starts. He does not win by lowering the standard. He wins by meeting it, in Christ, for everyone.³¹ That is not love swallowing holiness. It is the two of them, forever one, arriving together at the same end.

The God We Are Dealing With

Let me gather the thread. We began with a plain question. Does God want all saved, and if so, what could stop Him? The traditional answer was that God's holiness stops Him, because holiness and love pull in different directions. I have argued that they do not. God tells us plainly that He wants all saved. His holiness is not a rival to that love but its very shape. His anger is real but brief; His mercy is the deep and lasting thing. And at the cross we watch holiness and love kiss, so that God is both just and the one who makes the sinner just.

If that is who God is, then the rest of this book has a fair wind behind it. We are not trying to sneak the unrepentant past a holy God. We are trusting a holy God to do what holy love does, which is to heal what it judges. The judgment is not the enemy of the hope. It is the hope's hard hands.

I have also been honest about the one door I cannot bolt shut. Real love leaves the beloved free, and freedom leaves open, in bare logic, a final "no." I do not think that "no" will be anyone's last word, and I have said why, and I will say more at the end.³² But I will not buy the larger hope with a lie about freedom. Better an honest hope than a tidy one.

I think of the reader I have in mind through this whole book, the one who longs for the larger hope but is afraid it is only a wish. She is not asking me to make God nicer. She is asking whether the God who is really there, the holy one, the one who judges, is also the one who will not finally let her brother go. This chapter is my first answer. The God we are dealing with is love, and His holiness is the holiness of that love, and He has told us what He wants. What He wants is you. What He wants is all of us. And the God who is holy love tends to get what He wants.