As much as Calvinists will deny this, I believe that at a subconscious level, a universal “salvific will” is offensive to Calvinists because it undermines their self-conception to holding an elite status.
What do Calvinists believe?
James White: “The God of Scripture is able to save perfectly and completely all He desires to save: the fact that not all are saved leads inexorably to the truth of divine election.”361
Our reply:
God desires that everyone become saved. However, God doesn’t want all to be saved irresistibly, but rather He wants all to be saved freely, which He accomplishes through a well-meant offer of the gospel.
The problem with Calvinism is that it portrays God as having decreed whatsoever comes to pass, including all sinners and their sin, and then not wanting to save all, never intending to save all, in which God had created most people for the purpose of perpetual misery in being eternally separated from His love, in order to use them for the purpose of having object lessons of the divine attribute of wrath.
David Allen: “Without belief in the universal saving will of God and a universal extent in Christ’s sin-bearing, there can be no well-meant offer of the salvation from God to the non-elect who hear the gospel call.”362
That is why some Calvinists reject that the gospel is an offer all at, suggesting that although the gospel may appear to come across as an offer, it is actually a command which only some are elected to be made irresistibly regenerated to effectually receive. Matthew chapter 22’s parable of the Marriage Feast is perhaps the strongest portrayal of the gospel as being an open and indiscriminate invitation and offer of salvation to all men, and which if true, would bring us back full circle to the principle of a universal salvific will of God, for His part. I believe that the deepest desire and need in the soul of every human being is to know that they are loved and that they matter. The teaching of God’s universal salvific will delivers on this need.
The matter of God’s salvific will is tied to God’s purpose for creating mankind in the first place. Was mankind created to glorify God? Sure, but what truly glorifies God? Let’s see.
What do Calvinists believe?
If God loves every single person just as much as the next, why does He create those whom He knows will reject Him, and why does He let them go to Hell when He could otherwise choose to save all?
Our reply:
First of all, God doesn’t love everyone equally—God loves everyone uniquely. Moreover, God may indeed know of a particular father who will die rejecting Christ, but what if God also knows that the man’s son would someday become a Christian? Preventing the birth of the father would prevent the birth of the Christian son, and this is how people are interrelated, and why God will instead wait until the end of the Harvest to sort the sheep from the goats.
We may also ask why the father of the Prodigal Son allowed his son to leave, even though he sincerely loved him and desired that he stay? The answer is because the father had principles and didn’t want to hold him against his will, if his son truly loved him so little.
Ezekiel 18:23: “‘Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked,’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘rather than that he should turn from his ways and live?’”
God gives people a choice, and what has been happening in the world since Genesis is ordering and sorting. God doesn’t want people to be goats. He wants people to become His sheep. In the end, as a master fisherman, God will net a kingdom of people who chose to love Him and to be with Him, despite the adverse conditions of this presently fallen world. In the end, God wins true fellowship among His faithful, while those who refuse Him have made their choice and have to live with it.
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361 The Potter’s Freedom (Amityville, NY: Calvary Press Publishing, 2000), 99.
362 Whosoever Will: A Biblical-Theological Critique of Five-Point Calvinism (Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Publishing Group, 2010), 95.
[This post has been excerpted with permission from Richard Coords, Calvinism Answered Verse by Verse and Subject by Subject, © 2024.]
