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Chapter 4

Does God Get What God Wants?

On the websites of many churches, there is a page where you can read what the people in that particular church believe. Usually the list starts with statements about the Bible, then God, Jesus, and the Spirit, then salvation and the church, and so on. Most of these lists and statements include a section on what the people in the church believe about the people who don’t believe what they believe.

This is from an actual church website: “The unsaved will be separated forever from God in hell.”

This is from another: “Those who don’t believe in Jesus will be sent to eternal punishment in hell.”

And this is from another: “The unsaved dead will be committed to an eternal conscious punishment.”

So in the first statement, the “unsaved” won’t be with God.

In the second, not only will they not be with God, but they’ll be sent somewhere else to be punished.

And in the third, we’re told that not only will these “unsaved” be punished forever, but they will be fully aware of it—in case we were concerned they might down an Ambien or two when God wasn’t looking . . .

The people experiencing this separation and punishment will feel all of it, we are told, because they’ll be fully conscious of it, fully awake and aware for every single second of it, as it never lets up for billions and billions of years.

All this,

on a website.

Welcome to our church.

Yet on these very same websites are extensive affirmations of the goodness and greatness of God, proclamations and statements of belief about a God who is

“mighty,”

“powerful,”

“loving,”

“unchanging,”

“sovereign,”

“full of grace and mercy,”

and “all-knowing.”

This God is the one who created

“the world and everything in it.”

This is the God for whom

“all things are possible.”

I point out these parallel claims:

that God is mighty, powerful, and “in control”

and that billions of people will spend forever apart from this God, who is their creator,

even though it’s written in the Bible that

“God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2).

So does God get what God wants?

How great is God?

Great enough to achieve what God sets out to do,

or kind of great,

medium great,

great most of the time,

but in this,

the fate of billions of people,

not totally great.

Sort of great.

A little great.

According to the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, “God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear” (chap. 6).

God has a purpose, something God is doing in the world, something that has never changed, something that involves everybody, and God’s intention all along has been to communicate this intention clearly.

Will all people be saved,

or will God not get what God wants?

Does this magnificent, mighty, marvelous God fail in the end?

People, according to the scriptures, are inextricably intertwined with God. As it’s written in Psalm 24: “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”

The prophet Isaiah, in chapter 45, says that God “did not create [the earth] to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited.” Paul says in a speech in Acts 17 that in God “we live and move and have our being,” and he writes in Romans 11, “From him and through him and to him are all things.”

The prophet Malachi asks, “Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us?” (chap. 2). Paul says in Acts 17, “We are God’s offspring,” and in Ephesians 3 he writes, “I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives it name.”

The writers of the scriptures consistently affirm that we’re all part of the same family. What we have in common—regardless of our tribe, language, customs, beliefs, or religion—outweighs our differences. This is why God wants “all people to be saved.” History is about the kind of love a parent has for a child, the kind of love that pursues, searches, creates, connects, and bonds. The kind of love that moves toward, embraces, and always works to be reconciled with, regardless of the cost.

The writers of the Bible have a lot to say about this love:

In Psalm 65 it’s written that “all people will come” to God.

In Ezekiel 36 God says, “The nations will know that I am the LORD.”

The prophet Isaiah says, “All the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God” (chap. 52).

Zephaniah quotes God as saying, “Then I will purify the lips of the peoples, that all of them may call on the name of the LORD and serve him shoulder to shoulder” (chap. 3).

And Paul writes in Philippians 2, “Every knee should bow . . . and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is LORD, to the glory of God the Father.”

All people.

The nations.

Every person, every knee, every tongue.

Psalm 22 echoes these promises: “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him.”

But then it adds a number of details:

“All the rich of the earth will feast and worship;

all who go down to the dust will kneel before him—”

So everybody who dies will kneel before God, and “future generations will be told about the LORD. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!”

This insistence that God will be united and reconciled with all people is a theme the writers and prophets return to again and again. They are very specific in their beliefs about who God is and what God is doing in the world, constantly affirming the simple fact that God does not fail.

In the book of Job the question arises: “Who can oppose God? He does whatever he pleases” (chap. 23). And then later it’s affirmed when Job says to God, “I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (chap. 42).

Through Isaiah God says, “I will do all that I please.” Isaiah asks, “Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear?” while Jeremiah declares to God, “Nothing is too hard for you” (Isa. 46; 59; Jer. 32).

This God, in Psalm 145, “is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.”

This God’s anger, in Psalm 30, “lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime.”

This God, in Psalm 145, “is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.”

In the Bible, God is not helpless,

God is not powerless,

and God is not impotent.

Paul writes to the Philippians that “it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (chap. 2).