Is God All-Loving?
A few days ago, I struck up a conversation with a student at the local community college. This student had been raised in a church that taught that God was all-powerful and all-loving. But this student no longer believed that this was true. In fact, she had lost confidence that there was any sort of higher spiritual power at all. Why?
Well, when this student looked at the world, she saw a world full of volcanos, earthquakes, disease, poverty, depression, war, corruption, death – and she didn’t have a way to account for it. After if the all-powerful God is also all-loving, then why wouldn’t he prevent all these catastrophes? How could an all-loving God let people suffer?
But as it turns out, the Bible doesn’t teach that God is all-loving – not in an unqualified, absolute sense.
This student’s church misrepresented the nature of God, to her spiritual harm. And we need to be careful that we aren’t interpreting the Bible with manmade, culturally-distorted definitions of love, either. When the Bible says that God is love (1 John 4:8), that doesn’t mean he loves everything, all the time, with the same sort of love.
The Goodness of God
We can affirm that the Bible describes God as all-good (Psalm 100:5; Matthew 5:48; 1 John 1:5). Yet this isn’t the same as saying that God is all-loving. Because when we say that God is good, this doesn’t just mean that God loves. In fact, God’s goodness necessarily means that there are certain evils that he hates. Scripture tells us that he hates arrogance, idolatry, injustice, murder, marital unfaithfulness, and various other vices (cf. Deuteronomy 7:25; Psalm 5:4-6; Proverbs 6:16-19). We shouldn’t want a God who loves these profanities. And we should be relieved that the Bible confirms that he doesn’t.
But the idea of God hating things can still make us uncomfortable. And there’s a good reason for this. It’s because many of the things that God hates are character flaws that we notice in ourselves. And Romans 1:18 warns us, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” Likewise, Colossians 3:6: “Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.”
Yet if we understand that there are moral evils that God hates – that you and I are cosmic criminals who have provoked the Judge of the Universe to judicial wrath – then the sufferings of the world make sense. Of course there would be a penalty for rebelling against God! God is not unfair to subject the world to calamities, because being repaid for our evil is what we deserve.
Why Does God Let Good Things Happen to Bad People?
So perhaps the real question isn’t about God allowing pain. We should instead be asking, why does God let us experience good? And the only way this can be explained is in reference to the love of God. God, in love, has planned a way for defiled rebels to be reconciled and reclaimed.
He shows a general kindness, a general love, to many people. He allows both saints and sinners to experience sunny days, refreshing rains, and seasons of provision. This is a love he shows both to his allies and to his enemies (Matthew 5:44-45).
But God has a special mercy, a special love, that provides something better than transient pleasantness. God has sent Jesus Christ to abolish our enmity with God, by carrying our guilt and suffering the penalty that our evils deserved. Whoever receives this gift of God’s love has an everlasting future of peace with God.
This special love isn’t for all people, automatically, resulting in universal salvation. God’s special love isn’t for all things, indiscriminately, eliminating categories of good and evil. Instead God, in his special love, has fully accomplished everything that’s needed for the salvation of every believer. The world and even the Christians in it are still afflicted by sufferings and calamity. But in God’s special love, even these trials will ultimately work out for the lasting good of his people.
God Is Not All-Loving, And That’s Okay
We may not always know God’s motive in every trial that we face. But we can humbly affirm the little we do know: God is God, and we are not. His wisdom is above our wisdom. His ways are above our ways. He is good, and faithful, and we can trust Him. This is the God we must know, and the God we must introduce to our children – not a God of misunderstood love, or minimized complexity – but the God who has revealed himself to us in the pages of Holy Scripture.
