Chapter 4

What Love Wills

The Universal Salvific Will and the God Who Desires All Saved

The Question on the Table

Picture a father standing on the bank of a river. His child is drowning. He can see her. He has the strength to pull her out. And he simply watches her go under.

No one would call that love. Not one person hearing that story would say, "Well, he felt fond of her. He wished her well." We know, without needing a theology degree, that love acts. Love moves toward the beloved. A father who can save his child and does not is no father at all.

Now open the New Testament to a single verse. Paul writes to Timothy: 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. God desires. All people. To be saved. Does He mean it?

That question is the hinge of this chapter. And I believe the answer is a clear yes. God wills the salvation of every person He has made. Not some. Not many. Not "all kinds." All. The question after this one, whether God gets what He wills, belongs to Chapter 6. The famous inconsistent triad that Thomas Talbott built from this premise belongs to Chapter 5. Here we ask the prior question, the one a child could ask: does God want everyone saved?

The stakes are high. If God does not will the salvation of all, then the larger hope dies at the root. If He does, the traditionalist has a problem to solve. He must either deny that God loves all, or deny that love wills the good of the beloved, or split God's will in two. Each of those moves costs something. Let me lay out the cost.

Why It Matters

The universal salvific will is the first premise of the entire case this book makes. Without it, everything that follows falls apart. If God is indifferent to the fate of most of His creatures, then there is no philosophical pressure to expect universal salvation. But if God sincerely, genuinely, fully wills the salvation of every person, then we have the starting point for a very different picture. A God who wants all saved but loses most of them is either weak, confused, or hiding a second intention. None of those fits the God of Scripture.

This is not a minor doctrinal question. It touches everything: the meaning of the cross, the purpose of creation, the nature of prayer, and the hope we hold for the people we love. I have talked with parents who lost a child who never professed faith. I have sat with a wife whose husband died in anger at God. The question they carry is plain: did God want to save him? And if so, has He stopped?²

If God's desire to save is universal, sincere, and unending, then we have a reason to hope that goes deeper than proof-texts. We have a God whose love reaches as far as His power. If His desire is something less, if "all" really means "some," if "desires" really means "wishes but does not act," then we must say so plainly and face what that costs.

Consider the weight of the question from the other side. If God does not desire the salvation of all, then the gospel is addressed to a subset of the human race. The cross is sufficient for all, but intended for some. The "whosoever" of John 3:16 comes with an invisible asterisk. Many Christians hold this view in some form, and I do not think they hold it lightly. But I think the cost has not been fully counted.

George Sidney Hurd put the question simply: "Does God Get What He Wants?" That is the title of his chapter on this subject, and it deserves a straight answer.³ In this chapter we establish the will. Whether God achieves it is the work of later chapters. But the will is where love begins.

The Argument

Move 1. The Plain Testimony of Scripture

I want to start where the Bible starts: with what God says about His own desires. The texts are not obscure. They are not buried in apocalyptic code. They sit in plain pastoral letters and prophetic oracles, and they say the same thing.

"This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time." (1 Timothy 2:3–6, ESV)

Notice the scope. Paul does not say God desires believers to be saved. He says "all people." And the very next line gives the reason: one God, one mediator, and a ransom given "for all." The scope of the desire matches the scope of the ransom.⁴

The same note sounds in the prophets. God speaks through Ezekiel: "Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord GOD, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?" (Ezekiel 18:23).⁵ He repeats it: "I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD; so turn, and live" (Ezekiel 33:11).⁶

Peter writes to a church wondering why the Lord delays: "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).⁷ And the poet of Lamentations, writing from the rubble of Jerusalem, insists on the same point: "For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men" (Lamentations 3:31–33).⁸

These are not isolated verses. They form a pattern. The God of the Bible does not take pleasure in judgment. He delays it. He pleads against it. He provides against it. And Paul says plainly that He desires every person saved.

Move 2. What Love Is

The biblical testimony gains force when we ask what love actually means. If "God is love" (1 John 4:8), then whatever love is, God is that without limit and without failure.⁹

At its most basic, love is willing the good of the beloved. Philosophers call this benevolence (Latin benevolentia, "good will").¹⁰ A mother who loves her child wills the child's good. She does not merely feel warm about the child. She acts for the child's good. She sacrifices for it. She pursues it when the child runs. That is what "willing the good" means in practice.

Eric Reitan and John Kronen, in their careful defense of universalism, make a useful distinction between two faces of divine love. The first is benevolent love: God wills the good of every creature He has made. The second is what they call complacent love: God delights in each creature for who that creature is, not merely for what the creature might become.¹¹ Benevolence says, "I want what is best for you." Complacent love says, "I take joy in you." Both, the authors argue, belong to the God of Christian faith. And both point to the same conclusion. A God who values the good in every creature would seek to restore that good wherever it is damaged. The sinner needs saving not because God is indifferent, but because God sees and honors what the sinner truly is, even when the sinner has forgotten it.

Reitan develops this further in his more recent work, Troubled Paradise. There he argues that love, properly understood, is responsive to the inherent worth of persons. Drawing on the personalist tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and on the Thomistic conviction that all things are good insofar as they have being, Reitan contends that agape is not indifferent to the value of the one it loves. It recognizes that every human person bears the image of God and possesses a dignity that calls for a response. A love that values the being and welfare of the beloved, Reitan insists, will desire the salvation of all, "just as 1 Timothy 2:4 proclaims."⁴³ This is not love as sentimentality. It is love as the fitting response of a perfectly good God to the sacred worth of every creature He has made.

Now here is the step that matters. If God loves every person, and if love means willing the good of the beloved, then God wills the good of every person. And what is the highest good of any person? Scripture gives one answer: to know God, to be reconciled to Him, to share in His life. In a word: salvation. So a God who loves all wills the salvation of all. The conclusion follows from the premise as a river follows from its source.¹²

Notice that this argument does not depend on a single verse. It rests on the nature of love itself. The verses confirm what reason expects: if God is love, and if He loves all, then He wills all saved. A God who loves some of His creatures but is indifferent to the rest does not match the biblical picture. And a God who "loves" all but does not will the salvation of all is not really loving in any sense we can recognize.

Move 3. The Trilemma the Traditionalist Faces

If the universal salvific will is true, the traditionalist has a problem. He believes some people will never be saved. But the texts say God wants all saved. How does he hold both?

I see three options, and each one carries a cost.

Option One: Deny that God loves all. This is the path of strict double predestination. Some Reformed theologians have walked it. John Gill, commenting on 1 Timothy 2:4, insisted that "all men" cannot mean every person, because if it did, all would be saved. Since not all are saved (in his view), the "all" must be limited.¹³ Hurd quotes Gill at length to show the logic at work. Gill writes that God's will to save is "absolute and unconditional," that it "infallibly secures" salvation, and that it "is never resisted, so as to be frustrated." So far, Hurd notes, Gill sounds like a universalist. But then Gill makes his move: "by all men cannot be meant every individual of mankind, since it is not his will that all men, in this large sense, should be saved."¹⁴ The cost is plain. To keep his system intact, Gill must say that God does not want to save most people. He is sovereign and gets what He wants, but what He wants is the damnation of the many.

That is a heavy price. It means God created billions of persons whom He never intended to redeem. It means the "God is love" of 1 John 4:8 has a footnote the text does not carry: God is love, but not toward you. Kirk MacGregor, writing from a Molinist framework, observes that this creates a God who has a "universal salvific will" in name only, because the scope of the love and the scope of the will do not match.¹⁵

Option Two: Deny that love wills the beloved's good. This is a rarer move, but it surfaces when someone says God can "love" the reprobate while decreeing their destruction. Love on this view becomes a warm feeling that carries no intention. But that is not love in any ordinary sense. We do not praise a parent for "loving" a child while withholding a cure the parent possesses. Love without the will to act is not love. It is sentiment. The tradition that says God "loves" the damned while willing their damnation has emptied the word of its meaning.¹⁶

Option Three: Divide God's will in two. This is the most common and most serious move, and it deserves careful attention. Many Reformed theologians argue that God has a revealed will and a secret will. The revealed will says He desires all saved. The secret will decrees that only some will be saved. John Piper, for example, accepts that 1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9 express a genuine desire on God's part for the salvation of all. But he holds that this desire does not represent God's decisive, decreeing will.¹⁷

I want to state this view fairly. It is not stupid. It is trying to hold together two things the Bible seems to say: that God wants all saved, and that not all are saved. The "two wills" framework is a serious attempt to keep both truths in play. Kenneth Keathley gives a helpful survey of the options here and notes that the "two wills" view has a long Reformed pedigree.¹⁸

But the cost is still real. A God whose secret will decrees the opposite of what His revealed will desires is a divided God. Keathley presses this point: the revealed will of God is exactly that, the will of God. If the secret will is greater than the revealed will, it "certainly can never be less."¹⁹ A will that decrees damnation for the very persons it desires to save is not a deeper wisdom. It is a contradiction dressed in mystery.

There is a fourth option, of course. The universalist option. God loves all. Love wills the good of the beloved. God's will is one. And so God wills the salvation of all, and in the end, He achieves it. That is the path this book follows. The price the universalist pays is denying that anyone is finally lost. Whether that price can be paid honestly, without losing freedom or cheapening grace, is the question the rest of the book takes up in Parts IV through VI.

Move 4. The Whole Pattern of Scripture: Wrath for a Moment, Mercy Forever

If we step back from individual texts and look at the whole pattern of Scripture, something striking comes into view. God's anger is real. It is never denied. But it is always described as temporary, while His mercy is described as endless.

"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).²⁰

"The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever" (Psalm 103:8–9).²¹

"In overflowing anger for a brief moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the LORD, your Redeemer" (Isaiah 54:8).²²

Hurd draws attention to a telling fact. The phrase "His mercy endures forever" appears forty-one times in the Old Testament. The phrase "eternal wrath" does not appear at all.²³ That is not an accident. It reflects something deep about who God is. His wrath serves His love. His judgment aims at healing. His punishment has a purpose, and the purpose is not the punishment itself.

This pattern matters for the universal salvific will. If God's wrath is temporary and His mercy is permanent, then the end of the story is mercy, not wrath. God's desire to save is not a wish that expires. It endures as long as mercy endures, and mercy endures forever.

The prophet Jeremiah says it plainly: "The anger of the LORD will not turn back until he has executed and performed the intents of his heart. In the latter days you will understand it perfectly" (Jeremiah 23:20, NKJV).²⁴ God's anger does not turn back. But notice what it does: it executes the intents of His heart. And what are those intents? If the texts above are right, they are the intents of a God who desires all people to be saved.

Gerry Beauchemin captures the force of this contrast well. On earth, he observes, God's anger lasts but a moment and His favor is for life. Why, then, does tradition tell us that after death, His favor is not even a moment and His anger is forever? That reversal needs a better reason than tradition provides.²⁵

I find this pattern telling. It is not a proof of universalism. But it is a strong clue about what God is like. A God whose mercy runs out at death, while His wrath extends forever, would be the opposite of the God the psalmists sang about. He would be a God whose anger lasts and whose mercy ends. That is not the God of Psalm 103. It is not the God of Lamentations 3. And it is not the God whose character we explored in Chapter 3.

Move 5. Establishing the Will, Pointing Ahead

Let me pull together what we have. The argument of this chapter rests on three legs.

First, Scripture says plainly that God desires all people to be saved. The texts are clear, they are multiple, and they are found in both Testaments. They are not one proof-text but a chorus.

Second, the nature of love itself points the same direction. If God is love, and if love wills the good of the beloved, and if the highest good of any person is salvation, then God wills the salvation of all. The argument follows from what love means.

Third, the whole pattern of Scripture supports it. God's anger is described as temporary; His mercy is described as eternal. The arc of the story bends toward restoration, not destruction.

What I have not yet shown is whether God gets what He wills. That belongs to Chapter 6, where Paul's vision in 1 Corinthians 15 of a God who is "all in all" becomes the hinge. Nor have I yet answered the charge that the universal will can be frustrated by human freedom. That belongs to the heart of this book, Part IV (Chapters 13 through 18), where we take up middle knowledge, optimal grace, and the question of whether anyone could refuse God forever once fully healed and fully seeing.²⁶

Here we have established the starting point. God wills the salvation of all. That is not my inference. It is what He says. The question the rest of the book answers is whether we have reason to believe He will accomplish it, freely, without forcing a single heart.

Engagement with Specific Philosophers

The universal salvific will is not a marginal position in the history of Christian thought. It has defenders across the theological spectrum, and even many of its critics grant the premise while disputing the conclusion.

Thomas Talbott, whose inconsistent triad we examine in Chapter 5, takes the universal salvific will as his first proposition: all human sinners are equal objects of God's redemptive love, which He sincerely wills. Talbott argues that this is "perhaps the most important dispute" in the whole conversation, "because it goes to the very heart of who God is." If you reject proposition (1), he writes, "one can no longer regard loving kindness as a part of God's very essence." The love of God shrinks. It has limits. It does not reach every descendant of Adam equally.²⁷ Talbott traces three pictures of God from this single fork in the road: the Augustinian picture, in which God's will is sovereign but His love is limited; the Arminian picture, in which God's love is universal but His will is thwarted; and the universalist picture, in which God's love is unlimited and His saving will is unthwarted as well. Only the universalist, Talbott argues, keeps both halves of who God is.³⁷

Reitan and Kronen, in God's Final Victory, make the point carefully. Their case begins with what they call "divine benevolence," the claim that a perfectly good God wills the good of every creature. They distinguish this from a weaker claim, that God merely permits the good. Benevolent love acts. It moves. It provides. A God who merely permits His creatures to find their own way, while remaining indifferent to their fate, is not a God of love in any recognizable sense.²⁸ But they go further. God's complacent love, the love that delights in goodness itself, gives Him a second motive. Because sin is a failure to value what God values most, God would have what Reitan and Kronen call "a powerful motive to expunge all hatred of His essence and replace it with love. That is, He would have a powerful motive to convert every sinner." The two dimensions of love, benevolent and complacent, converge on the same conclusion: God wills the salvation of all.⁴⁶

Reitan returns to this argument from a different angle in his later work, Troubled Paradise. There he asks what the universal salvific will means for the blessed in heaven. If the saved are perfected in love, their love will reach to every person, including the lost. And if love includes grief for irreversible harm to those we love, then the damnation of anyone would permanently mar the joy of the blessed. Reitan calls this the "problem of heavenly grief." It strikes at a point many traditionalists have not fully reckoned with: God's desire to save all is not an abstract doctrine. It has consequences for the very possibility of heaven. If God wants all saved, and the blessed share that desire, then the permanent loss of any person means the promise of Revelation 21:4, that God will wipe every tear from their eyes, cannot be kept.⁴⁴ The least costly escape from this problem, Reitan concludes, is to embrace universalism itself: the hope that none will be finally lost.

Among the non-universalists, Kenneth Keathley affirms the universal salvific will without reservation. His survey of the four positions on God's salvific will is one of the clearest available. He argues that the antecedent-and-consequent-will model, the majority position through church history, best fits both the biblical texts and the character of God. God antecedently wills the salvation of all; He consequently wills that salvation is conditioned on faith.²⁹ Keathley is no universalist. He believes some will finally be lost. But he insists that God's desire for all to be saved is genuine, universal, and unconditioned. That is significant: even a non-universalist Molinist affirms the premise this chapter defends.

Where I part from Keathley is at the next step. He holds that God's desire for universal salvation can be genuinely frustrated by human freedom. I will argue in Chapter 15 that middle knowledge and optimal grace mean it need not be. But we agree on the starting point: God wants all saved.

R. Zachary Manis, who is no universalist either, makes a telling observation. For those who reject God's universal love in the Calvinist framework, "there is no basis for rational hope that God is doing everything in His power to promote the welfare of all His creatures." God, on that view, sacrifices some of His creatures to achieve something else He values more: His own glory. Manis argues that this sits uneasily with any robust account of divine goodness.³⁸ Robin Parry, writing as "Gregory MacDonald," presses the same point. The universalist is no different from the Calvinist or the Arminian in having to reinterpret difficult texts. Every position must reject at least one proposition for which there is biblical support. The question is which rejection costs the least and which picture of God coheres best with the whole of Scripture.³⁹

James De Young, writing against universalism, challenges this consensus from the other direction. He argues that the "all" in 1 Timothy 2:4 refers not to all individuals but to all kinds of people, classes and ranks and nations. But his deeper argument is harder to dismiss. De Young insists that even if God does want all saved, what matters is whether that want can be thwarted by the human will. He agrees that "God's attributes of omnipotence and love must go together," but he adds that the image of God in humanity "includes the will, the capacity to choose wrongly or sinfully, against God's preferred will."³⁰ I will address both prongs of his objection directly in the next section. But I note here that his deeper point, the one about freedom, is the challenge the rest of this book takes seriously. It is answered not in this chapter but in Part IV.

The point is this: the universal salvific will is not a universalist invention. It is a mainstream Christian conviction shared by Arminians, Molinists, and even many Calvinists (Piper among them). The universalist simply takes it seriously all the way to the end and asks what follows if it is true. MacGregor's concept of "optimal salvation," the idea that God creates a world aimed at maximizing the ratio of the saved to the lost, gives the Molinist a framework for holding the universal desire together with the fact of real human freedom. The universalist pushes one step further: if God is wise enough to achieve optimal salvation, might He not be wise enough to achieve total salvation?³⁶

Counter-Objections

Objection 1: The "Two Wills" Reply

I have tried to state this objection fairly, and I want to take it seriously. It has able defenders. The question I press is this: what kind of God has a secret will that decrees the opposite of what His revealed will desires?

Keathley puts the difficulty well. The texts we have examined do not merely say God would like the wicked to repent. They say He does not desire the death of the wicked. They say He is not willing that any should perish. They say He desires all to be saved. These are statements about the actual persons who perish, not about some general category. Peter says God is patient "toward you," the people he is writing to, not wanting "any" of them to perish.³¹ Keathley argues that the revealed will of God is exactly that: the will of God. A secret will that runs counter to it does not deepen the mystery of God; it divides Him.

Hurd makes a similar point with his comparison of the Calvinist and Arminian positions. Both camps, he observes, share one assumption: that not all will be saved. "The Arminians get around having to say that God will save all by subordinating God's sovereignty to the 'free-will' of man, and the Calvinists get around saying God will save all by saying that all doesn't mean 'all.'"³² Both moves are driven by a conclusion held in advance, not by the plain reading of the texts.

I do not deny that God's will is complex. But a will that sincerely desires the salvation of persons and then decrees their damnation is not complex. It is contradictory. The "two wills" framework works well for many purposes, but when it produces a God who "desires" the salvation of the very persons He has decreed to damn, it has ceased to describe mystery and begun to describe incoherence.

James Beilby makes a useful observation. Piper's "two wills" argument, he notes, is only plausible if one already takes it as settled that Scripture teaches Calvinist soteriology, effectual grace and limited atonement included. If you do not start from that assumption, the universal-will texts say exactly what they appear to say: God desires all to be saved.⁴⁰ And this is the deeper problem with the "two wills" move. Andrew Hronich, in his own study, pushes the point further. No matter how many texts one cites on behalf of God's universal love, the Calvinist can simply drop each one into a category labeled "will of disposition" and insist it does not touch the decretive will. The system becomes unfalsifiable. It cannot be tested against Scripture, because any text that would test it is reclassified before it lands.⁴¹

Objection 2: "All" Means "All Kinds," and God's Will Can Be Thwarted

James De Young mounts a two-part challenge to the universal salvific will. First, he argues that when Paul writes "all people" in 1 Timothy 2:4, he means all kinds of people, not every individual. Kings and peasants, rich and poor, Jews and Gentiles, every social class represented, but not every person.³³ Second, and more pointedly, he argues that even if God does desire the salvation of all, that desire can be thwarted by the human will.

I want to take both parts of De Young's challenge seriously, because each has real force.

This reading has a history. The Calvinist John Gill took the same line centuries earlier: "all sorts of men" would be saved, not all men without exception.³⁴ But look at the context. Paul has just urged prayer "for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions" (1 Timothy 2:1–2). The mention of kings and high officials is not a restriction on "all people." It is an expansion: pray for all people, even the rulers, because God wants even them saved.

Beilby puts the objection bluntly. The "all kinds" readings "are not interpretations of what the texts actually say; they are clever ways of avoiding the implications of what the texts say." He adds a plain challenge: if Paul had meant to say that God desires all kinds of people to be saved, he could have said so much more clearly. He did not. He said "all people."⁴²

Hurd presses the inconsistency further. The same word, "all," is used in Romans 5:12 to say that "all have sinned." Nobody reads that as "all kinds have sinned." Everyone takes it to mean every individual. But when Paul says Christ is a ransom "for all," the same commentators suddenly narrow the word. Hurd asks the obvious question: if Adam's sin ruined all without exception, but Christ's victory saves only all without distinction, how can Paul call Christ's work "much more" than Adam's (Romans 5:15–17)?³⁵ A cure that heals only a sample from each group while the disease kills everyone is not a greater victory. It is a lesser one.

The grammar and the context both resist the "all kinds" reading. When Paul says God "desires all people to be saved," he means all people. The simplest reading is the right one.

But De Young's second challenge goes deeper. He argues that 1 Timothy carries a two-fold emphasis on faith: one strand commends faith, the other warns against abandoning it. Faith, he insists, is the condition that makes God's saving will real in a person's life. Without faith, God's plan "does not enter reality."⁴⁵ De Young concludes that God may will the salvation of all, but He also wills that people exercise faith. If they do not, His will is not thwarted but simply conditioned on a choice that has not been made.

I grant the premise. Faith is the means. This book does not deny it for a moment. Salvation is through personal faith in Christ, for every person who is saved (see the boundary this book sets in Chapter 1). The question is whether God's desire is limited to this life and to human initiative, or whether God, who desires all saved, also pursues every person with the means of that salvation until the "yes" comes. This book argues that He does, that middle knowledge and optimal grace equip a God who truly wills the salvation of all to achieve it without forcing a single heart (Chapter 14; Chapter 15). De Young's point is correct about the means. But it does not show that the desire is anything less than universal, or that a sovereign God who arranges every circumstance cannot bring each person freely to that faith.

Conclusion and the Boundary

Let me close with what we have established. God wills the salvation of every person. Scripture says so plainly. The nature of love itself demands it. The pattern of the whole Bible, with its temporary wrath and eternal mercy, confirms it. And the alternatives carry costs the traditionalist should weigh honestly: a God who does not love all, a "love" that carries no intention to save, or a divided will that decrees the opposite of what it desires.

This chapter has not yet shown that God will accomplish what He wills. That is the work still ahead. In Chapter 5, Talbott's inconsistent triad will sharpen the question into a logical problem. In Chapter 6, Paul's vision of a God who is "all in all" will ground the sovereignty claim. And in the chapters that follow, we will take up the question of freedom: whether God can save all without forcing anyone. The cumulative case rests on all these threads woven together.

But the foundation is here. And it is a foundation laid not by the universalist but by God Himself. He is the one who said He desires all people saved. He is the one who gave His Son as a ransom for all. He is the one whose mercy endures forever, while His anger lasts only a moment.

If we believe Him, the rest is a matter of following the argument where it leads.

If you are reading this and you have set your faith down because you could not worship a God who damns most of His children, I want you to hear what this chapter says: God wants you saved. Not "you" in the generic sense. You, the person reading this sentence. The universal salvific will is not an abstraction. It is a claim about the particular love of a particular God for a particular person. Whatever questions remain, this is the starting point: He desires your salvation, and He does not give up.

And that, I believe, is what love wills.