Eustace+Jill, you seem to have entered the discussion with no small goals in mind!
This is quite a deep question, and I hope to God (literally) that below I can ask some questions, and give some reminders, with both Grace and Truth.
Among most Christians, the default practice is to say (as some have said here!) that "God loves everyone." But too often we stop there and don't further consider what that means, or if we should equally remember other truths about God's nature. If we don't consider this, we risk a few problems, both about how we think about God and how we live.
A few questions about the partial (not false, just partial) concept of "God is love," but mostly about the idea that God loves without discrimination, and that He loves everyone in exactly the same way. What do you think?
1. What about the narratives in Scripture in which God tells the Israelites to kill their enemies? As James White (just a bit rhetorically) asks:
James White wrote:Is anyone seriously going to argue that God loved the Egyptian foot soldier crushed under the falling waters of the Red Sea in the same way He loved Moses, who passed safely through the sea? That He loved the pagan Canaanite priest wiped out by the Israelites as they moved through the Promised Land to the same degree that He loved Joshua? That He loved the captain of the Assyrian army He used to chasten Israel in the same fashion He loved the prophet Isaiah?
2. Do human beings have the ability to "veto" God's love? If so, might this call into question all of God's claims to be all-powerful and sovereign?
3. What about Romans 9, in which Paul, quoting Old-Testament passages, clearly says that God at least has a precedent of loving some, and hating others, for His own good purposes?
We cannot forget that God is love, but we also can't forget harder truths about Him, as Paul wrote about:
As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
That's Romans 9: 13-15. Tough stuff, but somehow this is just as true as John 3:16 and other passages that talk about God loving the world.
4. Does "world" (
kosmos) in John 3:16 truly mean everyone in the world? Or do reminders such as
The Black Glove's also figure in?
5. Jesus goes on in John 3 to talk about how He did not come to condemn the whole world. However, He says, those who reject Him are already condemned. This could give us a clue that "God so loved the world" may not mean He loves every single person who is in the world the exact same way. Question: Does God love those who are "condemned already" just as much as He loves those who love His light and truth? From verses 17-19:
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.
6. What about the doctrine of "common grace"? Jesus in His famous Sermon on the Mount says that God the Father "makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). Is this not also a Biblical truth that God loves people that does not require Christians to believe (or imply) that "God loves everyone exactly the same"? (I'm also reminded of how this truth could be shown in
The Magician's Nephew, when Aslan loves the dumb beasts -- but blesses them in a different way by allowing them to cared for by the free, intelligent beasts to whom He has given speech.)
7. In saying only "God is love," or that Jesus was loving to people -- both very true statements! -- might we by accident forget that very often God/Christ did
not "act" very loving to people? Take the above-mentioned Egyptians, or the Pharisees, or Jesus with the rich man (Mark 10). One of Jesus' worse condemnations was made not to the Pharisees, but to other "average" people -- at the end of John 8, He calls them the Devil's children and accuses them (rightly) of not believing in Him.
(It could seem risky, compiling all these verses that on their own could make God or Jesus seem unreasonably mean. I only do this because it shows another "side" -- Christians dare not only focus on, or imply to others, that Jesus loved everyone and had nothing hard to say to them.)
8. Does God change "modes" between now -- when, as it's said, He's loving everyone exactly the same -- and the future, in which He will judge the wicked and sentence them to eternal, conscious suffering for their hatred of Him? Did He once love rebel humans, and then stop loving them? Or does He even now love the people who are suffering in Hell?
9. What does Scripture say about those for whom Jesus died? Was His sacrificial death really "in place" of those people, as many passages testify? Or did He die for every person, yet they veto it applying to them?
(This could be a fine distinction, for Christians as God's people don't know either way who will and won't be saved. That's why we preach the Gospel to as many people as we can find! It's also not meant to imply that Jesus' death was not sufficient to save everyone. But does Scripture say He died to set up a "system" of salvation, or to actually save people?)
10. The popular slogan
Love the sinner, hate the sin may be close to the truth that God wants us to show His love to all in different ways, and not act self-righteous (as if we somehow earned our own salvation and they haven't). But does God Himself "love the sinner, hate the sin"?
Randy Alcorn wrote:God states a reason for his pleasure in his Son: "You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness" (Hebrews 1:9). If we imagine God only loves and doesn't hate, we will think he calls upon us to only love. Yet he commands us, "Hate evil, love good" (Amos 5:15).
God's attributes of holiness, purity, and righteousness prompt him to hate evil, including some human attitudes and actions; and yes, even some people (see Deuteronomy 12:31; Proverbs 6:16-19; Jeremiah 44:4; Malachi 1:2-3). David writes, "He [God] is angry with the wicked every day" (Psalm 7:11, NLT). David also says, "You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong. You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the LORD abhors" (Psalm 5:4-6).
These statements make clear that our loving God won't allow the wicked to dwell in his presence. Certainly, he hates sin, but passages such as this go further by saying, "You hate all who do wrong." If we place God's love above his holiness, such statements will seem appalling. And they will seem especially jarring when we hear John, the "apostle of love," say something like, "Whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains [present tense] on him" (John 3:36).
from If God is Good; all brackets in original, but my own emphases added
These are sobering questions and truths, and I don't mean to raise such issues lightly. Nor do I mean to imply that all Christians
should have the exact same views on this, or else they're not "spiritual" enough (or worse still, not Christians), or nonsense such as that.
Still, I have known some people who have only ever been taught, or think about, God is love. Then suffering and death hits them, or they somehow wake up and find all the Scripture passages in which God has asked the Israelites to wipe out their enemies. Or they may even read Romans 8 to 9, especially 9, and see the precedent that God sets with loving Jacob and hating Esau (and Paul later asks even tougher questions, in Romans 9: 22-24). And instead of remembering that God is God, and we are not, and we cannot answer back to Him, as Paul says, some people resent God for having this right and nature -- even those who admit He exists.
I know of at least one case in which a real-life evangelical person, born and raised in Christianity, somehow figured out for the first time that God is also a God of holiness and justice. This person could not understand that -- he'd somehow "missed" it -- so he rejected Christianity altogether.
In popular Christianity, I worry that many people are thinking the same way. While God is sovereign even over their false conversions, it is also up to Christians to choose to preach the whole truth about His nature.
(sorry it feels like a major accomplishment).
I don't know what sermon I am thinking of, but it is not the sermon I thought it was. I will have to do some more research.
What about the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and other similar monsters, some of whom may still be living? How could God show love to such as these? Even if like Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition they profess Christianity, and commit their wrongdoing in the name of Christianity? Or Islam? Or whichever credo they espouse? Does God really love these sorts of people? Oh by the way, 
