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Q:
Dear Pastor,
If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t God save everyone?
A:
You’ve asked a simple question most people want the answer to. Why wouldn’t God empower everyone to be saved? Doesn’t he want everyone in heaven? The term being “saved” is a Christian one, and we must begin there. It is the idea that there is a promise of life after death; heaven or hell. Most of us don’t want hell. So how do we get to heaven? The Son of God, who is Jesus, opened that pathway to all mankind.
So the door is open! Now it makes sense for God to save everyone; eliminating a world of anxiety and heartache for millions. It would instantly make the whole business of Christianity a global worldview and mindset. It sounds heavenly! (Exactly.) Unfortunately we are not in heaven, we’re on earth. And God created a door that all people must pass through in order to enter heaven. That door is Jesus Christ. (John 10:1-18)
God already saved everyone. He saved all people, once and for all, during a three-day period where he died and rose to life again. Jesus, who is God, was slaughtered on a Friday. He then resurrected himself out of the morgue inside a cave on Sunday; throwing off his bloody grave-wrappings and showed himself alive to hundreds of people. (1 Corinthians 15:3-8) It was accomplished thousands of years ago on what we now memorialize as Easter. Every person who ever lived or would be born was saved in that moment. The rest of the story...the history of human choices...decided the fates of heaven or hell for each individual person. Yet on that glimmering Easter morning, everyone was saved all at once: God had taken on human form and met the sacrificial requirement of opening the doorway to heaven for every person to come in. The door stood wide for anyone who would choose it. Consider the tragedy then, when people decide they don’t want to go. They don’t accept Jesus and what he did. Many of them rejected it then, and they do now. God grieves at levels we cannot imagine over this fact.
The Bible says this: “But if the wicked man turns from all his sins which he has committed and observes all My statutes and practices justice and righteousness, he shall surely live; he shall not die. All his transgressions which he has committed will not be remembered against him; because of his righteousness which he has practiced, he will live. For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies,” declares the Lord God. Therefore, repent and live.” (Ezekiel 18:21, 22, 32 NASB.) Roughly six-hundred years after that prophetic statement, God brought forth a man named Peter to remind us all over again that God hates death and longs for us to choose life. “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9.) He’s a good God who wants all good things for his children. He even gave us the free-will to decide how we want to live, both here and in eternity: we choose Jesus or we don’t. Heaven and hell become the depositories of this fundamental, human choice.
We all want the easy road! “Life’s hard and unfair,” we bellow. God is fully capable of snapping his fingers and sending everyone to heaven right now, yes. But thankfully, the Lord will not violate our fundamental right to make our own decisions. He longs for us to choose him, but he will not make us do it.
In the eyes of The Almighty, he sacrificed his precious son Jesus in order to save us—he pressed the easy-button for the entire human race. It wasn’t easy for Jesus, but he gladly paid the price in order to win us back from death and hell. In God’s opinion, salvation is poured out over the whole earth already. It is finished.
Now it is your choice. Will you receive Jesus?
Do you have a question or comment for Pastor Adrienne? Email your inquiries to: info@adriennewgreene.com. For more information & contact for bookings, please also explore: www.askpastoradrienne.com.