Cold Case Christianity: Wouldn’t a Loving God Make Sure Everyone Gets to Heaven? Ask a Calvinist

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Wouldn’t a Loving God Make Sure Everyone Gets to Heaven?

Posted: 15 Sep 2017 01:25 AM PDT

289The concept of Hell is daunting for many Christians.

And since Christians are spiritually alive, you cannot blame their hatred of hell on their being spiritually dead, so their view just might reflect a truth of the Holy Spirit that is being mangled by improper bible interpretation or by NT authors who were not inspired by God.   

It’s not pleasant to think our unbelieving loved ones might spend eternity separated from God, regretting their decision forever.

It's even more unpleasant when you remember that the age of accountability is around 7.  That is, under conservative Christian theology, if a 7 year old unbelieving girl goes to church by invitation, learns the true gospel, but doesn't "accept Jesus", and then dies in a car accident on the way home, God roasts this little girl in hell forever.  One Christian singer has responded to the literal hell-fire issue.

Wallace continues:

Several religious traditions seek to avoid the problem by offering a second chance to those who reject God’s gift of forgiveness. They envision a place where rebellious souls can, in the next life, reconsider their choice or earn their way toward heaven; the Catholic tradition offers “Purgatory” and Mormonism describes a “Spirit Prison”. Both seek to offer solutions to commonly asked questions: Wouldn’t a Loving God love all of His creation? Wouldn’t He make sure everyone goes to Heaven (regardless of what they might believe in this life)? A loving God would never limit Heaven to a select few and allow billions of people to suffer in Hell, would He?

Those questions arise from the obvious fact that is taught in the bible: God does not require perfection in a sinner's good works before these can be acceptable to God (Matthew 25:40, in a context where some of the sinners didn't know their good deeds helped Jesus, so many of them likely weren't even Christians either), nor does he require perfection to fully expiate sin (Leviticus 16:30, the cleansing from sin promised here on the basis of animal blood atonement is a full expiation, yet the sacrifice was a mere animal, hence an imperfect attempt to appease the deity works, in the bible, hence, "perfection" is not required of human beings)

Let’s consider, however, the nature of Heaven and the truth about humans. Heaven is the realm of God, and those who ultimately enter into Heaven will be united with God forever.

So apparently, Satan is united with God forever, because he appears in Heaven (Job 1) and his demons sit around God's throne, waiting for God to authorize them to go to earth and force people to sin:

 19 Micaiah said, "Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left.
 20 "The LORD said, 'Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?' And one said this while another said that.
 21 "Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, 'I will entice him.'
 22 "The LORD said to him, 'How?' And he said, 'I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.' Then He said, 'You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.'
 23 "Now therefore, behold, the LORD has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the LORD has proclaimed disaster against you."
 (1 Ki. 22:19-23 NAU)

And apparently they are in heaven "forever" because if they are there now, and if heaven is an eternal "now", then they can no more leave heaven than god can.

Wallace continues:

While that sounds fantastic for some of us, it sounds ridiculous, boring or offensive to many who reject the existence of God (and resist God’s guidelines and obligations).

It also sounds boring to conservative Evangelicals like J. Warner Wallace, who, like most of his kind, would get sick of "going to church" if he did the whole Sunday-service thing every single day.  Staying away from church is what helps give the once-per-week church-going experience a greater feeling of significance.  Nothing different than the drunk who refuses to touch alcohol except for Friday and Saturday nights.  The longer the wait, the sweeter the reward.  The whole idea that you'll just be standing at God's throne, looking at him and ceaselessly praising God for his goodness after you get to heaven, is the result of a warped mentality.

If everyone will eventually end up in Heaven, it is inevitable and compulsory. This type of eternal destination seems contrary to the nature of God and the nature of human “free will”:

And so what you do now is fail to mention that your views about God's sovereignty and human freewill contradict those Christians you call 5-Point Calvinists, who believe people end up in hell because God intended from all eternity that they never have a genuine chance to go to heaven.

A Compulsory Heaven Would Eradicate “Free Will”

People who deny the existence of God relish the fact they have the freedom and ability to do so. Some of these same people, however, argue a loving God would make certain everyone goes to Heaven after they die.

That's because any other definition of "loving" requires us to believe "love" is compatible with a God who "delights" to cause rape and parental cannibalism (Deuteronomy 28:30, 53, 63).  Some things are beyond discussion, whether you make money discussing them or not.

But this kind of “universalism” actually denies human “free will” altogether. If Heaven is the only destination awaiting us (based on the assumption all who die eventually end up there), it is truly compulsory.

So?  God has no problems forcing people to sin in Ezekiel 38:4 - 39:29.  See 38:4, yes, "hook in your jaws" is mere metaphor, but the metaphor clearly cannot be reconciled with your belief that God doesn't force people to sin.  Why is god characterizing his power over human freewill here as "hook in your jaws", if that kind of mental picture implies more use of force than what is actually the case?  If the Gog and Magog armies were of their own freewill set to attack Israel, then it is completely inaccurate to say God used a "hook in their jaws" to cause them to so attack.

In this view of the afterlife, we have no choice about where we end up; everyone is united with God, like it or not.

So?  We send criminals to jail whether they like it or not, despite it being against their freewill.  Apparently, violating a person's freewill can be a good thing.

A compulsory Heaven rejects the importance of human liberty, the very thing those who deny God cherish the most.

Correct, your spiritually alive 5-Point Calvinist brothers and sisters in Christ also reject any importance of human liberty.

By offering (but not forcing) Heaven to those who freely choose to love the One who reigns there, God is actually honoring and respecting our “free will” universally.

True, but there are plenty of bible verses which contradict any idea that god respects human freewill.  Ezekiel 38:4.  Daniel 4:33, God causes a king to become animal-like and eat grass like an ox.  If he can mess up a human mind by force, he can also make it spiritually alive by force.

He is, in fact, treating us with the utmost respect and dignity; something we would expect if He is all-loving in the first place.

Which is nothing but worthless talk given that you have to qualify what you just said to make room for the fact that God allows little kids to be raped all the time.  What fool would say God is treating those kids with the "utmost respect and dignity" by stepping out of the way and allowing them to be raped when he has the most power in creation to protect them from all such?  Inerrantist Christians, that's who.

A Compulsory Heaven Would Embrace the “Unsuited”

In addition to this, a Heaven including anyone and everyone is counter intuitive and un-reasonable. Just think about it for a minute. Most of us would agree: A Holy place of eternal reward is simply not suited for people with a certain kind of character or certain kinds of desires. All of us can think of someone from history who (by our estimate) is unqualified for eternal reward. We may not all agree on who should or shouldn’t be included in such a place, but most of us would hesitate when considering people like Hitler (or perhaps lifelong unrepentant pedophiles with murderous desires) for eternal reward in Heaven. If there is a Heaven, it is surely unsuited for certain kinds of people, and even the most skeptical among us can find someone he or she would place in this category. A compulsory Heaven, including the most vile and dangerous people from history, is not likely what skeptics have in mind when they argue for an all-inclusive final destination.

Then read Daniel 4:33, God is able to change the mental constitution of even sinners who are actively against him.  Nothing prevents God from re-constituting the mentality of atheists after he brings them to heaven so they will find eternal joy in standing around god's throne, ceaselessly signing his praises.

A loving God would make Heaven possible for all of us while respecting the free will desires of some of us.

A loving parent would not respect the freewill choice of a child to ignore the warnings and just sit in the middle of a street while a driven by a drunk barrels toward them.   A loving parent would realistically and rationally conclude that sometimes forcing the loved one against their will is the most loving thing one can do.  Or if you wish to trifle, the parent who has ability and opportunity to take a gun away from a teen daughter intent on killing herself, could only be loving to forcefully wrench the gun out of her grip...not simply stand there and, like God, remind the girl that she is responsible for own choices.

A loving God would reward those of us who have decided to choose Him while dealing justly with those of us who have decided to choose against Him.

And your 5-Point Calvinist brothers and sisters in Christ, who are no less spiritually alive than you, explain that those who reject the gospel are obeying God's secret will that they so reject...which throws your "dealing justly" crap into a tail-spin:  What's just about condemning a sinner for doing what God wanted her to do?  If God secretly willed that a man rob a store, why does God thereafter condemn the man?  Do we find this rationalization completely disagreeable because we are sinners who don't know the whole truth, or because God's real truths are in our hearts causing us to naturally recoil from such rationalizations?

If the latter, what does that say about those genuinely born again spiritually alive Christian brothers and sisters in Christ?  How could they possibly have degraded their Christian thinking so low that it races past even the thinking of your average unbeliever?  Can they be part of the body of Christ while doing more harm with their theology than the average unbeliever does?

For this reason, Heaven simply cannot be the destination of every human who has ever lived. Heaven is not compulsory, but is instead the destiny of those who love the God who reigns there and have accepted His invitation.

If even murderers of Christians such as Saul (Acts 9) can convert on the basis of an experience on the road to Damascus that YOU say left Saul's/Paul's freewill intact, then God could be giving similarly dramatic experiences to unbelievers who are less angry at the gospel than Saul was, with even better odds that they would convert.

Unfortunately, your God has a lot of ways to convince the sinner to convert, ways that would not violate their freewill, and yet he doesn't do shit.  God has no business complaining about how the world rejects his "offers" (Matthew 23:37) if he knows of ways to more pesuasively convince them consistent with their freewill, but refuses to employ these measures.

Now just tell yourself "God's ways are mysterious" and "this excuse will suffice to get me out of any theological jam, even though I don't accept it when employed by heretics to get them out of a theological jam."  

You know, the same type of mental logjam that helps terrorists feel better about flying planes into buildings.