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Transcript 600A — Does God Love Everybody?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Hello. Good evening, Mr. Camping., My question is, does God love everybody?
HC: The question is, does God love everybody? The Bible teaches that from a creation vantage point God loves the whole world. God sends His benevolent rains and His warm sunshine on the wicked and on the just, on those who are unsaved as well as those who are saved. From the vantage point of God as Creator He loves everyone.
From the vantage point of God as Redeemer, as He thinks about mankind from a redemption vantage point and man's sin, then the whole human race stands under the hatred of God and is under the wrath of God. And the only ones who come to know the love of God in that area are those who become born again believers, those who are chosen by God.
We read in Psalm 5:5. "The foolish shall not stand in Thy sight. Thou hatest all workers of iniquity." Now that's the Bible, you see. We read in Psalm 11:5, "The Lord trieth the righteous, but the wicked and him that loveth violence His soul hateth. Upon the wicked He shall rain snares, fire and brimstone and a horrible tempest. This shall be the portion of their cup." That is the way God speaks about the unsaved.
Now the way we can know the love of God altogether is by responding to the Gospel. And after we've responded to the Gospel and we wonder why we responded to the Gospel, then we discover that it's because God drew us.
CALLER: When He commands us to love our neighbor as ourself, can God command something that He Himself doesn't do? Isn't that agape love, that we should love our neighbors?
HC: The question is, if God hates sin and the sinner, when God's justice is in view, how can it be that He asks us to love our enemies?
First of all, we must remember that sin is not against us. The sin is against God. God created man in His own image, to love Him and to be altogether faithful to Him. And man has rebelled against God; man as it were is shaking his fist at God and is going his own way. The sin is against God. And it is God's holy justice that is being violated, not our justice.
Now we stand as part of the sin problem. We are sinners saved by grace, true. But we are fellow human beings. And we don't know whom God has planned to save. We don't know God's elective decrees at all. And so God simply. says we are to love our enemies. We are to love all of the unsaved. And we leave the justice of God and the wrath of God and the hatred of God to God. That's His department, because the sin is against Him, not against us.
CALLER: Okay. Thank you very much, Mr. Camping