Why can God save the world?
If God who created the world in seven days, can raise the dead, heal the blind, and can die on the cross, and rise from the dead. What prevents Him from redeeming everyone?
Good question.
Many years ago I read a (fictional, or parable of a sort) story about a man who died. He was greeted by an angel who brought him to a great big banquet hall with countless numbers of people gathered around tables, tables covered with every kind of delicious food you can imagine. It was a feast beyond comprehension. And yet, upon a closer look, the man saw that these people were angry, upset, discontent. They were emaciated and starving. How could these people be starving when they are participating in such a tremendous feast? The angel directed the man to look even closer, and the man noticed that the people had been given spoons with extremely long handles, so long that they were impossible to use to feed oneself. So every time someone tried to feed themselves, the food fell and splattered on the table, themselves, and the floor. And so each as they tried to feed themselves was ever more frustrated, ever more bitter and angry, raging at their situation. Cursed to spend eternity unable to feed themselves. The man realized this was hell. The man turned to his angelic tour guide and asked the angel, "If this is hell, what is heaven?"
The angel then took the man to another banquet hall. Identical to the last. The tables contained no less nor more food than the other tables. But here the people gathered were happy, laughing, singing songs, loving and enjoying themselves. The man again looked closer, and he saw that they also had the same spoons with extremely long handles, but instead of feeding themselves, they instead fed their neighbor. And because each fed the other, all were satisfied, happy and sharing in the great feast together. All were full, all were satisfied.
Salvation isn't about our getting our t's crossed and i's dotted. It's not about our having picked the right religion, or our having done all the right things. Salvation is what happens when God invades and starts transforming, healing, and rescuing people and the world. In the end, it's not about good people going to heaven (or people who happen to have chosen the right religion to follow); nor is it about bad people going to hell (or people who happen to have not had the right religion).
As St. Isaac the Syrian speculated, it is probable that in the end heaven and hell are the same "place", what makes the difference is not location, but disposition. As Isaac describes hell as the "scourge of love", as love is impartial--and God loves all impartially. Is that love a source of joy, or is it a source of shame, resentment, bitterness, and remorse? When you have hurt a close friend, and they continue to love you unconditionally, can be a bitter punishment far deeper than anything inflicted.
Forgiveness not only means we are pardoned in Christ, it means that we are freed to a life of a clean conscience before God--for our transgressions are no longer held against us. What happens when someone doesn't want to be forgiven? What happens when someone chooses to dwell, inhabit, their resentment, their guilt? What happens when slowly, but ultimately, a person so thoroughly despises their human personhood, and closes them up in the prison of their own agony? Locked, not by a jailer keeping them in, but by themselves, to keep their Savior out?
It's not about whether God can, or if God is willing. We have the answer to both questions: Yes. God both can, and wills to save--to save all, without condition. Christ died for everyone. Everyone was there at Calvary, every sin, every transgression, every shame, every injury, every guilt--Christ bore it on Calvary. And the Gospel is for everyone.
So why, then, if God wills that all be saved, and Christ is efficient to save all, and it has nothing to do with our ability--our works--to be saved; but is entirely God's work, God's gift, and God's ability in Christ and given freely to all in the Gospel; why then are some, in the end, not saved? The only answer we are left with is that there are those who will, in the end, insist "No", they don't want to live, they don't want love, they don't want humanity, or goodness, or the good creation which God has made. They want something deeper and far more terrible than death, what St. John of Patmos can only describe as a lake of sulfur and fire, a second death. Not annihilation, but worse than that. Existing but never living.
Salvation is by grace alone, through faith; not because it's about winning a theological lottery by having gotten our religion right. But because faith, which is given freely in the Gospel, changes us; through faith God justifies us, through faith the full work and merit of Christ is appropriated to us. Without faith, we remain shut up from God, closed off, dead, and apart from the very Life Himself.
So without faith, says St. Paul, it is impossible to please God--for it is faith that loves the hungry neighbor, it is faith that clothes the naked neighbor.
-CryptoLutheran
