Some of where I’m coming from for this post is here. If you commented on that post, I tagged you.  If you’d prefer not to be tagged in future on this topic, please say so.   

There are only four out of over fifty verses on the love of God that could challenge this view.  But I think they can all be dealt with.

In order of difficulty, easiest first: “But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us…” (Titus 3:4-5a)  So I thought this verse presented possible difficulty because of the love “for mankind” part, only to find that pretty much only the NASB even sticks the words “for mankind” in there, because actually “love for mankind” is one Greek word for which other translations just say love.  For good reason – the actually word is philanthropia, it only occurs twice in the New Testament, never in the Septuagint, and it is the weakest of the words for love possible – just a general, affable benevolence.  In other words, this verse doesn’t really have much to do with what the Bible as a whole says about the love of God.

1 John 4:8b – “God is love.”  Just because the essence of love is contained in the character of God does not mean that His love applies to every individual.  After all, Hebrews 12:29 says that “our God is a consuming fire,” but He does not apply His wrath to those who are saved; otherwise, we would all be going to hell whether we believe in Jesus Christ or not.  And John’s immediate application of the fact that God is love is not to love everyone, but to love other believers, a point about which he is very strong.  So this verse doesn’t prove anything.

John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”  Now what I’m about to say is not semantical gymnastics intended to get out of the implications of “world”, but rather a framework to which my eyes were opened in my Ephesians class which I’m applying to this verse because it makes more sense of it in the context.  History is about God making Jesus Christ the hero.  The Fall of man created a problem – the curse indicates that it is a worldwide problem.  Because of their dominion over the earth, it’s a human problem that needs a human solution.  To get a human/man (in Hebrew, Adam), God focused on a nation: Israel, which was given promises of a perfect and redeemed world.  But the one problem is that if Messiah/Adam belongs to Israel, the solution to the Fall only redeems the one nation from its effects.  God brings in the multiracial church because you need a human-wide solution to the problem.  This human-wide solution, by nature of man’s dominion, becomes a world-wide solution (Romans 8).  The church is the beginning of God’s new creation: a human-wide solution that, when they come to glory, redeems the world.  And because all of this comes about by, through, and in Christ, God does it all to make Jesus Christ glorious.  From that framework, “world” (in Greek, kosmos: order, world, universe, adorning) does not mean every individual in the world; rather, it is creation/new creation language dealing with the plan of God.  This idea is confirmed by the next verses, which say that the Son was not sent to condemn the world but to save the world, though said Son says Himself that “he who does not believe is condemned already.”  So He’s condemning individuals while saving the world?  Unless you have some really interesting word gymnastics to do, it doesn’t make sense for “world” two verses earlier to mean every individual in the world.

This next verse is the one that almost convinced me my last post was wrong, and it’s probably one you’ve never heard of:  Deuteronomy 10:18: “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.”  Here’s a class of people who God loves that is not Israel or people in Christ.  But it’s still that same active love that does something on behalf of the one loved, not a gooey feeling.  So I had to ask, “who are sojourners?”  A simple word search shows that when God is talking to Israel, as He is in Deuteronomy, sojourners are almost always foreigners who have joined themselves to Israel – they reside in Israel because they worship the true God and participate as far as a non-Jew is able in the life of the nation.  So basically, this is an extension of God’s love for Israel, because these sojourners are as incorporated into Israel as they can get.  It doesn’t prove that God loves everybody.

Can you provide any Biblical evidence that God loves every person?