Does God Love All People the Same Way?

Published Apr 26, 2022
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Andy Naselli

The following is a transcribed Video Q&A, so the text may not read like an edited article would. Scroll to the bottom to view this video in its entirety.

God loves in many different ways. In fact, Don Carson, my mentor, has several books on the love of God - one is called The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God, published by Crossway, and in this book he explains at least five different kinds of love in the Bible. One of them is God's providential love. God loves all people, without exception. When it rains, the rain comes down on the Christian farmer and the non-Christian farmer. There's not some divide where it just rains on one - no, it's all, that's God's providential love.

There's a sense in which there's an intertrinitarian level where God loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. There is a more electing love - God loves His people. There is a covenantal love where God loves his people when they obey Him, in a way that He doesn't love them when they disobey Him.

So these different kinds of love - so when you say God loves all people, yes, in one sense. But God does not love all people, all the time, in the same sense. There are distinctions, and when you blur those distinctions, you flatten how the Bible talks, you take verses out of context, you take one truth and ignore the others, and that's where some significant problems will come.