As I argued in my theory of Christian inclusivism, I believe that God must give people the ability to ultimately reject him, and those who do so will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction (a.k.a, annihilation).

However, the only people who will be eternally destroyed are those who continually rejected the Holy Spirit's attempts at drawing them toward putting their faith in God, right to the very end. These people will continue to resist even after Jesus' final judgment of their works has proven that their sins deserve eternal death, and that their good works are not enough to earn salvation.

At that point, nothing else could possibly convince them to repent and believe in Jesus. They will only be fit to be thrown into the lake of fire and suffer the second death (Revelation 20:14-15).

Thus, I prefer to see eternal salvation as opt-out, rather than opt-in.

However, there are two questions that critics might raise about these claims:

1. Why would a loving God allow some people to ultimately reject him if it means that they will be eternally destroyed?
2. Why would anyone choose to reject God's love?

I believe there are plausible answers to both of these questions which will give us insights into the nature of sin, why a good God allows people to sin, why people willingly choose to sin, and ultimately, why some people will still reject God's offer of salvation, even at the final judgment.

The first question will be the subject of this post, and the second question will be answered in my next post.

Why Wouldn't God Prevent People From Ultimately Rejecting Him?

I believe the Bible is quite clear that at least some people will actually experience eternal death (Revelation 20:15, Isaiah 66:24, Matthew 25:41-46, 7:21-23).

God's omnipotence means that nothing happens which God does not ultimately permit to happen. Therefore, it is clear that God must allow people to choose eternal destruction, even though God would have preferred for them to be eternally saved (1 Timothy 2:3-4, 2 Peter 3:9, Ezekiel 18:23).

So I believe that at least some people will choose to freely reject God to the bitter end, even if they face eternal death as a result.

Unfortunately, not everyone is happy with that idea.

For example, Thomas Talbott argues that God's love for people means that God should override people's free will in order to save them, because it is in each person’s best interest to be eternally saved. Talbott says:

When we humans confront the possibility of serious and irreparable harm — that is, harm that no mere human can repair or cancel out at some future time — we feel justified in interfering with someone's freedom to inflict such harm. We feel justified, first of all, in preventing one person from harming another irreparably; a loving father may thus report his own son to the police in an effort to prevent the son from committing murder. And we may feel justified, secondly, in preventing our loved ones from harming themselves irreparably as well; a loving father may thus physically overpower his teenage daughter in an effort to prevent her from committing suicide.1

Similarly, then, Talbott claims:

Just as loving parents are prepared to restrict the freedom of children they love, so a loving God would restrict the freedom of the children he loves, at least in the cases of truly irreparable harm.2

Eternal destruction in hell would certainly be an instance of irreparable harm. All other evils that people suffer in this life are temporary, and any harm they cause can be repaired (and/or compensated for) by God, either in this life, or the next.3

For example, God promises that in the New Heaven and New Earth, he will wipe away all tears, thus somehow compensating or comforting all eternally-saved people for our sufferings in this life (Revelation 21:4). The only people whose tears will not be wiped away are those people who are not saved. They will suffer an eternal, permanent, and irreparable loss.

So in Talbott's opinion, a loving God should prevent people from experiencing such a loss, even if it means that God has to override a person's free will to reject God.

As persuasive as this argument might appear, it is possible to refute Talbott's claims about what he thinks a loving God should do. Jerry Walls, for example, takes issue with Talbott's analogy, and says that there is a difference between a loving father overriding a daughter's ability to commit suicide, and God overriding a sinner's choice to be damned.

Walls argues that in the case where a father prevents a daughter from committing suicide, it is because the choice to attempt suicide usually occurs when an individual is not thinking clearly because they are in the grip of strong emotions. Afterward, the person who was saved is typically glad they are still alive.4

However, Walls says that if someone continually chooses evil, then they are not just under the influence of a temporary emotion or situation. Walls' commitment to libertarian freedom means that if he were convinced that some individuals truly wanted to end their lives, then he would not try to stop them. He argues that a strong commitment to libertarian freedom is a key component of justifying the traditional Christian doctrine of hell.5

Why this is so will be explained in the next section.

God's Goodness Requires Human Free Will

Without libertarian (i.e., non-compatibilistic) free will, there are terrible implications for God's character. These are illustrated in a disturbing analogy by Thomas McCall:

Imagine a parent who is able to control each and every action of his children, and furthermore, is able to do so by controlling their thoughts and inclinations. He is thus able to determine each and all actions taken by those children. He is also able to guarantee that they desire to do everything that they do, and this is exactly what he does.

He puts them in a special playroom that contains not only toys but also gasoline and matches, and then gives them explicit instructions (with severe warnings) to avoid touching the gasoline and matches. Stepping out of sight, he determines that the children indeed begin to play with the matches. When the playroom is ablaze and the situation desperate, he rushes in to save them (well, some of them). He breaks through the wall, grabs three of the seven children, and carries them to safety. When the rescued children calm down, they ask about their four siblings. They want to know about the others trapped inside, awaiting their inevitable fate. More importantly, they want to know if he can do something to rescue them as well.

When they ask about the situation, their father tells them that this tragic occurrence had been determined by him, and indeed, that it was a smashing success—it had worked out in exact accordance with his plan. He then reminds them of his instructions and warnings, and he reminds them further that they willingly violated his commands. They should be grateful for their rescue, and they should understand that the others got what they deserved. When they begin to sob, he weeps with them; he tells them that he too has compassion on the doomed children (indeed, the compassion of the children for their siblings only dimly reflects his own).

The children are puzzled by this, and one wants to know why such a compassionate father does not rescue the others (when it is clearly within his power to do so). His answer is this: this has happened so that everyone could see how smart he is (for being able to know how to do all this), how powerful he is (for being able to control everything and then effectively rescue them), how merciful he is (for rescuing the children who broke his rules), and how just he is (for leaving the others to their fate in the burning playroom.) And, he says 'This is the righteous thing for me to do, because it allows me to look as good as I should look".6

In this story, the supposedly 'loving' father is ultimately responsible for three negative things:

1. Putting the matches and gasoline in the children's playroom.
2. Determining that the children will start a fire with the matches.
3. Only deciding to rescue some of the children, rather than all of the children.

Similarly, if humans did not have libertarian free will, then God would be to blame for:

1. Creating a world where sin is a possibility.
2. Determining that people would actually sin.
3. Choosing to eternally save only some people from facing eternal destruction in hell for their sins.

If you have read my previous blog posts, you will recognize that these three points are actually exactly what Calvinism teaches about God.

Now, some Calvinists would object to this analogy, but after studying Jonathan Edwards's theology of predestination for my PhD dissertation, I would agree that McCall's analogy is an accurate portrayal of how Calvinism depicts God.7

In Edwards' Calvinistic view of predestination, God actually wants most people to be condemned to hell, so that God can be maximally glorified to the small number of people that God chose to eternally save. If too many people were saved, Edwards seems to think that it would somehow actually make God appear less glorious, and cause the people who are chosen to be eternally saved to be less happy.

This conclusion is rather bizarre, and it causes a number of contradictions even within Edwards' own theology, as I argue in my dissertation.

Since Edwards is called the "the most formidable defender of Calvinism in the history of North America",8 I believe his inability to create a system of theology that is both logically and biblically consistent that can justify his theory of predestination is clear evidence that Calvinism is not true.

For example, at the most basic level, predestination is simply not consistent with how the Bible is extremely clear that God truly does want to save everyone (1 Timothy 2:3-4, 2 Peter 3:9, Ezekiel 18:23).

Since God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19, Titus 1:2, Hebrews 6:18), and all of Scripture was inspired by the Holy Spirit (2 Timothy 3:16), we know that every word in the Bible is true.

The Bible is also what teaches us that God is fully good, and completely all-powerful and all-knowing.

Therefore, we can confidently say that:

1. If it were only up to God, because God wants everyone to be saved, and because God's omnipotence means that no one else can thwart God's desires, then in this case, everyone would be saved.
2. The Bible is clear that not everyone will be eternally saved (Revelation 20:15, Isaiah 66:24, Matthew 25:41-46, 7:21-23).

Thus, the only answer to why some people will not ultimately be saved is to say that it is because these people used their own free will to reject God's offer of eternal salvation.

God would not allow another person's misuse of his or her free will (or the influence of Satan or demons) to eternally condemn someone who otherwise might have heard the gospel and freely chosen to be saved. It must be up to each individual — and each individual alone — to make the final decision about whether he or she wants to be eternally saved, or not.

Thus, as I argue in my theory of Christian inclusivism, each person must be given their own personal, free choice in the matter of their eternal salvation. This is regardless of how old they were when they died, or where they lived during their lives, what religion they followed, and even whether they heard the gospel or not.

This is the only explanation for why some individuals will not be eternally saved which is compatible with God's perfect goodness and his desire to truly save everyone, despite how not everyone will end up being eternally saved.

However, it might seem that God would still be guilty of:

1. Creating a world where sin is a possibility.
2. Allowing people to misuse their free will to sin.

If God is good, and God wants everyone to be saved, then why would he allow people to sin in the first place, which then opened up the possibility that some people would be eternally destroyed? Don't wise parents prevent their children from hurting themselves, rather than just rescuing the child after the child has already gotten themselves into trouble?

Preventing people from sinning would also saved Jesus from the hassle of having to become a human and die on the cross for everyone's sins. Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane is evidence that he clearly did not want to go to the cross unless it was an absolutely necessary part of God's plan to save sinners (Matthew 26:38-39, Mark 14:34-36).

So why did God put himself through that, and also subject everyone else in history to the misery and suffering that that results from sin and from God's punishment of sin (Genesis 3:16-19, James 1:13-15, Romans 1:28-32)?

Why God Allows People To Sin

This question takes us all the way back to the very first two people ever created: Adam and Eve. God put them in the Garden of Eden which was a paradise, and God told them they could enjoy eating fruit from all the trees that God had planted there. There were also two other trees: the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

God gave Adam and Eve only one rule: do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If they did, God warned that they would die (Genesis 2:15-17).

It seems like a simple rule, right? How hard can it be to avoid eating fruit from one very specific tree?

But even though Adam and Eve did not yet have a sinful nature, and although they knew God's warning, they still sinned when they chose to eat fruit from the forbidden tree (Genesis 3:1-6).

For thousands of years, Christians and skeptics alike have wondered about this event. What went wrong? Why did Adam and Eve make such a bad decision? Why didn't God stop them? Or at least, why didn't God make them smart enough to not sin? Why did God have to put that tree there, anyway? Did God actually want them to sin? Is it all God's fault?

In the 17th century, an author named Pierre Bayle wrestled with these questions, and he argued that all of the Christian explanations are unsatisfactory.9 I will briefly examine these explanations and summarize Bayle's objections to them, as we work our way toward what I think is the most plausible answer to the question of why God allows people to reject him and be eternally destroyed.

The Calvinist Answer

Christians who identify as Calvinists appear to have a straightforward answer to why God allowed Adam and Eve to sin. Their case can be summarized by referring to only two major Bible verses:

• And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28).
• For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us (Romans 8:18).

For example, Jonathan Edwards repeatedly argued that redeeming humanity from sin would bring more glory to God and more happiness to the small fraction of humanity who will be eternally saved than if Adam and Eve had never sinned.10 However, Edwards struggled when he tried to explain how sin could happen in a way that doesn't imply that God is ultimately to blame for it.11

In fact, Edwards did at one point outright admit that God is the 'author of sin',

if, by "the author of sin," is meant the permitter, or not a hinderer of sin; and at the same time, a disposer of the state of events, in such a manner, for wise, holy and most excellent ends and purposes, that sin, if it be permitted or not hindered, will most certainly and infallibly follow; I say, if this be all that is meant, by being the author of sin, I don't deny that God is the author of sin.12

Of course, I believe that Edwards is inconsistent to even use the term 'permit', because in Edwards' deterministic worldview, God controls everything that happens,13 exactly like the father who determines that his children will 'freely' play with matches in McCall's analogy. For God to truly 'permit' people to do something without God being the ultimate cause of it, people would need libertarian free will. Edwards, though, argued that libertarian free will could not exist.14

However, let's ignore that for now, and give Edwards the benefit of the doubt when he says that God only 'permits' sin, for the purpose of maximizing God's glory and the ultimate happiness of everyone who is finally saved.

Although he lived before Edwards did, Bayle had some apt criticisms of this typical Calvinist explanation for why God allows people to sin:

If you say that God has permitted sin in order to manifest his wisdom, which shines forth more in the midst of the disorders that man's wickedness produces every day than it would in a state of innocence, you will be answered that this is to compare God either to a father who allows his children to break their legs so that he can show everyone his great skill in mending their broken bones, or to a king who allows seditions and disorders to develop through his kingdom so that he can gain glory by overcoming them. The conduct of this father and this monarch is so contrary to the clear and distinct ideas by which we judge goodness and wisdom and in general all the duties of a father and a king, that our reason cannot conceive how God could act in this way.15

So Bayle and I both agree that Calvinism is not the best explanation for why God would allow people to sin, even though the verses cited at the start of this section are still very much true, and are a great encouragement for Christians when we experience suffering.

However, the main theological alternatives to Calvinism also have problems when it comes to answering Bayle's question.

The Arminian Answer

The major theological alternative to Calvinism is called Arminianism, named after the theologian Jacob/James Arminius. In the 16th century, Arminius became famous for rejecting Calvinism and emphasizing that individuals' own genuinely-free will is the ultimate reason these people will not be eternally saved.

Arminians argue that free will is why Satan and a third of the angels rebelled against God (Revelation 12:3-4). Adam and Eve's free will was also the cause of the first sin, and the sinful nature everyone inherited from them is what now causes each person to be a natural-born sinner (Romans 5:12-14).

As a result, God was not directly involved with any of this sin. God simply chose to let people and fallen angels act in ways that God did not approve of.

This argument that God is still good and loving despite the existence of evil and sin is known more broadly in theology as the 'free will defence'. However, it is not flawless. As Bayle said,

Those who say that God permitted sin because he could not have prevented it without destroying the free will that he had given to man, and which was the best present he made to him, expose themselves greatly. The reason they give is lovely. It has a je ne sais quoi, an undefinable something, that is dazzling. It has a grandeur. But in the end, it can be opposed by arguments more easily understood by all men, and based more on common sense and the ideas of order.16

The main problem with Arminianism when it comes to the question of sin and God's goodness is due to Arminianism's reliance on the idea of God's perfect foreknowledge.

Specifically, if God foreknew that Adam and Eve would freely choose to sin, thus, making both themselves and all of their descendants become sinners who are worthy of eternal death, then why didn't God stop Adam and Eve from doing this?

Bayle argued that if God foreknew how Adam and Eve would misuse their free will to sin, but God allowed them to sin anyway, then God is like a mother who allowed her daughter to go to a party where the mother knew for sure that the daughter would lose her virginity. In this case, Bayle says the mother clearly doesn't love either her daughter nor the virtue of chastity.17

So Bayle is implying that because God didn't stop Adam and Eve from sinning when God definitely knew that they would, and God foreknew all the negative effects that sin would cause in the world throughout all history, it shows that God did not truly love Adam and Eve (or their descendants), and God doesn't truly love holiness, either.

However, there is a convincing response to this objection. But before getting there, we must briefly address another flaw with the Arminian answer to this question.

The problem comes from how the traditional Arminian view of God's foreknowledge means that God perfectly knew from all eternity past that certain individuals he planned to create would definitely use their free will to ultimately reject him.

If God did have this foreknowledge, then simply by going ahead and creating these people, God is effectively predestining them to eternal destruction. For more on this line of reasoning, see my post where I critique William Lane Craig's theory of predestination that appeals to God's middle knowledge.

So Arminianism does not actually solve the problem of predestination. It is also open to Bayle's critique that it seems that God is not perfectly good or loving, because of how God allowed Adam and Eve to freely choose to sin when he perfectly foreknew that they would do so.

But what if God doesn't have perfect foreknowledge of what people will do? Would this lack of foreknowledge mean that God is less blameworthy for allowing Adam and Eve to sin? This brings us to the third (and much less common) Christian answer to this question.

The Open Theist Answer

Open theists say that while God is still omnipotent and omniscient, not even God can know for sure what someone will freely choose to do until the person does it. This means that while God can foreknow everything that does not depend on someone's free will, it is philosophically impossible for anyone—even God— to perfectly foreknow what someone with libertarian free will freely do.18

Therefore, when God made Adam and Eve, he knew that because he created them with free will, there was a chance that they might use it to sin. Maybe even a very high chance. But because God did not foreknow their choice, it was not guaranteed that they would sin. In the open theist perspective, God genuinely did not know for sure what Adam and Eve would choose to do if they were tempted.

Yet Bayle argued that the open theist option isn't any more convincing. Even if God didn't perfectly foreknow that Adam and Eve would sin, but God still allowed them to sin, then Bayle says the first sin is still God's fault, because God's omniscience means that God knew exactly what Adam and Eve were doing and thinking as they were being tempted to sin.

In this case, it would be like a mother who follows her daughter to the questionable party, and peeks through a window where she sees her daughter being cornered by a would-be-lover. Bayle said that in this situation, the mother should barge into the party and prevent the daughter from giving in to her potential lover, or again, the mother doesn't love either her daughter nor the virtue of chastity.19

So Bayle believed that God should have intervened and prevented Adam and Eve from sinning, even if it came down to God having to physically restrain them.20

Yet if God did that, then obviously, Adam and Eve would not have had the freedom to either obey or disobey God. If God would have intervened and always prevented them from sinning, then Adam and Eve would not actually have had free will. Regardless of what they wanted to do, God's intervention would have prevented them from doing anything different than what God wanted them to do.

Thus, theologians who support the idea of libertarian free will accept that God cannot give people free will while preventing them from using it in ways that God does not desire.21 As Richard Rice puts it:

God must respect the consequences to which our actions lead. For actions to have real integrity, they must have real results. After all, freedom is more than making a decision, it also involves making a difference.22

Furthermore, if God did intervene in some way to stop Adam and Eve from sinning, then I believe that Adam and Eve would have been able to argue that God did not give them a truly fair test.

For example, in Bayle's analogy, if the mother had burst in and dragged her daughter out from the party when she believed her daughter was about to give in to her lover, the daughter could always complain that if the mother had waited just one more second, the daughter would have declined her lover's suggestions and left the party of her own free will.

Similarly, even a fraction of a second before Adam and Eve actually sinned, there was still a chance they could have decided not to sin. For God to let them make a truly free choice, God had to let them go all the way to the point of actually sinning if they so chose, even though such a choice would lead to great misery and eternal death for both them and all their biological descendants.

So then, we might ask, why did God even bother giving Adam and Eve free will, if God knew (or if God even suspected) that it might lead to sin, a world full of suffering, and that in the end, many people might freely choose to reject God and be eternally destroyed?

Why Human Free Will Is Important to God

Let us now answer Bayle's objection that a God who allowed Adam and Eve to sin is not a perfectly good or loving God.

We must remember that it was God's own idea to put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. If God did not want it to be possible for Adam and Eve to sin, he could have simply avoided creating that tree. They could happily have eaten fruit from all the other trees that God also created, and gone on to have kids, and humanity could have lived in the garden forever.

However, by putting the tree in the garden, and giving the rule to Adam and Eve to not eat from it, God opened up the possibility that Adam and Eve might choose to disobey him and sin. Without the tree and God's one rule, Adam and Eve would have had no way to make a choice, and thus no free will to obey or disobey God.

But why is God so hung up on obedience and disobedience? And why did he care so much if Adam and Eve disobeyed him?

I think our confusion comes because for most humans, disobeying an instruction is not inherently the same as choosing to reject them as a person. In some cases it might be true, but it is not true by default. For example, just because we ignore our parents' instructions to not eat the cookies in the cookie jar does not mean that we no longer love our parents, or that we don't want them to be our parents anymore.

But for God, it's different. Because God inherently is love (1 John 4:8, 4:16), all of God's commandments, laws, and rules are expressions of God's perfect love. This is why all of God's commandments are summarized as loving God and loving others (Matthew 22:37-40, Romans 13:8-10).

Thus, to choose to disobey God is the same as choosing to act in an unloving way. Yet since God is love, when we choose to act in an unloving way, it is choosing to reject God himself, since God is Love.

Furthermore, we can see that what Adam and Eve were doing when they sinned was not just the equivalent of a child eating a cookie from the jar when the parent had told them it was forbidden. When the serpent (i.e., Satan—Revelation 12:9) tempted them to eat the forbidden fruit, he suggested to them that if they did so, they would be like God, and they would know good and evil for themselves (Genesis 3:5).

By acting on Satan's suggestion that if they sinned they would become like God, which would make them able to make their own rules about what is right and wrong, Adam and Eve revealed that in their hearts, they wanted to be their own gods, rather than having God be their god.

Therefore, in at least two different ways, Adam and Eve rejected God when they sinned.

By rejecting God, who is Love, and who is also the source of all existence and goodness (James 1:17), Adam and Eve chose the opposite of God, which is misery and death (Genesis 2:16-17, James 1:14-16, Romans 1:28-32). Thus, sin is always contrary to human happiness and wellbeing.

This basic test regarding the forbidden fruit, then, was the way that God offered Adam and Eve the choice between loving/obeying God and disobeying/rejecting God. Free will, after all, requires that we have at least one choice with at least two options to choose between.

Therefore, God could not override or take away Adam and Eve's free will or their ability to reject him without also making it impossible for them to truly love God.

Likewise, if God created people in order to love them, and for them to love him in return, there was no other way for God to achieve this goal without giving humanity free will.

Examples of How Free Will is Necessary For Love

To illustrate this fact, let us return to an analogy I have used in an earlier post:

Let's imagine that a scientist were able to covertly insert a microchip into the brain of a man who she had a crush on, which allowed the scientist to make the man act in a loving way towards the scientist. Even if the microchip made the man feel like he was voluntarily loving the scientist, he would not actually be doing so, for he is fully controlled by the scientist. In effect, the scientist would simply be loving herself by manipulating the man like a puppet, and the man's love for the scientist would not be genuine.23

This example shows our innate understanding that it is only if someone has a truly free choice about whether or not to love someone that his or her love becomes genuinely valuable and meaningful to the person whom he or she loves.

Critics might respond that this claim is false. They may argue that parents automatically love their children, and children automatically love their parents. God is like humanity's parent because he created us. Parents do not feel less loved by their children just because their child did not freely choose to be born to their parents. So likewise, critics say, our love for God can still be valuable to God even if we never make a free choice to love God.

In response, I would say that such a critic has made several errors in this argument.

First of all, people are only reborn as "children of God" once we put our faith in Jesus as our Savior and the Holy Spirit comes to live in our hearts (John 1:12, 3:3-8, 3:16-18, Romans 8:15-17). By definition, then, all of God's children have freely responded to God's love that he showed to us through Christ (1 John 5:1). Universalists are not correct when they claim that everyone who has ever been created by God is automatically a child of God.

Furthermore, in this fallen world, some parents do not always love their children, and even worse, some parents actually do horrible things to their children.

Also, even though a child who has been well-loved by a parent will generally naturally respond with love for that parent, many loving parents know the sad reality that once their child grows up, their child's love for them is not guaranteed to continue.

In this way, then, the parent-child analogy is actually better for helping us understand why God might choose to create people who are not guaranteed to love him in return. Ideally, out of the union of their love, a husband and wife choose to create another person who they commit loving and caring for. They hope that their love will be returned, but they accept the risk that they may be heartbroken if their child grows up to reject them.

This is the same sort of risk that God took when he chose to create other beings with free will, in order to make it possible for God to participate in more loving relationships than just his own inner-Triune relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the reason why I believe God created the world.

God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit means that God is fundamentally a three-way loving relationship within himself, and so Love is what God actually is, and Love is what God loves most.24 But again, in order for the love expressed by his created people to be the most valuable to God, that love must be freely given by his people. This is why God created us with free will, even though there was a risk that people would use our free will to reject God by sinning.

Bayle could object, though, that in the New Heaven and New Earth, all eternally-saved people will truly love God, although they will no longer have the freedom to reject God. So this fact might prove that freedom to reject love is not necessary in order for love to be valuable to God.25

In response, we can appeal to the example of human marriage, which is the best analogy that the Bible uses to illustrate the love between God and God's people (Ephesians 5:22-33).

If a marriage between two people is based on love, it must be consensual, not forced.26 Typically, a man freely proposes to a woman who he loves and desires to marry, and the woman then accepts or declines the man's offer. The man is prepared for both possibilities, and he knows the heartbreak that her rejection might cause him to feel, and how a rejection would likely be the end of his romantic relationship with the woman.

But if the woman freely accepts the man's proposal, they go on to exchange vows to love one another and to be loyal to one another for the rest of their lives. By doing this, they have freely given up the freedom to love or not love one another, and also given up the freedom to romantically interact with other people. In exchange, the married couple enjoy a higher sort of freedom to love one another in ways that God has reserved to be experienced only within the committed relationship of marriage.27

So likewise, in the New Heaven and New Earth, people who have freely accepted Jesus as our Savior will no longer need (or even want) the freedom to sin or reject God. We will be as perfect and sinless as Jesus himself is (1 John 3:2). We will then be truly free to eternally experience the fullness of the love that God has for us, which we only experience a tiny foretaste of in this life.

Thus, human free will to sin or not sin is not something that God values in itself. Yet human free will is absolutely necessary in order for God to gain what he wants most: an eternity of mutually-loving and freely-chosen relationships with his people.

That meant that in some sense, God had to give humanity free will, if God wanted to enable the possibility of having eternally-loving relationships with some of his created people.

It also meant that God knew there would be the possibility that some people would reject him. There was no way to avoid this potential outcome if God also wanted the possibility of some people freely choosing to love him.

This is why from all eternity past, God had already decided that if humanity did sin, God would send his Son into the world to die for sinners, so that everyone can have their sins forgiven while also upholding God's perfect justice (which is an aspect of God's perfect love). Thus, from God's perspective, Jesus is the perfect sacrificial lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8, KJV) in order to atone for all of humanity's sins (1 John 2:2).

Anyone who believes in Jesus as our personal Savior (John 3:16) receives God's forgiveness for our sins that Jesus purchased for us. The moment we believe this, the Holy Spirit indwells and seals us as a guarantee of our eternal future with God (Ephesians 1:13-14).

Now, everyone effectively gets to make the same ultimate choice as Adam and Eve did, as to whether we will freely choose to love God and have eternal life with God, or reject God and be eternally destroyed.

This ultimate choice can be made in this life by those who are fortunate enough to hear and believe the gospel. If you would like to learn more about this, see my post about how you can have eternal life for free.

For everyone else who never heard the gospel, I am convinced that their ultimate choice will happen at the final judgment. Then, God's judgment of their lives will show them that they are sinners who are worthy of eternal destruction, and whose good works are not enough to earn heaven.

But God still loves them and wants to forgive them and be with them forever, so I am convinced he will present the gospel to them and give them one final opportunity to believe in Jesus and be eternally saved. For more on this idea, see my theory of Christian inclusivism.

Conclusion

Thus, to achieve God's purpose of enabling the possibility of participating in eternally-loving relationships with his created people, God must give each individual the choice as to whether to believe in Jesus and be saved, or reject God and suffer eternal destruction.

God cannot override anyone's free choice, but must allow them to follow through and actually reject him, even if the consequences are as severe as eternal destruction.

This is true even though such rejection and the eternal destruction of these individuals saddens God, and also saddens others who loved the individual during their earthly lives.28 But being emotionally hurt and rejected is an unavoidable possibility when we love another person who has free will.

Therefore even if I were somehow given the power to cause everyone I love to believe in Jesus and be eternally saved by overriding their free will, I wouldn't want to. Even if I knew that otherwise, they would all reject God and face eternal death. Because I know that if their love for God is not freely chosen, it would not be valuable or meaningful to God. I would also have turned them from real people with free will into mere objects that I could manipulate to make myself happy, which does not respect how God created them to be.

For the same reason, God will not allow anyone else or anything to interfere with a person's ability to make this final, free choice to love God or reject him, even if the outcome is not what God had hoped it would be.

This is the answer that I give to those like Talbott who argue that God should not allow anyone to reject him. I'm not alone in this argument, as many other theologians have argued likewise.29

However, someone might raise the second objection which was listed at the start of this post: if God can't outright prevent people from sinning, or completely eliminate the possibility that people might choose to sin, then it seems that God should at least have made people more intelligent or more reasonable, so that they would be less likely to misuse their free will to sin.30

Furthermore, once anyone becomes aware of God's amazing offer of eternal life in a new universe that will be better than anything we can currently imagine (1 Corinthians 2:9, Psalm 16:11), and that the only alternative is eternal destruction, why would anyone still freely choose to reject God?

These questions will be addressed in my next post.

Footnotes:

• 1. Thomas B. Talbott, "Universal Reconciliation and the Inclusive Nature of Election," in Perspectives On Election: 5 Views, ed. Chad Owen Brand (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 256.
• 2. Thomas B. Talbott, "Universal Reconciliation and the Inclusive Nature of Election," in Perspectives On Election: 5 Views, ed. Chad Owen Brand (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 256.
• 3. Thomas B. Talbott, "Universal Reconciliation and the Inclusive Nature of Election," in Perspectives On Election: 5 Views, ed. Chad Owen Brand (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 256.
• 4. Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 135.
• 5. "My assumption, however, that a person should ultimately have the right, if he so chooses, to do himself irreparable harm obviously involves a strong commitment to the value of libertarian freedom. This value judgement is surely one of the main pillars of the orthodox Christian doctrine of hell, and indeed, I think the doctrine would topple without it." Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 136.
• 6. Jerry L. Walls, Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What is Wrong with Calvinism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 46-47, citing Thomas H. McCall, "We Believe in God's Sovereign Goodness: A Rejoinder to John Piper," Trinity Journal 29.2 (2008), 241-242.
• 7. Jerry L. Walls, Does God Love Everyone? The Heart of What is Wrong with Calvinism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 47.
• 8. Mark A. Noll, "Edwards, Jonathan," in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, ed. Alister E. McGrath et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 145.
• 9. Pierre Bayle, "Paulicians" in The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, Second edition, trans. P. Desmaizeaux (London: J.J. and P. Knapton et al., 1734-1738), 175.
• 10. Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin, WJE 3: 259–260, 336; Edwards, "Miscellanies," no. 156 in WJE 13: 304; Edwards, "Miscellanies," no. 348 in WJE 13: 419–420; Edwards, "End of Creation," in WJE 8: 509; Edwards, Freedom of the Will, WJE 1: 407–408.
• 11. See my dissertation, Janelle L. Zeeb, "An Examination of Jonathan Edwards’ Theological Method Concerning the Problem of Reprobation", PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto and Wycliffe College, 2022, section 3.4.4. Many commentators agree that Edwards' explanation of original sin is inconsistent, including Clyde Holbrook, Samuel Storms, John Gerstner, Sam Logan Jr., and others (John J. Bombaro, Jonathan Edwards’s Vision of Reality: The Relationship of God to the World, Redemption History, and the Reprobate (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 210, referring to John Kearney, "Jonathan Edwards' Account of Adam’s First Sin," Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 15, no. 2 [Autumn 1997]: 127–141).
• 12. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Ramsey (Jonathan Edwards Center: Yale University, 2008), 399.
• 13. However, given Edwards’ philosophical occasionalism, the distinction between God's causation of an event and God's permission of an event is very small or even nonexistent. Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards and the Metaphysics of Sin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 64; Oliver D. Crisp, Jonathan Edwards Among the Theologians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 177.
• 14. See my dissertation, Janelle L. Zeeb, "An Examination of Jonathan Edwards’ Theological Method Concerning the Problem of Reprobation", PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto and Wycliffe College, 2022, section 2.2.1.
• 15. Pierre Bayle, "Paulicians" in The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, Second edition, trans. P. Desmaizeaux (London: J.J. and P. Knapton et al., 1734-1738), 175-176.
• 16. Pierre Bayle, "Paulicians" in The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, Second edition, trans. P. Desmaizeaux (London: J.J. and P. Knapton et al., 1734-1738), 177.
• 17. Pierre Bayle, "Paulicians" in The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, Second edition, trans. P. Desmaizeaux (London: J.J. and P. Knapton et al., 1734-1738), 177-178.
• 18. See my Master of Theological Studies thesis, Janelle Louise Zeeb, "An Analysis of Clark Pinnock's Open Theism as a Potential Solution to Theodicy", MTS Thesis, Tyndale Seminary, 2015, 44-46.
• 19. Pierre Bayle, "Paulicians" in The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, Second edition, trans. P. Desmaizeaux (London: J.J. and P. Knapton et al., 1734-1738), 181.
• 20. Pierre Bayle, "Paulicians" in The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, Second edition, trans. P. Desmaizeaux (London: J.J. and P. Knapton et al., 1734-1738), 189-191.
• 21. Clark Pinnock, "Systematic Theology," in The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 115; Millard J. Erickson, What Does God Know and When Does He Know It?: The Current Controversy over Divine Foreknowledge (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), 194-195.
• 22. Richard Rice, Suffering and the Search for Meaning: Contemporary Responses to the Problem of Pain (Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2014), 100.
• 23. Gregory A. Boyd, "God Limits His Control," in Four Views on Divine Providence, eds. Stanley N.Gundry and Dennis W. Jowers (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 188-189.
• 24. Jonathan Edwards, "Discourse on the Trinity," in WJE 21: 113–114; Jonathan Edwards, "End of Creation," in WJE 8: 432-433, 437, 441–442, 455-456. See also WJE 8: 527–531.
• 25. D. Antony Larivière and Thomas M. Lennon, "Bayle on the Moral Problem of Evil," in The Problem of Evil in Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Michael John Latzer and Elmar J. Kremer (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001), 105.
• 26. Norman Geisler, "God Knows All Things," in Predestination & Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty & Human Freedom (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1986), 69.
• 27. Norman Geisler, If God Why Evil? A New Way to Think About The Question (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2011), 62-63.
• 28. Contra Talbott's assertion that if God truly loves someone, God must also love the other people that that person loves, and do what is best for them. His implication seems to be that if God loves Christians, then God should also eternally save all the people that Christians love, regardless of whether these other people themselves have freely chosen to love God or not, so that Christians will not be sad to eternally lose their loved ones. Thomas B. Talbott, "Universal Reconciliation and the Inclusive Nature of Election," in Perspectives On Election: 5 Views, ed. Chad Owen Brand (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 215-218.
• 29. C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity," in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 48; Norman L. Geisler, "God Knows All Things" in Predestination & Free Will:Four Views of Divine Sovereignty & Human Freedom, ed. David Basinger and Randall Basinger (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1986), 69; Gregory A. Boyd, "God Limits His Control" in Four Views on Divine Providence, ed. Stanley N. Gundry and Dennis W. Jowers (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), 188–189; Gregory A. Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), 381; Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God's Openness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 41–47; F. Leroy Forlines, Classical Arminianism: A Theology of Salvation, ed. J. Matthew Pinson (Nashville, TN: Randall House, 2011), 48–50; Fred Berthold, God, Evil, and Human Learning: A Critique and Revision of the Free Will Defense in Theodicy (Albany: State University of New York, 2004), 65–68.
• 30. Pierre Bayle, "Paulicians" in The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, Second edition, trans. P. Desmaizeaux (London: J.J. and P. Knapton et al., 1734-1738), 178-179.