As I argued in my theory of Christian inclusivism, I believe that God must give people the ability to ultimately reject him. Those who do so will be thrown into the lake of fire and suffer the punishment of eternal destruction (i.e., annihilation).

In my previous post, I answered the first of two main questions that critics might raise against this idea. There, I argued in more depth that God must allow people to reject him, so that for those who do accept Jesus as their Savior, their love for God would be genuine.

This is why God had to allow Adam and Eve the possibility of sinning, even if God knew their sin would lead to all the suffering that the world has experienced since then.

Similarly, I argue that in the end, God will ensure that every single person will be given a fair and free choice about whether to accept Jesus as his or her Savior to gain eternal life (John 3:16), or reject him. This choice is fundamentally the same as choosing whether to love God/Love or not, because God is Love (1 John 4:8, 4:16).

In the end, all who love God/Love will admit they have sinned and will respond positively to God's demonstration of love that was shown when he sent Jesus to die for their sins (1 John 4:10, John 15:13), and they will believe in Jesus as their Savior. Everyone who believes that Jesus Christ died for their sins will love God for this same reason.

Critics of my theory of inclusivism might say that, at that moment when someone is seeing God face to face and is then presented with the ultimate choice between eternal life or eternal destruction, no one in their right mind would choose to reject God's offer of salvation. If these critics were right, then the final judgment would lead to universalism, and everyone would end up loving God and having eternal life.

However, in this post I will argue that even when people are facing God at the final judgment, it must still be possible for them to choose to reject God. Otherwise, they would not truly have free will, and without free will, we're back to all the issues I discussed in my previous post.

And actually, the reason these people will choose to reject God's free offer of eternal life at the final judgment is basically the same reason why Adam and Eve chose to sin in the Garden of Eden.

To begin to understand why people might reject God, we must look at how free will works, and how God makes it possible that we can actually choose between multiple different courses of action.

How Does Free Will Work?

Free will is obviously a complex topic. A significant number of books and philosophical treatises have been written about different theories which explain how we have free will. Neuroscientists also try to investigate how the decision-making process occurs in people's minds from a biological point of view.

On one side, some philosophers say that we do not truly have free will, because they claim that all of our actions and thoughts are fully determined by pre-existing causes, such as our brain chemistry. This chemistry is influenced by various external factors that act on our bodies which are outside of our control. These factors were themselves caused by previous causes, and those causes were also caused by earlier causes, going back in an unbreakable chain of cause and effect to the very first cause of the existence of the universe. Or so they claim.1

Although the Calvinistic theologian Jonathan Edwards didn't know about the more 'scientific' aspects of this explanation, it is effectively the same theory of free will that he argued for in his famous book Freedom of the Will. He thought that the movement of every tiny atom and molecule in the entire history of the universe can be traced back through the links of cause and effect back to God's initial creation of the universe.

So, to Edwards, nothing in the entire history of the universe could ever have been any different than it actually was, and is, and will be. Otherwise, he thought there would be no determining 'cause' behind why, for example, I chose to eat spaghetti for dinner tonight, rather than tacos. It would be an instance of an effect (a choice) that occurs without a cause that could fully explain why that particular effect/choice happened, rather than a different effect/choice. To Edwards, such a situation would be inconceivable.2

In contrast to this view of philosophical determinism, a libertarian view of free will means that our decisions are not completely determined by either internal or external factors. While our desires, instincts, habits, conscious and unconscious motivations, personality, brain chemistry, and mental state can influence our decisions, in order for us to have libertarian free will, none of these influences can be so overwhelming that we could not have chosen to do otherwise. If any of these influences do become so overwhelming that they force us to act in a particular way, then we would no longer have free will.

Even in extremely difficult decisions where each option we are considering has different and incomparable reasons behind why we might choose it, we do not usually choose randomly, but deliberately consider the pros and cons of each option. Then when we finally choose one option, we can say we chose it because of the reasons that justified our choosing it. Yet if our choice was free, our decision cannot have been determined by any of those reasons, and we must have always had the ability to choose otherwise.3

Or in other words, if a choice was made with libertarian free will, then theoretically, if we could go back in time, we could have chosen something different than what we actually chose, because nothing was forcing us to choose the way we did.4

And just for clarification, it is not necessary that every single action we do is a result of our free will. But unless a decision is made with libertarian free will, such that we could have chosen to do otherwise, we cannot be held morally accountable for that decision by God or by others, nor justly rewarded or punished accordingly.

Thus, when it comes to the 'ultimate' punishment of eternal destruction (2 Thessalonians 1:8-10), I believe that God must give everyone at least one free libertarian choice to accept or reject Jesus as their Savior, or God would be unjust to punish them with eternal death for their disbelief.

Hopefully this is clear enough, but there are also two other conditions that must be met in order for us to make a truly free choice.

Condition 1: The Need For Multiple Options to Choose Between

First of all, for a choice to be truly free, we must have multiple options to choose from. Otherwise, even if we have free will, it would not do us any good, because we would only have one option available to us.

For example, If I only have spaghetti sauce and pasta noodles in my cupboard, it doesn't matter how much I want to eat tacos instead. If I have no way of going to the grocery store to buy the supplies to make tacos, and no way of ordering tacos to be delivered, if I want to eat dinner, I would have to eat that spaghetti, or choose to go hungry. Even this example, though, I do still have an option to go hungry. If I truly had only one option, I would have to eat the spaghetti, and I couldn't even choose to not eat it.

This is why, if God gives people free will so that they can freely choose to love him, God must also give them the option of freely choosing to reject him.

This is why God created the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. If God had not created that tree and not told Adam and Eve to not eat its fruit, then although Adam and Eve had free will, they would have had no way to choose to disobey/reject God. (And yes, disobeying God is the same as rejecting God, because God's nature as perfect Love (1 John 4:8) means that obeying him is the same as loving him.)

Now, similarly, as I argued in my previous post, God must give each individual the same choice of whether to return God's love, or reject that love. For those who hear the gospel, our choice to love God is expressed as choosing to believe in Jesus Christ as our Savior, who died for our sins on the cross (John 3:16, 6:28-29). This choice to love God or not will determine whether an individual experiences eternity in the New Heaven and New Earth, or is eternally destroyed.

But if God wants our love for him to be genuinely meaningful and valuable to him, he cannot force us to love him. That means that God must give us the option to reject him and be eternally destroyed, even though ideally, God wants everyone to be saved.

So having at least two different options to choose between is the most basic requirement for free will to be possible, in addition to being able to make the choice without our choice being fully determined by unchosen influences. But there is a second requirement that is necessary in order for a free choice to be possible.

Condition 2: The Need for A Motive To Choose Each Option

No matter how many options are open to us to choose from, we cannot actually choose any of them unless we have a motive for selecting each of the possible options.

For example, let's say I open my cupboard, and I see that I have the supplies to make spaghetti for dinner. I also know that in my fridge, I have all the supplies I need to make tacos. However, on one shelf of my cupboard, I also spot a tin of sardines.

Now, I could eat those sardines, if I chose to. Nothing is physically preventing me from eating those sardines. I'm not allergic to them, and Batman will not break in to stop me from reaching for the sardines. I have the ability to lift my arm, grab the can, pry open the lid, and dig a fork right into those sardines.

The only thing that prevents me from doing so is that I currently have absolutely no motivation to eat those sardines.

Now, I could gain a motive to eat said sardines if they were the only thing I had left to eat and I was hungry enough, and I had no other way of obtaining better food. But until then, I would never willingly eat those sardines.

This is obviously a silly example, but the same principle is true for any choice, no matter how ethically consequential or inconsequential.

So, in order to truly have free will, we need two other things in addition to the faculty of free will. We need at least two different options to choose between, and at least one possible motive for choosing each option. If either of these conditions are lacking, then it would not be possible to make a free choice.

But Why Would Anyone Reject God's Love When They Know The Consequences?

This brings us to the question we asked in the introduction to this post: why would anyone intentionally choose to reject God's love, if they knew that doing so would certainly lead to their own eternal destruction?

The universalist Thomas Talbott argues that no one will continually choose to reject God's love, because, although people might choose sin and evil for a while, eventually, they would realize that their lives are more pleasant without sin and evil. So he claims:

that is how God works with us as created rational agents. He permits us to choose in the ambiguous contexts in which we first emerge as self-aware beings, and he then requires us to learn from experience the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn. So in that way the consequences of our free choices, both the good choices and the bad ones, are a source of revelation; they sooner or later reveal—in the next life if not in this one—both the horror of separation from God and the bliss of union with him. And that is why the end is foreordained: all paths finally lead to the same destination, the end of reconciliation, though some are longer and a lot more painful than others.5

Talbott argues that in the end, if anyone actually understood the above, they would have "no intelligible motive whatsoever to reject him [God]."6

However, if it is guaranteed that eventually, everyone will realize that choosing to love God is in their best interest, then we have lost one of the conditions for making a free choice, which is the possibility of having a motive to make the choice to reject God. This lack of a motive to make the opposing choice would mean that these people's choice to love God would no longer be truly free.

Yet because I strongly believe that love must be freely chosen in order for it to truly be love, then if God ever removed the possibility for people to reject God, it would contradict the reason why God created people with free will in the first place—so that loving relationships between God and people could be possible.

Thus, even for people who will face God at the final judgment, after having their works judged by God to prove that they are sinners who are worthy of eternal destruction, and having been given one last chance to believe in Jesus as their Savior, it must still be possible for them to freely reject God.

To do so, these people would need to have a motive for their rejection of God. But what could that motive possibly be?

Some might say that at that point, only the most hardened, God-hating people would tell God to throw them into the lake of fire just out of spite, because they will think that if God loves them, then forcing God to destroy them instead will cause God to suffer, and they like the idea of causing God to suffer. Now, maybe some people will think this way, but I doubt this would be the motive for everyone who ends up being condemned to the lake of fire.

Instead, I think Jerry Walls has a more convincing answer to this question. Walls argues that the only way people could willingly choose sin, evil, and ultimately, eternal destruction, is because they have the ability to deceive themselves about what will actually make them the most happy.7

Jerry Walls writes,

It seems to me that the ability to deceive ourselves may be an essential component of moral freedom.... If we cannot deceive ourselves, there can be no sustained motive to choose evil, and hence no freedom to so choose.8

Moral freedom requires both the ability to respond to God’s grace as well as the ability to resist it. And the latter requires the ability to deceive oneself, which entails the ability to avoid clear perception of God’s relation to happiness.9

Basically, Walls is arguing that if we truly believe that God only wants what is best for us and that all of God's instructions are for our own good, then we would never sin. Similarly, it's definitely in our best interest to accept Jesus as our Savior, so that we can have an amazingly wonderful eternal future in the New Heaven and New Earth.

So the only way to convince ourselves that sinning and/or rejecting God will make us happier than following God's instructions is to deceive ourselves by persuading ourselves that God is wrong.

Yet God is never wrong, since God never lies (Titus 1:2). Therefore, to disagree with God is to believe a lie about reality. Or in other words, to disagree with God is to willingly deceive ourselves about reality.

Let's test Jerry Walls' claims by considering the example of Adam and Eve.

The Example of Adam and Eve

Before they sinned, Adam and Eve faced a conundrum. The serpent (Satan, as per Revelation 12:9) told them that God was lying to them, and that eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would actually greatly benefit them. It was this false idea that God was withholding something even better from them—that they could become like God—which tempted them to sin (Genesis 3:4-6)

This false idea opened up the possibility that Adam and Eve could make a free choice to disobey God, because until they had a potential motive to eat the forbidden fruit, they would never have considered doing so.

Yet, simply having a potential motive for such a choice was not enough to make Adam and Eve to choose as they did. They had to willingly and actively choose to believe that Satan was telling the truth, and simultaneously choose to believe that God was lying, although they had no evidence to support this conclusion.

Indeed, based on everything they had seen up to that point, Adam and Eve should have believed that God was good and that God wanted what was best for them, because God had provided everything they needed in the Garden of Eden. In contrast, Satan had done nothing for them that could have given them a reason to trust him.

Furthermore, they also had to choose to reject or ignore God's warning that to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would lead to their deaths (Genesis 2:16-17).

Thus, twice over, Adam and Eve convinced themselves that God was lying to them, and chose to believe that they could gain a greater benefit from sinning than from obeying God.

Similarly, whenever we choose to disobey God, we think that sinning will lead to greater benefit or happiness for us than if we choose to not sin. We also choose to ignore or deny that God has our best interests in mind when he told us not to sin.

In order to sin, therefore, we must pridefully tell ourselves that we know better than God does what is ultimately best for us. Simultaneously, we must also slander God's character by saying to ourselves that God is not perfectly wise, good, or loving, because he is trying to keep us from experiencing the happiness that we could gain from sinning.

Of course, sin might seem to make us happy temporarily, but sooner or later sin will always lead to misery, and ultimately, death (James 1:14-15). In this way, sin is fundamentally deceitful (Hebrews 3:13). This is why God instructs us to not sin. It's not because God wants to ruin our fun, but because God knows the full negative consequences of sin which we don't fully see or understand when we make a choice to sin.

This returns us to Talbott's earlier objection that through experience, people should learn that sooner or later, sin always leads to suffering. When they realize this, people should be motivated to give up their sins and turn back to God.

Walls agrees that if God allowed sinners to become progressively more miserable from their sins, eventually there would come a point that sinners would wake up to it and would be forced to change their minds about their sin. However, Walls says that the decision to turn away from sin and back toward God under these circumstances would not qualify as a free choice.10

Therefore, even this connection between sin and misery must have limits, as Walls explains:

Of course, God is the only one who knows us well enough to know at what point our freedom is broken. Only God knows how much inducement through misery one can stand before his freedom is eliminated. But again, my claim is that there is a limit to what freedom can tolerate, and if a person resists to that point, then God cannot add more pressure without violating his [or her] freedom. To be sure, if God added such further pressure, the person would be forced to see that sin causes misery and would find it impossible not to submit to the pressure. But the choice to submit under these circumstances would not qualify as a free choice.11

In other words, if God allowed sinners to become so miserable that they eventually had no other choice but to turn to God, then God would have taken away the sinner's free will to reject him.

So even when sinners start to discover that their sin is not actually making them happy, but is making them more miserable and ruining their lives, they can still deceive themselves into thinking that it is not that bad, or think that the alternative would be worse.

As an example that I believe supports Walls' point, let us consider one of the most confusing and debated details in the Old Testament, regarding how God interacted with Pharaoh during the ten plagues of Egypt.

The Example of Pharaoh

It can seem confusing why, if God said that he was sending Moses to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt, that God also said he would 'harden' Pharaoh's heart so that Pharaoh would not agree to Moses' request (Exodus 4:21).

Talbott himself suggests that the purpose of this hardening was to keep Pharaoh from giving in to Moses' request too quickly.12 So when it was necessary, God strengthened Pharaoh's own inner desire and determination to not let the Israelites leave Egypt, despite the awful consequences that God warned both Pharaoh and his people would suffer because of Pharaoh's repeated refusals.

One reason that God hardened Pharaoh's heart was so that God would be able to bring enough plagues on Egypt to properly judge both Pharaoh and the Egyptians for how they had mistreated the Israelites (Exodus 10:1-2). Another reason was so that the Egyptians would know that only God is God (Exodus 14:4, 9:14, 14:16-18).

Scholars often note how all the plagues that God sent on Egypt were targeted against various aspects of life that the Egyptians believed were controlled by their false gods.13 When God demonstrated that he was more powerful than these false gods by negatively affecting things that the Egyptians believed these gods should have been in control of, it was a merciful form of evangelistic outreach to the people of Egypt who otherwise would never have had any interest in worshipping the one true God.

It seems this strategy was effective, as the Bible records that many people who were not Israelites also left Egypt with them (Exodus 12:38, NIV).

Furthermore, the details of these plagues and the parting of the Red Sea would also have been a sort of evangelism to the other pagan peoples in the region. The news of what happened to the Egyptians and to other hostile people the Israelites encountered in the wilderness made its way to the people in Canaan, such as Rahab. She wisely chose to side with the Israelites instead of her own people, which saved her life and her family members' lives when the Israelites conquered Jericho (Joshua 2:8-14).

Seeing God's power more fully demonstrated may also have humbled Pharaoh in a deeper way than if Pharaoh had given in after only one or two plagues: "In the case of Pharaoh, his God-given strength to disobey God's command no doubt revealed to him, in a way that perhaps nothing else could have revealed, the self-destructive and self-defeating character of his own self-exaltation."14

Thus, the reason that God 'hardened' or 'strengthened' Pharaoh's prideful desire to not immediately give in to Moses' request was ultimately for Pharaoh's own good, and the good of his people. Without seeing the ten plagues, the Egyptians would never have questioned the power of their false deities. For Pharaoh, the death of his firstborn son showed him his own powerlessness, and his need for Moses' God who is the only one who has the ultimate power over life and death.

However, even then, in order for God to not override Pharaoh's free will to either believe in God or reject God, Pharaoh must still have had the ability to deceive himself about the cause of the plagues.

If Pharaoh did choose to deny the role of Israel's God in all the plagues, including the death of Pharaoh's son, and the dramatic escape of the Israelites through the Red Sea, how might he have done so?

He would have had to come up with some other 'reasonable' explanation for why all these things happened. Maybe he hadn't been devoted enough to his Egyptian gods? Maybe it was due to some unfavorable star alignment? Who knows what lie he might have told himself in order to avoid facing the truth.

And this brings us to the next section of this post, where we will examine the role that human reason plays in our choice to sin and reject God.

The Role of Reason in Self-Deception

In my previous blog post, I examined several questions posed by the 17th century author Pierre Bayle who wondered why God didn't prevent Adam and Eve from sinning, given that God knew all the negative consequences that their sin would have on the world.

One of Bayle's final questions regarding this situation was: why couldn't God have made Adam and Eve more intelligent or 'reasonable', so that they wouldn't have sinned?

John Feinberg is a modern theologian who asked a similar question. Feinberg's only answer was that to do so would have meant that God would have had to make humans morally and intellectually superior to the way we are now, in order to give us the ability to discern which desires and actions would lead to evil, and God would also have had to give us the moral fortitude to overcome those desires. Yet then, we would no longer be the way that God desired to make us.15 I find this to be a rather unsatisfactory answer.

So I haven't yet seen someone provide a solid answer to the question of why God did not give humans greater reasoning abilities, to enable us to avoid freely choosing to sin, or at least, to enable us to choose far less sin and less serious sin than we currently choose.

Ironically, I think the question can be answered when we consider Bayle's own comments about the nature of human reason, along with the other principles we've seen so far in this post.

Bayle said that "human reason … is a principle of destruction and not of edification. It is only proper for raising doubts, and for turning things on all sides in order to make disputes endless".16

For example, Bayle argued that many critical truths that are revealed to us in Scripture do not make sense to our supposedly 'reasonable' minds, and so we must accept them only on the basis of faith.

He referred to the doctrine of the Trinity, which early Christians realized they needed to affirm in order to try to explain how, despite there being only one God, in the Bible we see Jesus and the Holy Spirit also acting in ways that show they are equally divine. There is also the mystery of how Jesus could be fully God and fully human at the same time. Instead of making sense of these mysteries, our 'reason' is only able to raise objections to these doctrines.17

Bayle also explained how, when it comes to the question of why there is evil in the world, our minds can invent many different explanations that could seem equally plausible and reasonable, which may or may not match up with divine revelation in Scripture.18

So in summary, Bayle believed that human reason cannot lead us to the truth, but it is very good at raising objections or doubts about the truth, especially when it comes to supernatural truths which are above reason. If we put too much trust in our reason, it will lead us astray and into endless unsolvable debates and confusion, because we can come up with convincing reasons for believing many different ideas.

This means that I believe it is our faculty of reason that is actually a critical part of human free will. It is our 'reason' that lets us consider multiple different courses of action, and extrapolate the possible consequences of those actions. It is also our 'reason' that can then come up with various reasons why we should or should not act in any particular way.

For example, it is only if Adam and Eve were able to raise 'reasonable' doubts about God's warnings to them regarding eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that they would have been able to actually consider eating from it.

It is also only if Adam and Eve could have persuaded themselves that it was 'reasonable' to believe that Satan was telling the truth and that God had lied to them that they could have convinced themselves to follow through on their temptation and decide to eat the forbidden fruit.

Yet because their choice was truly free, they must still have had the ability to reason either for or against eating the fruit. Only then could they be properly held accountable for their choice by God. If one motive became so overwhelming that it forced them to act in that way, they would no longer have had free will.19

Thus, God could not have created Adam and Eve with such intelligence and rationality that they would always choose what is wisest and best, or they would have had no ability to even consider sinning, and they would not truly have had free will, unless they chose to act completely irrationally. But it is highly unlikely that such rational beings would choose to act irrationally.

So we can say that Augustine was correct when he suggested that humans were originally created in a “middle transitional state between wisdom and folly which allows man to be seduced without the blame falling on God."20

Thus, this answers the question of how people can reject God. Our malleable and finite 'reason' allows us to justify multiple different courses of action to ourselves, even if some of those actions are ultimately not good for us.

However, we still need to look at why people might choose to reject God.

Why People Reject God

Universalists like Thomas Talbott argue that,

insofar as God remains hidden from us and we do not fully understand the true nature of God or the consequences of separating ourselves from him, we are in no position to reject the true God at all. We may reject a caricature of God, as frequently happens in a context of ambiguity, ignorance, and misperception; but we are in no position to reject the true God until our ignorance has been removed and our misjudgments have been corrected.21

However, if our ignorance were removed and our misjudgments were corrected, it is basically the same as saying that God should override our free will and force us to see reality correctly, so that we have no choice but to make the correct and 'reasonable' decision to love God and trust Jesus as our Savior.

But as I argued in my previous post, although God does want everyone to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Peter 3:9, Ezekiel 33:11), God cannot force people to love him, because love inherently cannot be forced but must be freely chosen.

Talbott also seems to presume that the main problem regarding why people reject God is only due to a lack of knowledge about God, rather than a fundamental problem in people's hearts.

I think I agree more with John Piper, who suggests that the ultimate reason why people refuse to believe in Jesus once they hear the gospel is "owing most deeply not to the mind's problems with history, science, logic, or ethics, but to the heart's overpowering desire for something that does not fit with Christian faith."22

If someone wants to believe in Jesus, there is a lot of historical, scientific, and logical analysis that has been done that shows that believing that Jesus truly lived and taught the things he did, died on the cross, and came back to life three days later is completely reasonable.

There is an entire category of theology called 'apologetics' that focuses on explaining all the reasons why we can trust that Christianity is true, how we can know that God created the universe, and so forth. The popular Christian author Lee Strobel is one notable example of someone who became a Christian after he set out to investigate the evidence for Christianity for himself.

However, people can also come up with all sorts of 'reasonable' objections as to why they do not want to believe that God exists, or why they think they do not need to believe in Jesus as their Savior. They then attempt to explain the evidence of the world around us in ways that fit with their chosen beliefs.

For example, Richard Dawkins famously said, “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."23 So it was not necessarily Darwin's theory of evolution which led to atheism, but atheists appreciated Darwin's theory because it allowed them to feel intellectually fulfilled while holding onto their prior choice to be an atheist.

Some atheists honestly admit that they simply do not want there to be a God.24 It makes sense that such people would find great comfort in a human-made theory that claims to explain the existence of the universe and of humanity that does not require them to believe that there is a creator God who will hold them accountable for their actions.

This is just one example of how it is our faculty of human reason that makes disbelief in God possible, but disbelief must be a possibility in order for faith to also be a possibility.

Faith is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). Without faith in Jesus, we cannot please God (Hebrews 11:6).

After his resurrection, Jesus told his doubting disciple Thomas that "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29).

These statements about faith only make sense if it is possible for people to not believe in God.

In the current dispensation of history, God is hidden enough that it is possible for people to believe that he does not exist, if they don't want to believe that he exists. This means that God cannot do anything that would overwhelmingly 'force' someone to believe in him. But for those who want to find God, he promises that if we seek him, we will find him (Luke 11:9).

So once again, I find C.S. Lewis very helpful when he wrote:

The Irresistible and Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His [God's] scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.25

Even in the case of Paul on the Damascus road, I agree with the assessment that this incident was not truly a 'conversion' in the sense of convincing Paul to believe in God. Paul was already a highly-educated Jewish Pharisee who clearly believed in God so much that he thought the early Christians were committing blasphemy by saying Jesus was God, and he set out to persecute them (Acts 22:3-5). So as William MacDonald writes:

It must be remembered that the dramatic conversion of the "chief of sinners" on the road to Damascus was not the overpowering of a God-hater, but the enlightenment of a badly mistaken man who up to that time had thought he was serving God and was doing so "in all good conscience"!26

Yet Paul still had free will afterward, as Paul implies that he could have chosen to be disobedient to this vision of Jesus that he received on the Damascus road, although he did not do so (Acts 26:19-20).

So God gives people the freedom to not believe in him, because this is the condition that also makes faith a possibility. If God did anything that was so overwhelming that our minds were not able to come up with some alternative 'reasonable' excuse that would enable the possibility of disbelief, our free will to believe in God would be taken away.

And we have evidence that God can actually do quite a bit without removing our free will to not believe in him.

During the yet-future seven-year period of time called the Tribulation, which is described in the book of Revelation, God will send twenty-one severe divine judgments on the world. This will be in order to punish people for their sinful rejection of him (e.g., Isaiah 26:20-21), for their mistreatment of God's people (Revelation 6:10, 16:4-7), and for their division of the land of Israel (Joel 3:1-3).

The Bible says that despite how terribly the people who are living on Earth during the Tribulation will suffer, and even if on some level they recognize that they are facing God's judgment (Revelation 6:15-17), most of them will still refuse to turn to God and repent of their various sins (Revelation 9:20-21, 16:8-9, 16:10-11).

Before the Tribulation, all true Christians (and probably all children) will be suddenly taken to heaven in an event called the Rapture (John 14:1-3, 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18, 1 Corinthians 15:50-54). Hopefully, once that happens, many people who heard about the Rapture beforehand will finally realize their 'crazy' Christian friends and family members who warned them about it were telling the truth, and they will believe in Jesus.

However, many more people will not want to believe that the Rapture just happened, because they will not want to believe that the Christians were right. Instead, they will choose to believe whatever lie will be told in the mainstream media to explain away the Rapture. It has often been suggested that a mass alien abduction will be the go-to excuse, based on how well our society has been accustomed to the idea of aliens through science-fiction and news stories which claim that aliens and UFOs are real.27

Thus, in this section we have seen how people's determination to not believe in God comes not just from a misunderstanding about God or a lack of information about God. Instead, it is actually a willful choice they make, based on something in their heart that does not want to acknowledge that God is their creator who holds them accountable for their sins.

They then willingly believe whatever alternative theories or ideas they can find, no matter how objectively irrational these theories are, in order for them to feel that they can 'rationally' reject the reality that the God of the Bible exists. In this way, they willingly deceive themselves.

In one sense, these people are 'blinded' to the truth of the gospel because of Satan's lies (2 Corinthians 4:4). But if it were true that they literally could not believe the gospel because Satan was interfering with their free choice, then I believe that God could not properly hold them accountable for their disbelief.

Instead, I believe these people are 'blinded' by their own choice to believe whatever 'lie' Satan presents to them (whether directly or indirectly), and they deceive themselves by coming up with reasons why it makes more sense for them to believe Satan's lie than to accept God's truth, just as Adam and Eve did. In this way, although Satan's lies do play a role in 'blinding' people to the gospel, the people themselves are still accountable for their decision to allow Satan to blind them.

Indeed, at one point, Paul writes to the early church to not let anyone deceive them (2 Thessalonians 2:3), which implies it is a choice to allow ourselves to be deceived. See also 1 Corinthians 3:18, Galatians 6:3, Ephesians 5:6, 1 John 1:8, 3:7.

So in summary, God gives all people free will and an opportunity to love him or reject him, because God wants our love for him to be genuine. Although it is in our eternal best interest to choose to love God in return and accept Jesus as our Savior, our minds are still able to justify making the opposite decision by coming up with reasons why we do not want to believe what God says about reality.

Free Will at the Final Judgment

All that has been said thus far in this post must also remain true even at the final judgment.

At this judgment, everyone who has not been resurrected earlier at either the Rapture (1 Corinthians 15:51-53) or after the Tribulation (Revelation 20:4) will be resurrected to have their lives personally judged by God (Revelation 20:11-15). Because the Bible says that God truly wants everyone to be saved, I believe that after this personal judgment of people's lives, God will explain the gospel to each person and allow them one last chance to believe in Jesus, in order to have their names written into the Book of Life (Revelation 20:15).

However, again, since God values our free will so that our love for him is genuine, God will ensure that nothing that these people will see or experience at this judgment will be so overwhelming or irrefutable that it forces them to repent, love God, and believe in Jesus as their Savior. Otherwise, they would lose their free will.

Presumably, even when they are face-to-face with God, some people will retain an inner desire to reject God. They will then use their faculty of reason to come up with some excuse that can justify their decision to not accept God's final offer of salvation, even though it means they will be eternally destroyed.

At that point, though, if people still reject God when seeing him face-to-face, after having been told that accepting Jesus as their Savior is the only way to avoid the second death, there will be nothing else that could possibly convince them to change their minds. They will have been hardened beyond all possibility of salvation, and there will be no place for them in the New Heaven or New Earth which will be full of righteousness (2 Peter 3:13), where God will be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).

Thus, as Walls says, “if God allows us to retain libertarian freedom, some illusions may endure forever.”28 Whatever lies people will tell themselves to justify their final choice to reject God will never be corrected.

Although the Bible does say that in the end, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord (Philippians 2:9-11), I am convinced that this verse only refers to all the people who will ever believe in Jesus as their Savior. No one can say "Jesus is Lord" without having the Holy Spirit in them (1 Corinthians 12:3), and the Holy Spirit only indwells a person the moment they believe in Jesus (Ephesians 1:13-14).

One day, though, after everyone who rejected God is eternally destroyed in the Lake of Fire, then Philippians 2:9-11 will be fulfilled, and God will be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28).

The purpose of God's gift of free will to humanity will have been fulfilled, and those who will have eternal life in the New Heaven and New Earth will never again need or even want the option of rejecting God. Then we will experience true freedom to do whatever we want to do, since none of our desires will be sinful once we have become just as perfectly righteous as Jesus himself is (1 John 3:2).

The Problem of Pride

So in the end, anyone who refuses to accept that God is telling us the truth about reality, and who refuses to admit that we are sinners who need to believe in Jesus as our Savior to have eternal life, is effectively claiming that God is a liar:

He who believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself; he who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed the testimony that God has given of His Son. (1 John 5:10)

Why would they call God a liar? For the same reason that Adam and Eve did, when they chose to believe Satan's lie instead. They thought they knew better than God did what was true, and what was best for them. And that's called pride.

Pride is the source of the very first sin, when the angel Lucifer decided he wanted to be worshipped like God, instead of worshipping God as he was created to do, and so he became known as Satan (Ezekiel 28:17, Isaiah 14:12-14).

Pride is also what causes people to attempt to boast before God and claim that their good works should be enough for God to accept them, without needing to admit they are sinners in need of a Savior (e.g., Matthew 7:21-23, Ephesians 2:8-9).

In contrast, it takes humility to have faith and trust that God does know better than we do what is true, and what is best for us. It takes humility to admit that we are sinners who deserve eternal death (Romans 6:23) and that nothing we can do could ever earn eternal life (Titus 3:5, Galatians 2:16).

The difference in attitude is demonstrated well by the contrast between the tax collector and the Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14. The tax collector humbly admits he needs God's mercy for his sins, while the Pharisee is thinking of his good works and praises himself for being superior to other people who are sinners. If the Pharisee will not give up his prideful focus on his own works and realize that he also needs God's mercy for his sins, then God will ultimately say to him "I never knew you" (Matthew 7:21-23).

So everyone who chooses to ultimately reject God will do so by choosing to willingly deceive themselves. Their motive will be due to their prideful desire to refuse to admit that they are sinners who need Jesus to die for their sins so that they can have eternal life.

Using their reason, they will come up with whatever excuse they find convenient to allow them to reject the reality that they are created beings who are accountable to God for their sins, even though this choice will lead to their eternal destruction.

Yet such a choice is ultimately irrational, considering that eternal life in the New Heaven and New Earth will be better than anything anyone can imagine (1 Corinthians 2:9). We will have immortal, strong, beautiful bodies that will never get sick or be injured, and will live in a perfect society of love between God, angels, and all redeemed people from all of history.

Would you like to experience an eternity like this? It is completely free, and the moment you believe that Jesus died for your sins so you can have eternal life, you will be sealed with the Holy Spirit who guarantees your salvation (Ephesians 1:13-14). For more on this topic, check out my article on how you can have eternal life for free.

Conclusion

This is the end of my series of posts on Christian inclusivism. I plan to make a summary post with links to each article, to provide a high-level overview of what I have argued in each post.

Hopefully this series has been able to offer hope to you if you worry about God's justice regarding people who never had a chance to hear the gospel, or if you worry about people you know who died before they personally accepted the gospel. This is my best understanding of how it might be possible for them to still be saved, backed up by Scripture and philosophical reasoning.

However it works out, the Bible is clear that God truly does want to save everyone, and so somehow, God will ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to be eternally saved. Yet everyone who is saved will be saved only on the basis of Jesus' death for their sins.

Yet there are still good reasons why we should care about trusting in Jesus as our Savior right now.

Christians are blessed to know the gospel so that we can have hope for the future, and this gives us peace despite the trials we face.

We can live with a perspective which focuses on loving God and loving others, and serving God to earn heavenly rewards that last forever, rather than wasting our efforts by trying to selfishly get as much temporary wealth or pleasure as possible before we die.

Christians also get to be indwelled by the Holy Spirit who gives us spiritual gifts, along with many other blessings.

Even if others might still have a chance to be saved at the final judgment, these blessings that Christians experience in this life due to knowing Jesus as our Savior should motivate us to share the gospel with others right now, just as Jesus instructed us to (Matthew 28:18-20).

Given that it seems all the signs of the end times are here, the Rapture could happen practically any day. Let's have the courage to be disliked and share the good news with others about how they can be eternally saved by putting their faith in Jesus.

Then, not only will the people we tell hopefully choose to believe in Jesus and have eternal life, but if they believe before the Rapture happens, they will also go with us to heaven in the Rapture, thereby escaping the terrible judgments of the Tribulation.

This will also save them from having to make the very hard choice to not take the Mark of the Beast or worship the Antichrist. Not doing so means they will possibly face martyrdom for their faith.

But even then, it's better than the alternative. Because the only exception to everything I've written in my theory of inclusivism is that if people take the Mark of the Beast, there will be no second chances for them at the final judgment, and they are guaranteed to face eternal punishment (Revelation 14:9).

Footnotes:

• 1. For an example of this sort of philosophy, see Sam Harris, Free Will (New York, NY: Free Press, 2012).
• 2. Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will in The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol. 1, ed. Paul Ramsey (Jonathan Edwards Center: Yale University, 2008), 238, also 345, 414.
• 3. Randall S. Firestone, “An Argument for Libertarian Free Will: Hard Choices Based on Either Incomparable or Equally Persuasive Reasons,” Open Journal of Philosophy 7 (2017): 64-93.
• 4. T. J. Mawson, Free Will: A Guide For The Perplexed (New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 17.
• 5. 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), 258-260, quote from 259.
• 6. In contrast, anyone who does understand this and still rejects God has made such an irrational choice that Talbott believes it is no longer a free choice which they could be held personally responsible for. 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), 144.
• 7. Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 129, 131.
• 8. Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 130.
• 9. Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 131.
• 10. Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992)Walls, 132.
• 11. Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992)Walls, 132.
• 12. 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), 243-244.
• 13. As a short summary of these typical arguments, you can read "What was the meaning and purpose of the ten plagues of Egypt?", GotQuestions.org
• 14. 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), 244.
• 15. John S. Feinberg, The Many Faces of Evil: Theological Systems and the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 127, 133.
• 16. Pierre Bayle, "Manicheans," 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), 151.
• 17. Pierre Bayle, "Second Clarification," 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), 410-411.
• 18. Pierre Bayle, "Manicheans," 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), 147-152.
• 19. Randall S. Firestone, “An Argument for Libertarian Free Will: Hard Choices Based on Either Incomparable or Equally Persuasive Reasons,” Open Journal of Philosophy 7 (2017): 79, 87.
• 20. Adam M. Willows, “Augustine, The Origin of Evil, and the Mystery of Free Will,” Religious Studies 50 (2014): 260
• 21. Thomas B. Talbott, "Response by Thomas B. Talbott," in Perspectives On Election: 5 Views, ed. Chad Owen Brand (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2006), 144. Obviously, he doesn't mean to imply that God is always completely hidden from us, because God did reveal himself to humanity in many ways, most importantly, by having the Son of God become incarnate as the human man Jesus. However, it is true that God doesn't come down and put on indisputable displays of his glory that would cause us all to fall on our faces and force us to admit that he exists. God leaves enough room for people to doubt his existence, power, and goodness if they want to, which is necessary to enable the possibility that people might choose to reject God.
• 22. John Piper, "Seventy Years Without Shipwreck: Five Reasons That Some Fall Away", DesiringGod.org, May 20, 2022.
• 23. Jonathan Sarfati, "Refuting Atheists’ ‘Useful Dupes’", Creation.com, August 2022, citing Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (W.W. Norton, 1987), 5-6.
• 24. A notable atheist Thomas Nagel has admitted that he simply doesn't want to believe in God. He wrote: "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that." Annie Holmquist, "An Atheist Explains the True Reason Religion Terrifies Him", Intellectual Takeout, June 14, 2018.
• 25. C.S. Lewis. "The Screwtape Letters," in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), letter 8, 207.
• 26. William G. MacDonald, "The Spirit of Grace" in Grace Unlimited, ed. Clark H. Pinnock (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany Fellowship Inc, 1975), 86.
• 27. For an article that goes into more detail on why they will likely explain away the Rapture by claiming it was a mass alien abduction, see Arden Kierce, "Was It Aliens, or Was It The Rapture?", RaptureReady.com, June 20, 2023.
• 28. Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 133.