Does God Get What God Wants?

In this chapter of Love Wins Rob Bell plays the “Sovereignty of God” card. He argues that God gets what God wants, and God wants all people to be saved (1 Tim. 2:3-4). He then follows up with several passages that point out that all people will come to God (Psalm 65; Ezekiel 36; Isaiah 52; Zephaniah 3; Philippians 2). The conclusion, of course, is that if God wants all people to be saved, and that God gets what God wants, then all people will eventually be saved.

First, we might ask what the Bible means by all people coming to God. In particular, I want to consider one of the passages that Bell references to make his point (Philippians 2:10). What does the apostle Paul mean when he says that every knee will bow and confess that Jesus is Lord? Does this mean, as Bell suggests, that everyone will eventually become followers of Jesus?

In this passage Paul is echoing Isaiah 45:23 (he also does this in Romans 14:11). So let’s go to his source and see what God has to say through his prophet Isaiah.

Isa 45:23-24
By myself I have sworn,
my mouth has uttered in all integrity
a word that will not be revoked:
Before me every knee will bow;
by me every tongue will swear.
They will say of me, ‘In the LORD alone
are righteousness and strength.’”
All who have raged against him
will come to him and be put to shame.

Notice that everyone will bow the knee, but some of those who do so will be those who have raged against him and are therefore put to shame. In other words, they are not coming to worship and follow God, but by their defeat they are being forced to recognize who God is. Paul maintains this perspective when he cites this passage in Romans 14:11. There he says that every knee will bow at the time of judgement.* The point in both the Old and New Testaments is that sooner or later everyone is going to come to realize that God is king of the universe. This is NOT the same as everyone being saved.

What does it means for all people to come to God? Bell is suggesting that this means that every individual will come to God.** But in the Bible this notion of all people coming to God is really a reference to all nations (see Revelation 7:9). This point is significant because, although Israel was God’s chosen people, the Bible makes clear that God’s interests extended beyond Israel to all people. In the New Testament we see that all people (those from varying ethnic and national backgrounds) do come to God.

Second, let’s explore Bell’s argument that God always gets what God wants. Is this so? After leaving Egypt the people of Israel fashioned a golden calf and worshipped it. Is that what God wanted? Later the people of Israel offered their children as sacrifices that God said that he did not command nor did it enter his mind (Jeremiah 7:31). Is that what God wanted? On and on we could go. Adam and Eve eating from the tree. David committing adultery with Bathsheba. Amnon raping Tamar. Pharisees making religion hard on people. Are those all things that God wanted?

Unless we assume that God wants evil, we must conclude that sometimes things happen that God does not want. If this is true in temporal matters, why would it be less true in eternal matters? (for more on the issue of God’s sovereignty and human free will, go here). The Bible is clear that God allows us to choose to love him. That means that we have the freedom to accept or reject God. This is a point that Bell himself makes but then passes it by (103-104)

The irony in Bell’s argument for God getting what he wants is that there are others who have also laid hold of the sovereignty of God who argue just the opposite. They argue that some are lost because that’s what God wants. Augustine, for instance, understood that not everyone will be saved and therefore interpreted 1 Timothy 2:4 to mean that all who are saved are saved because God wants it to be so.

When we look at the details of his arguments (the trees), Rob Bell has not made a convincing case that God is going to give people multiple chances to come to him. In my next post I will explore his theological (forest) argument found in the chapter “Does God Get What God Wants?”

* Some have imagined that the BEMA (Judgment seat) is a place where God separates the good from the better, but the New Testaments shows that the term is a reference to a judgment between right and wrong or guilty and innocent. See here.
** As he has done previosuly, Bell has confused a group with individuals – see here.