Ware:

Objection 2

The universal, impartial, and equal love of God for all people demonstrates that unconditional election cannot be true. Since God is love, and since God’s love is the same for all people whom he has made, it cannot be the case that the reason some are not saved is owing to God’s choice, ultimately. Rather, some are not saved because they choose not to be saved, yet God would gladly (in love) have saved them, too, had they but come. Therefore, the election spoken of in Scripture simply cannot be unconditional election.

Reply. While Scripture clearly teaches God’s universal, impartial, and equal love for all people, this is certainly not the only, or the most central, meaning of the love of God. As D. A. Carson has explained so helpfully, the Bible actually speaks of the love of God in five different senses.³⁸ One of those five senses is God’s universal love for all (e.g., as seen in John 3:16). But another sense, one more prominent in Scripture, is God’s particular, selective, and discriminate love for his own people. Consider two representative passages, both of which reflect God’s special love for his own people, a love that moves him to save them and benefit them in a manner that distinguishes them from all others.

First, Isaiah 43 begins in a manner that believers have often found greatly comforting. “Do not fear,” God tells his people, “for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine” (lsa. 43:1 HCSB). Further, God promises, “I will be with you when you pass through the waters, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you” (lsa. 43:2 HCSB). So God establishes the fact that he is the God of his people, and he will be with them to provide for them and to protect them, for as he says to them, “you are Mine.”

The true significance of God’s special claim upon this people, his people, is about to be seen more clearly, however. We read on: “For I the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, and your Savior, give Egypt as a ransom for you, Cush and Seba in your place. Because you are precious in My sight and honored, and I love [from aheb, “to love”] you, I will give human beings in your place, and peoples in place of your life” (Isa. 43:3-4 HCSB). Here, then, is the particular, selective, and discriminate love of God for his own. He loves his people Israel by saving them at the expense of (“in the place of”) many lives of Egyptians. Clearly this is a reference to the favor shown the Jews at the time of their exodus from Egypt. For, although God could have given the same warning and instruction in Egypt regarding the upcoming angel of death as he did among the Israelites prior to the exodus, he did not. Nor did he intend to do So.³⁹

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