Why doesn’t God save everybody?

The idea that God chooses not to save everybody is horrifying to some. The idea that He wants to save everybody and would save everybody but His desire for such is trumped by a deeper desire to leave room for free will is horrifying to me. I have a hard time imagining the damned complaining about the heat but finding some consolation in the blessings of their free will. God has the power to save all people. The value of the suffering of Christ is sufficient to cover all the sins of all God’s people. Protecting man’s free will is not something the Bible says God has the least interest in. So why?

The Bible tells us, explicitly, and clearly why. It says, “What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction…” (Romans 9:22). God doesn’t save everybody because He wants to show His wrath and make His power known. Now He also delights to show His grace, as the text says, “…and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy which He had prepared beforehand for glory” (verse 23).

This verse does nothing to shroud or push back against the verse before. Paul is explicitly, by using that word “and” denying this argument- that hell must exist that we might know the glory of our redemption. Hell is the black velvet on which God places the diamond of His grace. No, hell doesn’t exist to make heaven more glorious. It exists to manifest the glory of the One who made heaven and hell.

Hell isn’t a necessary evil. It isn’t the result of the dark side of God that He’d rather we not know about. It is something that glorifies Him, which means, in turn that it is something that He glories in. That we find that puzzling reveals just how worthy we are of hell. That we think it unseemly that people are in hell, rather than think it shocking that people are in heaven shows why we all deserve to be in hell.

It also explains why Paul had to explain, once again, the very nature of grace. The moment we come to believe it is owed, or necessary is the moment it stops being grace. Paul writes,

What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not!  For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.” So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. For the Scripture says to the Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth.” Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens (Romans 9: 14-18).

I understand that this truth is difficult for us to swallow emotionally. It is not, however, difficult to understand intellectually. It is instead clear, simple. Our duty is to get our hearts in line with our minds, and to glorify Him for all that He glories in, all that He is.