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Perspective


          How priceless is your unfailing love, O God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.  They feast on the abundance of your house; you give them drink from your river of delights. (Psalm 36:7-8)

          There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”. (C.S. Lewis)

          There are people who maintain that because God’s love is unfailing, we must all ultimately go to heaven. I maintain that it would be singularly unloving of God to for Himself on someone who has spent a life rejecting Him and rejecting the principles He teaches. Since sin is that which separates us from God, if we have spent our lives in unrepented sin, it would be hateful in the extreme to require that someone then spend eternity living in a way that is diametrically opposed to what they chose in life. Some people claim that we will simply be shown that our thinking was a mistake – and in some cases, there may be a mistake involved (or even entrapment) but I suspect those are a tiny minority of the cases. As the book of Romans points out, we all have some knowledge of God and of right and wrong. What this means (to me) is that God’s love is unfailing and universal but when it is rejected, that same love requires that the rejection be permitted. 
          That His love can be rejected brings us to Professor Lewis’ statement. What he’s saying is true, in its context, but I’m going to take an exception to it that I think he’d accept. There is a third sort of person in the end. It is the person who says to God “Thy will be done” and God says back, “Thy will be done” because both God’s will and the person’s will are the same.  
          This fits with what Professor Dallas Willard has said, that it is not God’s will that we do His will, but it is His will that we become the kind of people who do His will. These are the sorts of people who will find drinking for God’s river of delights delightful and who will feast on the abundance of His house. Some may choke it down as Caster Oil, but many are likely to spill out the water and spit out the food as tasting vile. It’s all in  your perspective.

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