‘Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.’ Now there is no doubt that the fundamental meaning of the ‘all’ here is all nationalities and all conditions of men, Jews and Gentiles, all nations of the world, all types of people, rich and poor, people drawn from every stratum of life. But if you want to read it as a literal ‘all’, you may; it is quite legitimate to do so, because other Scriptures do teach that it is God's wish that all should be saved. 2 Peter 3:9 says, ‘The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.’ It is undoubtedly the wish of God that all should repent, it is the heart of God and the wish of God that all people should repent. Well, if that is the wish of God, we may ask, why is it not the will of God also? If it is the wish of God that all should repent and come to salvation, then why has God not seen to it that it will happen? That is the great question, but of course we cannot answer it. In 2 Peter 3 there is no doubt God is not willing – or, as Calvin puts it, he does not wish – that any should perish. As Calvin said so long ago, ‘Why then do so many perish?’ God stretches out his arms of mercy to all alike, but in his secret will, and his sovereign will – into which we cannot look and which we cannot understand – he grasps only the elect. Nevertheless, his heart and his wish is revealed in that he reaches out to all, even though he grasps only the elect.
We as his people must reflect the heart of God, and this is very important. The apostle Paul reflects the heart of God in this matter. Even though he knows that men and women are so stubborn that they will not respond to the call of mercy – only the elect will by God's overruling grace – yet Paul’s heart is like the heart of God. He says, ‘Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved’ (Romans 10:1). ‘What Paul? Even though they beat you, even though they arrest you, even though they stone you, and try to kill you? Even though you more than any person can see their bigotedness and their pride, yet you have such a heart for them you would prefer for them all to be saved? You know that they are not all going to be saved because of their stubbornness, and only the elect shall be saved. You mean that you still have heart enough to preach to all of them, and to take their punishment?’ ‘Yes,’ says Paul, because his heart is like the heart of God. It is God's wish that all men should be saved and should repent, even though his secret decree is that those whom he has foreordained to life will be saved. We cannot reconcile those things.
You may have heard the story of Spurgeon and how he expressed it. There was once, he put it, a thinker, a scholar, and he had shut himself into his study and locked the door. He had a boy, and small children can inquisitiveness, but he wanted to think through this weighty problem, and of course he was not going to allow any distractions, so he said to his boy, John your father has to do something which you cannot possibly understand or know about, so you must go away, and I'm going to lock the door and go and think. Well of course that was a recipe for disaster. Having told John that this was something he couldn't possibly look into, or understand, the boy was determined to get into that study. He was only a little fellow and his father hadn't been deep in thought for very long, before he heard a scratching noise. His study was evidently up there on the first or the second floor, but this lad had somehow scrambled, tiny as he was, up the vine, and there he was precariously balanced on the windowsill outside the window, peering in. At all costs he must get into this mystery of what his father is up to. So his father had to open the window and grasp the child before he fell to his death. Spurgeon says, that is just like us. God says, there are some things you can't understand, and up we go scrambling up the ladders of speculation, getting into dangerous and precarious positions, because we think we must get to this, and we must look into that. But it is a fact that we cannot resolve it. We believe in the doctrines of grace, and we believe that God has an elect people and he is going to overrule in their hearts. You mustn't say, ‘Well then I can't possibly accept that God is not willing that any should perish. I can't possibly accept that he should have a heart for all.’ But some reason like this, and there are people who stop singing the grand hymn of Charles Wesley (who was kind of half Calvinist, half Arminian, and not so Arminian as his brother), and they won't sing those glorious words: ‘O that the world might taste and see, The riches of His grace! The arms of love that compass me Would all mankind embrace.’ They think they have solved the problem of God's pity and his desire for all, and yet his secret decree that only the elect will be saved. We must preach to all as persuasively as we can. That is why we seek to reach out to the whole community, to the whole city, to the whole world if we can, because we want to represent the heart of God to the human race.
God saves people by bringing them into a knowledge of the truth. Therefore we must tailor our message and our preaching so that people can understand it, and God by the Spirit will use it instrumentally and persuade them by it. A saved heart should be sympathetic to the lost. A saved heart should say, God has saved me and I am not worthy of this. If I am a debtor to him, and to the people around me, to spread this message. A saved heart should be tender and feelingful and concerned for evangelism. Whereas a backslidden heart is a heart that will be smug and exclusive and hide behind the doctrine of election, and complacent about lost souls. What kind of a heart do we have?