Most of my life I just took it as a given. God loves every single person but when you look at the huge gap in quality of life between people…
Does God really love everyone equally?
Don’t confuse “loves” for “gives the same stuff to”. Jesus himself ended up poor and executed, and father didn’t love him any less for it. But the gap in quality of life isn’t nothing either… Scripture spends a lot of time telling the comfortable to do something about it.
Yes, God loves everyone, but not everyone ends up in the same relationship with him or has the same life here on Earth.
I keep noticing how often Scripture ties faithfulness to taking care of people in need.
The way I read it, unequal quality of life is a call for those of us who are comfortable to show God’s love through generosity and justice.
If everyone got the same life here on Earth, I’d be a billionaire with perfect knees, but His love never promised identical paths.
The relationship has a lot of us in it, our choices.
We treat a comfortable life like a receipt for God’s affection… Scripture is full of people God loved who had rough, painful lives.
I’ve been working on delighting myself in the Lord more consistently (Psalm 37:4 especially), and it’s shifted how I think about this question. When you start desiring what God desires, the blessing becomes the relationship itself.
1 John 3:10 draws a line, children of God and children of the devil. Then there’s ‘God is love’…
Anyone else wrestled with reconciling the two?
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John is describing how people live, not measuring how much God cares about each person… In the same letter, God’s love is shown in sending his Son (1 John 4:9-10). It gives us no reason to assume that someone facing a harder life is less loved by God.
I struggle here… The idea that God loves people who end up in eternal suffering (eternal being the part I can’t get past) is something I wrestle with.
Has anyone else found the ‘God loves everyone’ message gets harder to hold onto once you think about what eternal punishment means?
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God is love. It means His nature, His essence, is love itself and he doesn’t feel loving sometimes, love is who He is.
When we wonder about the gaps in life circumstances, we can trust that love is measured by who He is toward us.
I think He loves us all equally and the difference is how close we choose to get. Some people lean in and feel that love and comfort, while others keep their distance.
That “first will be last, last will be first” thing Jesus kept saying. We assume people with easier lives are the ones he favors most, but he seemed to say the opposite.
The love of Jesus reaches everyone… even when he was up on the cross.
God loved the world enough to give His only Son, so that whoever believes would have eternal life… Whoever.
I think the invitation in that verse feels open to all.
“Love the sinner, hate the sin” gets overused to the point of meaninglessness, but Augustine was onto something. That psalm about God hating evildoers and John 3:16 about God loving the world don’t contradict each other. He despises the action, not the person he created.
We shield ourselves from the sun and rain that Scripture says God sends to everyone equally.
Adam and Eve’s first instinct was to hide, to cover themselves from His presence… And we’re still doing it. God pours out love through creation itself, giving life and the chance to love Him back and across all of human history our response has been to find shade.
Colossians 3:14 says love ties everything together, and 1 John 4:8 says God is love. Maybe he hates our choices, not us as people.
Jesus says we have to hate our family to follow him, but 1 John 2:9-10 says if we hate someone we’re still in darkness, so the word must mean something different.
He sent Jesus for the whole world not just certain groups… That part feels equal, even if the daily stuff doesn’t line up.
The cross is the measure of His love, not your circumstances. That’s where He answered this for every single person.