A Christian & Agnostic Debate God's Love in Light of His Judgment

Hello all, this is the first round of an online friendly debate between myself, Thomas Booher, a Calvinist Christian, and David Delmar, an agnostic. We do not know how many rounds we will go yet, but the only rule is that we cannot exceed 1500 words in our replies per round. The first round will be each of us presenting our opening statements, and all subsequent rounds will be responses to each other's opening statements.

With that said, let us begin by introducing the debate topic, which I will be arguing for in the affirmative, and David in the negative which is:

“God’s judgment and eternal damnation are consistent with His perfect benevolence toward and love of mankind.”

Round 1 (Thomas Booher's opening statement):

I confess the God of the Bible, as the one and only triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons, one essence/being. His original creation is a perfect expression of His nature. 

God is not expressing love and benevolence when He judges and damns. Objects of love aren’t damned. So we have to make some distinctions. Can God have a good will (benevolence) and love (care/concern/bond) for those He ultimately will cast into hell? In their upright and unfallen condition, yes, insofar as mankind is made in God’s image and is His handiwork.

When God made the first man, Adam, and his wife Eve from the body of Adam, God loved them, and He loved all their potential progeny given their state of uprightness and innocence. Genesis tells us that God created man in His own image and likeness, that man is the crown of creation, being fruitful and multiplying in order to fill and subdue the earth for God’s glory and their delight. God did not set enjoyment and glorifying God at odds. As John Piper has put it, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him,” or as he put it elsewhere, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.” You cannot fully glorify God as a human being made in God’s image, without enjoying God to the maximum. Glorifying God, serving and loving and obeying Him, was never meant to be a killjoy, but rather the source, expression, and pinnacle of joy. 

Scripture describes the relationship Christians have to Christ as a faithful bride to her loving husband. There is a deep, warm, one-flesh intimacy, the husband being the loving, leading, providing and protecting head of the wife and home, with the wife being the husband’s body, whose delights to take on his surname (as Christians take on Christ’s name) and glorify her husband in joyful obedience, tending to the things he has provided her for the delight of herself and her whole family, multiplying and developing it. The family, then, is God’s creative purpose write small, the basic building block of society.   

But society today generally does not like the idea of obedience, especially not where a wife is expected to “obey” her husband. I suppose some in society can still stomach the idea of children needing to obey their parents, but this too is slipping away because the foundation for such belief has slipped and become repulsive. God is the source of submission because He is the source of authority, but our nation in general rebels against that ultimate benevolent authority. If I don’t have to submit and obey almighty God, why should I obey mom or dad, or my husband, or my boss, or my government? The fallout of this mentality is rebellion and revolution, against all authority and structures, the good and the bad. 

But when we recognize that there is such a thing as a good and benevolent authority and submission to authority, then certainly we would grant that the ultimate good authority whom we should gladly submit to for our good is our Creator. Of course, a tyrant is no legitimate authority, and is not benevolent. But God is not a tyrant, He has not usurped authority, and He is benevolent and loving in His very nature/being. He has an inherent right within Himself, not bestowed upon Him by His Creator, but His because He is Creator, to do with His creation whatever His benevolence desires. 

The God of the Bible has created us to find our maximum delight in glorifying Him, and our relationship to God is likened to a joyful wife taking on the name of her husband, serving him by stewarding their house with gladness. Scripture says that all sinners redeemed in Christ will inherit the earth, the universe, all things, with Jesus, and will even rule and reign with Him. So when Christians serve Jesus by being fruitful and multiplying, filling the earth and subduing it in all righteousness, they do this for a kingdom, which is this world renewed, which they will inherit, and not as slaves or servants, but as children of God, adopted into His family through the sacrificial, atoning blood of Christ. Christians enter into resurrection life, life after sin and wickedness and all sorrow is done away with(!), through Christ’s own resurrection from the dead as they are covenanted to Him, becoming one with Him as creatures. 

Why was Jesus needed? Because in the Garden of Eden Satan tempts Adam and Eve, and they listen to his lies rather than God’s truth (in God’s world under His rules, which reflect His own benevolent being).

What, at this crucial point, ought God do? Adam, and Eve with him, have at this moment committed spiritual adultery. They have bedded a rival suitor, Satan, father of all lies and all that is evil. They have turned from their loving Creator, with whom they had a wonderful, loving bond, immense freedom and protection, and have turned to what they think will be greener pastures by throwing off God’s authority and taking hold of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, at the literal advice of Satan! 

What does this mean? This means they were giving God the middle finger concerning their submission to His will, in His world, as His creatures whom He loved. They were saying that Satan, a corrupt creature, should instead be heeded, and his rebellion followed to determine right and wrong and find wisdom for themselves, by leaving the source of all wisdom. 

This, of course, is a fool’s quest. If you live in a created world, only the Sovereign Creator can determine goodness, truth, and beauty because it adheres in Him. You can rebel and deny objective goodness, truth, and beauty, but you cannot do anything about its reality (though by rebelling you have now changed your reality and become wicked, false, and ugly). Love, Goodness, truth, is unchangeable, because it originates in God the Creator and He never changes. To determine wisdom yourself you must become wisdom, must become God, so you must destroy and murder God Himself, impossible to do to an immortal, immutable being. 

Besides, what kind of monster wants to destroy goodness, truth, and beauty Himself? Yet in the Garden this is precisely what Adam and Eve attempted, rebellion against God to establish their own supremacy. They attempted a tyrannical coup, to go from the privileged position of God’s vicegerents, enjoying the world God kindly gave them, to supplanting God in order to become God themselves, as Satan their new father himself desired to be. 

Adam’s love for God had turned to bitter hatred, destructive, hell-bent rebellion. If treason against your own nation should be a capital offense, how much more should treason against the Creator of all nations, of all worlds, be a capital crime? Adam, and all his posterity connected to him who inherited his sinful nature, deserved to die. Justice demanded it. God’s justice, God’s benevolence and love, demanded that He uphold what is just and lovely and true, and punish what isn’t. The wages of sinful rebellion really is death, eternal and final. That is a righteous judgment of God, an equitable punishment for attempted deicide. If a man has a right to sever the covenant bond of marriage to his wife for infidelity and even trying to murder him, how much more right does God, the perfect husband, have to cast off his unfaithful bride that attempted to murder Him? 

God’s benevolence and love toward mankind is perfect, it is holy. A sane person does not love one who incessantly betrays and seeks to destroy him. God is a sane God, and His benevolence and love is sane. God does not love His creatures no matter what they do, that would be unholy and insane, just as we should not love another person no matter what they do. All mankind is fallen in Adam, and only deserves contempt and judgment for their incessant rebellion against God. Mankind is worthy of wrath, of judgment and punishment, of destruction. 

We realize in earthly government that some are so corrupt they deserve to die, and in fact their death is an act of love and benevolence for the rest of mankind. But if we grant this wisdom of righteous judgments on earth, we have to grant it in heaven to God Himself, who is infinitely more worthy of obedience and infinitely more wise as judge in determining punishment for disobedience. Scripture reveals that God destroys the wicked through Christ to give to Christ and His bride (whom Christ redeemed from their wickedness with His own life and death), all things made new, perfected, without sin and sorrow. So God’s judgment and damnation is simultaneously justice toward those worthy of judgment and gracious benevolence and love toward His faithful, redeemed bride.