Objection 38

From Sovereign Grace and the Scope of Election: A Comparative Examination of Attainment Theology and Grace Theology, with Particular Attention to the Question of Whether God's Elect Are Found Among All Nations and Religions

1 Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9. God "will have all men to be saved" and is "not willing that any should perish." Election contradicts God's expressed will.

1 Timothy 2 opens by urging prayer "for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority", all kinds and stations of men, including the persecuting powers a first-century church was tempted to exclude. God will have all sorts of men saved, kings and slaves, Jews and Gentiles, which is precisely the doctrine of Revelation 5:9 and of this document. 2 Peter 3:9 carries its own restriction: "the Lord... is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any [of us] should perish, but that all should come to repentance", the "us" being "them that have obtained like precious faith with us" (2 Peter 1:1), the elect to whom the epistle is addressed; the delay of Christ's coming waits for the ingathering of every last one of them. And observe the trap in the objection: if these verses teach God's decretive will to save every individual, then either universalism is true or God's will is defeated on the grandest possible scale. The attainment system believes in neither a saved world nor an omnipotent failure, so the attainment position already reads "all" as something less than every individual. The only question left is whether God's saving will is bounded by man's veto (their reading) or accomplishes its whole intention (Isaiah 46:10, "my counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure"; Daniel 4:35).