Does God Love Everyone? - Paperback

Does God Love Everyone? — The Surprising Biblical Answer

Jesus loves me, this I know.

Most Christians have sung those words from childhood. They are among the first things many people learn about the Christian faith — simple, warm, and deeply reassuring. And yet for many sincere and searching people, the confidence those words express is precisely what is hardest to hold on to.

They believe, in some general sense, that God is love. They believe that Jesus came to save the world. But when it comes to the personal, specific, fully inhabited conviction that God loves them — that the love of God is not a general benevolence toward humanity in the abstract but a real, particular, personally directed love for them in all their specific brokenness and failure — that belief is far more difficult.

And behind that personal struggle lies a theological question that deserves a careful, honest, and genuinely biblical answer:

Does God love everyone?

In this concise and accessible booklet from the 9Marks Church Questions series, pastor and author Matt McCullough takes up that question — not with a quick reassurance or a theological brushoff, but with the kind of careful, Scripture-directed engagement that the question genuinely deserves. His answer is both surprising and deeply personally significant — and it has the potential to transform the way every reader understands the love of God for the world and for themselves.

A Question That Deserves a Careful Answer

The question of whether God loves everyone might seem, at first glance, to have an obvious answer. Of course God loves everyone — he is love, and love is his essential character. End of discussion.

But McCullough shows that the question is more theologically complex and more personally significant than the obvious answer suggests — and that engaging with its complexity, rather than bypassing it, is actually what leads to the deepest and most personally sustaining understanding of what the love of God actually is.

Because the Bible talks about the love of God in more than one way. It speaks of a love that is universal — a genuine benevolence, a genuine care, a genuine desire for the good of every human being that God has made. And it speaks of a love that is particular — a specific, covenant, saving love directed at those who trust in Jesus Christ, a love that is not merely generous sentiment but the love of a Father for his children.

These two dimensions of God’s love are not contradictions to be resolved by choosing one and dismissing the other. They are both genuinely taught in Scripture. And understanding how they relate to one another — what it means that God genuinely loves all people and also specifically loves those who trust in him — is the key to understanding both the breadth of the gospel’s invitation and the depth of the security it offers to everyone who responds to it.

Two Dimensions of God’s Love

God’s Genuine Love for All People McCullough shows that Scripture does teach a genuine, universal love of God for every human being — a love expressed in common grace, in the provision of rain and harvest and the goods of ordinary life, in the patience with which God endures human rebellion rather than immediately executing the judgment it deserves, and supremely in the sending of his Son into the world so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

This is not a theoretical or merely formal love. It is genuine — a real expression of the character of a God who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, who calls all people everywhere to repentance, and who makes the offer of salvation freely and sincerely available to every human being without exception. The gospel invitation is not a performance — it is a genuine expression of God’s genuine desire that all people would come to him and find life.

God’s Specific Love for Those Who Trust in Him But the Bible also speaks of a love that is specific, particular, and uniquely directed toward those who are united to Christ by faith — a love that is more than benevolence, more than general goodwill, more than the common grace that God extends to all. It is the love of a Father for his adopted children — the love that chose them before the foundation of the world, that sent the Son specifically to die for them, that draws them irresistibly to faith, that keeps them through every trial, and that will ultimately bring them safely home to the inheritance that has been prepared for them.

This particular love does not contradict or diminish the universal love. But it is genuinely different from it — and understanding the difference is what gives believers the deep, personal, unshakeable assurance that the love of God for them is not conditional on their performance, not threatened by their failures, and not merely general sentiment but a specific, personal, covenant commitment that nothing can separate them from.

The Surprising Answer

Why does McCullough describe the biblical answer as surprising?

Because it is not the answer that either of the most common instincts about God’s love would lead us to expect.

The instinct that says God loves everyone equally in exactly the same way — without any distinction between those who trust him and those who do not — leads to a vision of divine love that is broad but ultimately not very deep or personally meaningful. A love that makes no distinction between those who respond to it and those who reject it is not the kind of love that the Bible describes or that the human heart most deeply needs.

The instinct that says God only loves those who believe — that his love is entirely conditional on faith — leads to a different problem: an anxiety-producing uncertainty about whether one’s own faith is genuine enough or strong enough to secure that love, and a gospel invitation that sounds less like a sincere offer and more like a selective announcement.

The biblical answer that McCullough draws out is genuinely different from both — and genuinely better than either. It is an answer that affirms the sincerity and the universality of God’s love and invitation, while also affirming the specific, particular, covenant depth of the love he has for those who are his. And holding both of those truths together, in the way that Scripture itself holds them, produces exactly the combination of evangelical urgency and personal assurance that the Christian life requires.

What This Booklet Will Help You Do

• Understand clearly both dimensions of God’s love — his genuine love for all people and his specific love for those who trust in him — and how they relate to one another
• Find genuine, biblical personal assurance that the love of God for you is not a vague generality but a specific, particular, covenant commitment
• Understand why the biblical answer to this question is more surprising and more personally significant than the obvious answer suggests
• Help friends, family members, or new believers who struggle to believe that God genuinely loves them to find the biblical grounding for that conviction
• Engage thoughtfully with the theological complexity of God’s love without losing the personal warmth and the pastoral encouragement that the subject calls for
• Develop a richer, more biblically grounded understanding of the love of God that is capable of sustaining faith through doubt, suffering, and the daily challenges of the Christian life
• Use this booklet as a starting point for deeper conversation about the character of God, the nature of the gospel, and what it means personally to be loved by him

Who Should Read This Book?

Does God Love Everyone? is essential reading for:

• New believers who are still forming their understanding of who God is and what his love for them actually means — and who need a clear, accessible, biblically grounded answer to one of the most personally significant questions they will ever ask
• Christians who struggle with assurance — who believe in God’s love in theory but find it difficult to rest in personally — and who need the specific, particular, covenant love of God to become real and sustaining for them
• Pastors and church leaders wanting a reliable, accessible resource to give to congregation members who are wrestling with questions about God’s love — whether through doubt, suffering, or theological confusion
• Thoughtful seekers who are exploring Christianity and want to understand what the Bible actually teaches about God’s attitude toward them — not what they have assumed, but what Scripture actually says
• Small groups wanting a short, discussion-rich, personally searching study on one of the most fundamental and most personally significant questions in the Christian faith
• Christians in India navigating a diverse religious landscape where questions about whether the Christian God genuinely loves all people — regardless of background, caste, or religion — are urgent and personally felt
• Anyone who has ever wondered — in a dark moment or a quiet one — whether the love of God is really meant for them, or whether it somehow applies to everyone except them

About the Author

Matt McCullough is the pastor of Edgefield Church in Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of Remember Death: The Surprising Path to Living Hope. He is known for his ability to bring careful biblical thinking and genuine pastoral warmth to questions that matter deeply to real people — and Does God Love Everyone? reflects both of those qualities at their best. His treatment of this subject is theologically serious without being cold, personally warm without being sentimental, and biblically grounded without being academic.

About the Church Questions Series

Does God Love Everyone? is part of the 9Marks Church Questions series — eagerly commended by R. Albert Mohler Jr., President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — a collection of short, accessible, biblically grounded booklets that answer the questions that curious Christians and thoughtful seekers most commonly ask about the faith, the church, and the Christian life.

Each booklet is biblically grounded, accessible to ordinary readers, concise enough to read in a single sitting, and practically applied to real decisions and real church life.

Other titles in the Church Questions series available at forthetruth.in include:

• Does the Old Testament Really Point to Jesus?
• Does the Gospel Promise Health and Prosperity?
• What Should I Look For in a Church?
• How Can I Be Sure I’m Saved?
• Is God Really Sovereign?

The Love That Will Not Let You Go

Jesus loves me, this I know.

Those words are simple. But what they point to is not simple at all — it is the deepest, most personally significant, most eternally consequential reality in the universe. The love of the God who made you, who knows everything about you, who sent his Son to die for you, and who offers to you — freely, genuinely, personally — the love that nothing in all creation can separate you from.

Does God Love Everyone? is an invitation to understand that love more clearly, to rest in it more deeply, and to find in it the unshakeable foundation that every human heart is looking for — whether they know it or not.