The Case for Free Will

by Ron Smith, MD | Jan 1, 2026

My wife related one day how her hairdresser said she explained the love of God to her daughter. This well-meaning mother told her child, “God doesn’t love everybody.” This woman attends a local church whose pastor told me directly that he is a Calvinist. When I shared this story with other Christian friends, many were unaware and even shocked to hear what this man believes and teaches to his flock, because he doesn’t do so by saying, “I’m a Calvinist, so I believe God doesn’t love everyone.”

The reality seems to be many pastors and teachers believe what I contend is a false teaching. They pass on to their fellow unwitting Christian flock in a way that hides the term “Calvinism.” Calvinism begins with the five points called the “Tulip,” but the sum of this flawed thinking is exactly what that hairdresser mother told her young daughter.

The word “reformed” is code for Calvinism, i.e. God only loves the “elect” or chosen. Several years ago, I remember hearing about a Reformed pastor who was asked by one of his congregants, “Can I really tell people who aren’t believers that God loves them?” He replied, “Absolutely!” In other words, this pastor was condoning what he believed to be a lie to unsaved people.

For Calvinists, the “elect” or chosen in the New Testament doesn’t mean the same thing when the Old Testament says the nation of Israel is chosen. The terms chosen or elect cannot meaningful mean for Israel that all of them will be saved. Why then do Calvinists interpret that to mean some are saved and some are not from the New Testament? What were Israel and all the Christians chosen for if not to spread the good news of his unconditional love to the rest of the world? What better way for him to reach the world than to choose a formed nation and an unformed group of people to convey his central character of unconditional love?

I will not haggle over dissected verses, which Calvinists like to parade in support of their belief that God doesn’t love everyone unconditionally. My logic alone buries this warped theology. Before you can understand what the phrase “unconditional love” means, you need to understand the difference between eternity and timelessness.

We live in eternity, which is the stream of unending time that began when God created the heavens and the earth. God did not “begin” when created eternity. He pre-existed eternity in timelessness, where there is no such thing as one moment to the next.

That’s what he means when he says, “I am that I am.” What he is now, will forever be hence, and was before he created everything is the same. He is Elohim, and he does not change.

While we can speak of what was “before” creation, we cannot describe in any human terms “when” God first thought something. There is no such thing as when for a timeless being, and he is the only timeless being there is. For a timeless God, all our times are “now.” To him, its like peering through an endless deck of transparent cards representing the moments of all creation from beginning to end, and seeing each of us at all points in our life simultaneously.

Regardless of the difficulty in wrapping our minds around this truth, no one can conclude that He suddenly decided to create man. Attempting to apply the confines of our moment-to-moment existence to God may force us into beliefs such as Calvinism, but it will not pull and restrict a timeless God into our boundary of time.

If God does not love some of us, then by what criteria did he decide who to love? Did he look through that endless deck of cards, pull out all those moments one by one to see if somehow we met his criteria so he could “love” certain ones of us?

Certainly, he cannot see anything but all of our moments as a composite picture of who we are, but suppose for a moment that he does pick and choose who to love and who to condemn to be saved or unsaved. This leaves two groups of people, who at first seem to be different, when, in reality, both groups are the same. Those who are “loved” are no less God’s slaves than those who are not. Being “loved” becomes meaningless.

He does not call us slaves. He calls us sons. If, though being sons, we somehow excuse that logic and go on to believe we are truly “loved,” what then? Does his “criteria” for selecting specific individuals to be loved or unloved still jibe with his character of “unconditional” love? If he really has unconditional love, then there cannot be any such criteria.

There are only two logical possibilities. First, God loves us all, even those among us who’ve committed the most vile acts imaginable. Second, he loves only those who meet some imagined criteria conjured up in our mind. The other possibility — that God does not care — is excluded when you think about how he called everything he created good and nothing bad before Adam and Eve disobeyed him. Perhaps you’re thinking God created everything because somehow an all-knowing, timeless, and all-powerful being needed something he made? That logic is self-defeating and dies before the punctuation mark at the end.

Some describe agape love from the New Testament as the “God kind of love.” What is that but a way around using the word “unconditional” before the word love? The Hebrew equivalent of the Greek word agape is hesed, which means “unfailing love, loyal love, devotion, kindness, often based on a prior relationship, especially a covenant relationship.” Covenant is a non-transactional relationship, which means God agrees to uphold his word whether or not we do. That “God kind of love” is really a covenantal love, which cannot be broken by any criteria he might see in our stream of time.

If a timeless God really uses any predetermined criteria or criteria based on our behavior in the stream of time, then there is no such thing as a “God kind of love.” The conclusion must be that either he loves us all, regardless, or he actually loves no one and his existence does not differ from any fairytale character you might imagine.

Therefore, if God exists, then he must be wholly and completely loving. Among those who would relegate him to a fairytale character, many attempts are proposed to support such a belief. Evolution was not the first. Babylon is known to be the source for the creation of other “gods” as a way to defeat our creator. At the other extreme, atheists propose there is no such thing as God.

Disproving both polytheism and atheism really pivots on our own sense of justice. That means all of us have some innate compass for what we consider right or wrong. The evidence of this is simple. Has anyone challenged by a perceived injustice not thought or exclaimed, “That’s not fair?” We all have, because we all bear a copy of God’s heart for what is right, which C. S. Lewis called the Law of Human Nature. No one can escape this unerasable mark of our creator, especially not polytheists or atheists.

There is only one God, immovable by the events of time, always unconditionally loving, manifested by enduring, never-ending justice, mercy, kindness, long-suffering, and patience. He cannot be both loving and unloving.

At the end of man’s reign on earth, Jesus Christ will reign openly, unhidden. His love will not reach those who choose to lock themselves away in a dark prison cell of their own making. He will not stop loving them, even to the point where he gives them exactly what they each want — total separation from him.

Even from before time, he knew all this, and it grieved him. These self-created chains of darkness he must grant because he is unconditionally, covenantally loving.

As for my wife’s hairdresser, how does she give her daughter complete assurance that God really does love her? How does anyone know God loves them if they believe he doesn’t love some?