Notice the following foolish error in the book we are reviewing: “Why say ‘He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father’ if the Father loves everybody?” (p. 248). Who said that the Father loves everybody? Let us keep with the very words of divine inspiration and say, “God so loved the world, that He gave.” It is God that loves the world, not the Father. Furthermore, there is a special love of complacency in the Father for those who love His Son — “He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father.” Mr. Pink attacks such a differentiation, but it is there nonetheless. He misuses Hebrews 12:66For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. (Hebrews 12:6) in the same way when quoting, “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,” saying that God’s love is restricted to members of His own family (p. 248). Does it need to be said that this again is not God’s love to the world — the world of mankind? It is the children in the family who are disciplined in love by the Father. He also confuses Ephesians 5:2525Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; (Ephesians 5:25) with John 3:1616For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16), but let it be noted that “Christ . . . loved the church, and gave Himself for it,” but God loved the world. It does not say that Christ loved the world, nor that God loved the church. Why cannot men quote Scripture as it is given and revel in its perfect exactitude as evidence of divine inspiration?
Mr. Pink becomes rather daring in the following: “ ‘God so loved the world.’ Many suppose that this means the entire human race. But the entire human race includes all mankind from Adam to the close of Earth’s history: It reaches backward as well as forward! Consider, then, the history of mankind before Christ was born. Unnumbered millions lived and died before the Saviour came to the earth, lived here ‘having no hope and without God in the world,’ and therefore passed out into an eternity of woe. If God ‘loved’ them, where is the slightest proof thereof ?” (pp. 248249). This almost savors of replying “against God.” Let such as endorse Mr. Pink’s grave error read Romans 1 and hold their peace. In that chapter we are told that at one time the human race knew God —“that, when they knew God” — all who came out of the ark had the knowledge of God, and the long lives of the patriarchs from the flood to the tower of Babel made it possible for men to learn of God through their ancestors. Shem, Noah’s son, was still living when Isaac was past fifty years of age, although Isaac was born about 500 years after the flood. But they did not like to retain that knowledge. They gave up God, and God gave them up to uncleanness. They had also the testimony of God in creation: “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in [rather, to] them; for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” Here is the right answer. God never left man without a testimony of Himself, and men at all times were responsible for whatever revelation He was pleased to give them. The infidel today inquires about the heathen, asking what God will do with them, but Mr. Pink disposes of that question by an assumption of his own, that God designed to cast them all into hell. This in our judgment is very serious. Who gave Mr. Pink the right to speak for God?
We cannot but think of Job’s friends when we read Mr. Pink’s book. They did not speak right about God: “It was so, that after the Lord had spoken these words unto Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of Me the thing that is right, as My servant Job hath” (Job 42:77And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these words unto Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath. (Job 42:7)). Job had been through a hard school and had learned about himself, but he had not said things that misrepresented God, as his friends had, and which we are persuaded Mr. Pink has done.
Again, Mr. Pink argues that God could not have loved the world as representing the whole human race, for half of the human race “was already in hell when Christ came” (p. 251). What does he mean, “In hell”? There are none in hell yet, for the first two men who will go there will be the Roman beast and the false prophet in Jerusalem, and that has not happened. (See pages 4346 for comments on this point.) If he means those that died without faith are lost, we grant it. But how does he know how many in old times had faith in God? The Old Testament mentions individuals here and there who were not Jews who evidently had faith. Was not Job one of these? When he says, “The objects of God’s love in John 3:1616For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16) are precisely the same objects of Christ’s love in John 13:11Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. (John 13:1),” he is sadly mistaken. Why does he not make “His own” in John 1:1111He came unto his own, and his own received him not. (John 1:11) the same as “His own” in John 13:11Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. (John 13:1)? It would be just as reasonable and just as wrong. The former were the Jews as a people, the latter the Jews who had faith in Him.
When Mr. Pink asks, “Is it conceivable that God will love the damned in the lake of fire? Yet, if He loves them now, He will do so then, seeing that His love knows no change — He is ‘without variableness or shadow of turning’!” (p. 248). This is just plain sophistry. Wrath and judgment, the just deserts of sin, are not incompatible with love.