What's a Lutheran? (10) Christ’s Salvation Is for All People and All Things

Lutherans believe that “in Christ God was reconciling the world” to Godself (2 Cor. 5:19) and that God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4).  God’s offer of grace, mercy, and forgiveness extends to all people, and ultimately the plan and purpose of God is to renew all creation and make all things right.  There is no one and nothing that is outside God’s love or desire for reconciliation and mercy.  No one is unlovable in God’s eyes.  No one was created by God for eternal damnation.

We are also aware, from our own experience, that it is possible to resist God, turn inwards on ourselves, and reject God’s grace and mercy.  This is why we constantly need to return to the gospel and its promise of God’s grace, to turn away from all that keeps us from God, and to put our trust and faith in the God who is constantly calling us back to God and freely giving us the means of grace to enable us to come to God in humility, repentance, and gratitude.

Does that mean that, in the end, everyone is saved, or will some people really wind up condemned forever?  What about people who are not Christians but nonetheless respond to the divine as they understand it?  How does God’s work of salvation in Christ apply to them?  The Lutheran confessions ultimately conclude that the answers to these questions remain hidden in God; we do not know all the mysteries of God’s will and plan and we do not need to know them all.  Rather, we trust in the God revealed to us in Jesus – a God who loves us and desires nothing but our good and the good of our neighbors, a God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34:6), a God who does not stop reaching out to us even when we have turned our backs, a God who raises the dead and is always ready to forgive and renew.