Is God’s Love Open To Everyone?

Let’s see if we can clear up some poor understanding about God’s love.

Imagine this time in history is over and you are dressed in your white robe, standing before the Throne, singing with an enormous crowd. Who do you imagine is nearby? I am sure there are family members and beloved friends on your list, especially those who have gone on before you. But how would you describe the crowd? You might be happy to know that John, the author of Revelation, says that the Great Commission worked. Remember it?

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:19-20

Not long after Jesus gave these marching orders, the apostles scattered across the known world to make sure this message reached everyone. While the book of Acts documents how Paul traveled exhaustively across the Mediterranean to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles, church tradition tells us that the other apostles traveled just as far in completely different directions.

For instance, tradition holds that Thomas traveled all the way to India, establishing churches that still exist today. Andrew is said to have taken the message north into Scythia—the region around the Black Sea and modern-day Ukraine and Russia—as well as Greece. Bartholomew reportedly traveled into Armenia and parts of India, while Matthew took the good news to Ethiopia and regions in Persia.

Even Peter, before eventually landing in Rome, spent time ministry-building in Antioch and regions across Asia Minor. Each of them took a different path, but they carried the same message. They risked their lives and crossed massive cultural boundaries because they understood the Gospel was never meant to stay locked inside one region—it was always intended for the entire world.

We know that today we have missionaries all over the globe continuing their good work, and that is why that crowd we spoke of earlier is described as this:

“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands,” Revelation 7:9

The Bible ends exactly where it began—showing that God’s plan has always been to bring the whole world into His family. Jesus echoed this in John 3:16. He did not mean only people of one race or skin color. In fact, since He was speaking to a fellow Jewish man at the time, He plainly was not limiting His love to any single group. He meant all humans everywhere. The Gospel message is for everyone who is open to hearing it.

No Room For Hate

This means if you carry hate in your heart toward any person or group of people for any reason, you are acting like an enemy of God. Scripture makes it explicitly clear that hatred and the love of God cannot coexist in the human heart. The apostle John writes directly about this contradiction, stating that anyone who claims to belong to God while harboring hatred is living in spiritual blindness and falsehood:

“Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have seen.” 1 John 4:20

John reinforces this by explicitly linking hatred to spiritual darkness and physical death, declaring, “Anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness” (1 John 2:11), and further warns that “anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him” (1 John 3:14-15).

If you do it while calling yourself a Christian, you are blaspheming the name of Christ.

The Love of God Connects People

When you carry God’s love, differences in culture, gender, physical appearance, mental ability, political affiliation, economics, and ethnicity no longer create roadblocks. You begin to realize that a person’s story is more important than how you might describe them to a restaurant host if you are meeting them for lunch. Scripture puts it plainly: Christ Himself is our peace, having broken down the wall that once divided us, making one new humanity out of the divisions we cling to (Ephesians 2:14–18).

And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. Colossians 3:14

Are You Using Hate to Boost Your Own Ego?

We also have to understand the psychological truth behind this: when you try to diminish someone else, it is rarely about them. It is almost always about how you feel inside. Diminishing another person is a standard human reflex to cover up our own insecurities, fears, or unaddressed brokenness. We tear down someone else’s value just to artificially inflate our own. This is known as downward social comparison.

Changing the World With God’s Love

There is a need for change, a need for reform, justice, and equality. Our righteous discontent is valid and necessary—and it loses none of its force when it is carried in love.

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love [for others growing out of God’s love for me], then I have become only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal [just an annoying distraction]. 1 Corinthians 13:1 (AMP)

You cannot hate someone into agreeing with you. It is absurd to even try. A person treated like an enemy will dig in and never agree with you. So when you attack someone in person or online, you are guaranteeing they will oppose you.

We need to have discussions about change, not adversarial debates.

This does not mean we have to be silent and soft-spoken in drawing attention to the problems we see. We need to be loud and noticeable, just not in a way that creates more problems. We cannot control how others choose to act, but we can do things the right way ourselves.

The other problem with creating an enemy is that it is often a strategy used by leaders to distract you and blame all the problems and lack of progress on someone else. It lowers your objectivity and creates blind loyalty to a cause.

Instead, we need to be praying for those who are in our way. We need to love them, and if we really want change, we need to try and share the Gospel with them. Not a false Gospel that serves a political group or a race, the true one that ends with us in white robes with representatives of every tribe, language, and nation in the crowd with us.

Seeing Others Through the Eyes of God

Scripture used or considered in the writing of “Is God’s Open to Everyone?” By RD Montgomery All Scripture quoted is in ESV format unless otherwise specified.