Ezekiel 33:11 – Say to them, “As I live,” declares the Lord God, “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?”
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If you know me, you will know that I believe in the Bible’s teaching of God’s sovereignty over all things, including over our salvation. I do not doubt for one minute that, if any person is saved, they are saved by God and not by their own righteousness (including righteous decision-making). In this, I do not negate that God commands all people to have faith in Jesus Christ. However, as Romans 3:10-12 makes it plain, no person will, on their own, come to faith in Christ without God first doing something to change them.
With that said, I want to make a comment in verse 11 of Ezekiel 33 that needs to be heard by my own camp in this discussion. God takes no pleasure, absolutely none, in the death of the wicked. God has no pleasure in pouring out his wrath over a sinner who has, by that sinner’s own free will, chosen not to repent of his or her sin and come to Christ for mercy. God is never indifferent to the lostness of the lost. Though we may not be able to work out how this all works in the light of his sovereign grace, we can not deny the truthfulness of the fact that God does not want the wicked to perish.
Two things at least should come of this thought. First, we too must learn to have God’s heart when thinking about the lost. If God’s heart breaks at the thought of a lost person being damned, ours should break too. If God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, not even in the death of international terrorists and pedophiles (the very people whose deaths do not tend to bother me), that we need to learn to find even those deaths to be occasions of sorrow in our own hearts.
Second, this verse ought to effect our evangelism. No matter how strongly you believe in God’s sovereignty, you can not escape the conclusion that God does not like it when people perish. Thus, if you love your God, you will share the gospel with passion, regardless of any discussion of election. The fact is, we love God’s sovereignty because it is taught in scripture and it frees us to share the gospel with confidence, honesty, passion, and trust that God will do his own will. At the same time, sovereignty does not remove God’s own sadness over the death of the wicked; and sovereignty must not remove our sadness over the death of any lost person. Let us learn to share the gospel passionately, because we too are touched by the horror of the lostness of the lost.
God is sovereign. When eternity rolls around, we will not sit there and say that something happened in the eternal scheme of things that was not right. Yet, we also should want to sit on the other side of eternity with the understanding that, so far as it depended on us, we shared the gospel with every person we possibly could in the deep desire that as many as would be saved were saved.
Pastor Travis Peterson 