Does God want some to go to hell?
Universal wishes for salvation are set against divine actions that obstruct understanding and lead people toward condemnation.
- Textual conflict
- Interpretive tension
- The passages pull in different directions, but the conflict depends on how their wording, scope, or narrative context is read.
- Importance
- Foundational
- A central claim about origins, salvation, divine justice, or religious authority.
Universal desire for salvation conflicts with God deliberately preventing conversion and sending delusion toward condemnation, although prior wrongdoing supplies a stated punitive context.
An editorial assessment of the quoted passages. Importance describes the stakes; it does not increase certainty. Reading order weighs both.
God wants everyone saved and brought to repentance
For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour; Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.