Volition And Human Salvation

If God has to choose someone before they are capable of choosing him, and if God wants everyone to be saved, then why is it that not all people are saved?  I want to exemplify the utterly illogical nature of any supposed "Biblical" teaching that God must choose for a person to be saved before that man or woman can freely choose to align with God.

Let us see how this idea survives an examination of Biblical theology.  The Bible itself clearly describes in Matthew 7 that the road to destruction is broad and many travel on it.  Thus, according to the Bible the majority of humans will not end up saved.  It is also stated with undeniable clarity that the God of the Bible wants every person to be saved (2 Peter 3:9, 1 Timothy 2:3-4).  Either there really isn't a choice on the part of humans to be saved, meaning that God is responsible for the damnation of the unsaved and does not desire for everyone to be saved, or humans do have a choice in accepting or rejecting restoration to God and thus no one is exempt from making this choice, meaning God can still truly want the salvation of all men and women.

This isn't that difficult to realize!  I sometimes find myself astonished at how people will try to minimize any controversy that discussions over this issue will generate in the church, when clear knowledge of God's character is at stake.  One of these ideas of God renders us all helpless puppets (at least with regards to salvation) and then arbitrarily punishes or saves us at random, and the other offers an actual choice to each person in respect of the autonomy God himself imbued humans with.  It is not difficult to verify that a concept of a puppeteer God who nullifies free will cannot be reconciled with the Bible.

Perhaps there are passages in the Bible which we cannot fully understand regarding God's foreknowledge or his role in illuminating human minds.  But any view of God that credits him with needing to initiate a human choice to be saved, without which a human will not or cannot be saved, cannot survive comparison with what verses in the Bible clearly and without ambiguity say about God's hope that all people will be restored to him.  Indeed, such a God is a deceiver at best (for placing contradictory claims about himself in the Bible) or he is logically impossible at worst and thus not the real God.