One of the many issues I saw in a study on sovereignty at church was this side-by-side statement in our handout:
- God chooses some people for salvation, this is one of His decrees
- Man is responsible for rejecting God
This is the furthest thing from the truth if one understands the “T” in TULIP. We will also visit the “U” and the “I.” Let us start in order of the acronym however.
Man cannot react to, freely, an offer of salvation through enablement’s or grace offered evidence the work at Calvary. Other grace enablement’s that are soaked with the Holy Spirit are the Gospel, preachers teaching from the Word, other Christians witnessing, etc. I do not accept selective regeneration of the elect which precedes faith and necessarily results in faith in Christ “IS” how one is saved (Acts 16:31-32; Romans 1:16).
Calvinists believe that a totally depraved person is spiritually dead. By ‘spiritual death’ they mean the elimination of all human ability to understand or respond to God, not just a separation from God. Further, the effects of sin are intensive (destroying the ability to receive salvation) ~ Geisler, Chosen but Free (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1999), 56.
Pastor Rogers helps us define it as well:
Total Depravity: The whole of man’s being is corrupted by sin and he is, therefore, incapable of doing any eternal spiritual good.
Calvinism’s understanding of total depravity includes a compatibilist view of human nature, unconditional election, and limited and selective regeneration. This means the only interpretive option Calvinism permits for God to be able to redeem such a compatibly defined totally depraved person is that God must give him a new nature (variously called quickening, regeneration, or restoration), which he is pleased to do only for the limited unconditionally elect; thereby, guarantying their subsequent free exercise of faith.
Viewing man from a compatibilist perspective means that while fallen man freely chooses to sin, he cannot freely choose to believe in the gospel unless God gives him a new nature and past that assures he will freely choose to exercise faith in Christ; however, in either state, man cannot choose to do other than he did choose because while freely choosing, he has no salvific choice.
Although it seems most Calvinists in the SBC do believe in regeneration prior to faith, it is true not all Calvinists depend upon regeneration preceding faith. Nevertheless, they all do depend upon on a preceding determinative work of God that changes the elect’s past. This work of God changes their nature from what it was before to something different after the work. This is due to their commitment to compatibilism. Technically, compatibilism requires that given the same past, man cannot choose, in the moral moment of decision, other than he did in fact choose.
Consequently, while some may seek to avoid reliance upon a new nature preceding faith, if they are going to be consistent compatibilists, they must believe God works determinatively in the unconditionally elect so as to change man’s past in order that he can transition from only being able to reject Christ to only being able to accept Christ. Therefore, regardless of what term they choose to employ, it never changes the deterministic nature of salvation nor its limited accessibility. This pre-faith work necessary to exercising faith is intentionally withheld by God from the non-elect.
Ronnie W. Rogers, Does God Love All or Some? Comparing Biblical Extensivism and Calvinism’s Exclusivism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2019), 30-31.
Calvinistic Election says to the unregenerate elect, “Don’t Worry, your Depravity is no obstacle to salvation,” and to the unelect, “Too bad, you have not been predestined for salvation but damnation” (George L Bryson, The Five Points of Calvinism: Weighed and Found Wanting). Here is a definition of Total Depravity’s “inability” (more… longer PDF):
… The doctrine of total depravity is explained as total inability in the writings of some theologians. James Boice and Philip Ryken explained, “In this sad and pervasively sinful state we have no inclination to seek God, and therefore cannot seek him or even respond to the gospel when it is presented to us. In our unregenerate state, we do not have free will so far as ‘believing on’ or ‘receiving’ Jesus Christ as Savior is concerned.”130 They clarified that unbelievers “cannot” respond to the gospel by repenting and believing in Jesus when it is presented. Consistent with article 3 in the Canons of Dort, they taught that a person believes in Jesus after they are born again. Mark DeVine wrote, “Humanity’s fall into sin results in a condition that must be described in terms of spiritual blindness and deadness and in which the will is enslaved, not free.” DeVine continued, “We need to ask whether the Arminian insistence that the work of the Holy Spirit frees the will to either repent and believe or refuse to do so does not evidence a deeper misunderstanding of the nature of depravity itself.”131 John Piper wrote, “Faith is the evidence of new birth, not the cause of it.”132 “Regeneration precedes faith,” R. C. Sproul explained. He added, “We do not believe in order to be born again; we are born again in order to believe.”133 R. Albert Mohler Jr. also affirmed that regeneration precedes faith:
In the mystery of the sovereign purposes of God and by his sheer grace and mercy alone, the Word was brought near to us. As a result, we were called, made alive, and regenerated. We then believed what we otherwise would never have been able to believe, and we grasped hold of it, knowing that it is the sole provision of our need. We came to know of our need and of God’s response and provision for us in Christ, and then we came to know of our necessary response of faith, repentance, confession, and belief.134
According to these views of total depravity, spiritual blindness and deadness results in the enslavement of the human will so that people do not have the ability to repent and believe the message of the gospel unless they are first regenerated, or born again.
[130] James Montgomery Boice and Philip Graham Ryken, The Doctrines of Grace: Rediscovering the Evangelical Gospel (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009), 30; italics in the original.
[131] Mark DeVine, “Total Depravity,” in Barrett and Nettles, Whomever He Wills, 35 (see intro., n. 22).
[132] John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1986), 50.
[133] Robert C. Sproul, Chosen by God (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1986), 72.
[134] R. Albert Mohler Jr., “The Power of the Articulated Gospel,” in The Underestimated Gospel, ed. Jonathan Leeman (Nashville: B&H, 2014), 19.
To further the point, here is John MacArthur explaining it:
Now, any discussion of the doctrine of predestination or the doctrine of divine sovereign election, or, if you will, sovereign salvation as a work of God is based on another doctrine, on another doctrine. God must save us. He must choose us, call us, regenerate us, justify us by his divine power, because we are neither willing nor able to do it for ourselves. And this takes us to what I’m going to call the “doctrine of absolute inability.”
[….]
Especially would I never say to a dead man, “Bill, come forth.” I mean, you wouldn’t waste words. You’d look foolish. Dead men can’t hear. Dead men can’t think. Dead men can’t respond cause they’re dead and dead means the absolute inability to do anything in response to any stimulus. There’s no will. There’s no power to think or act.
[….]
Those who deny the doctrine of divine election, those who deny the doctrine of divine salvation as an act of God have to believe that there’s something in man left to himself that enables him to become willing and to come to life. Is that what the Bible teaches? The Bible doesn’t describe our condition as a disability. It describes it as death. And everybody knows that death means an inability to respond.
[….]
That is not what is meant when theologians refer to total depravity because not everybody is as bad as they could be, and not everybody is as bad as everybody else. What we’re talking about here is what I’ve chosen to call “absolute inability.” What is true of everybody is we have no ability to respond to the gospel. We are completely unable to raise ourselves out of a state of death. We are completely unable to give our blind hearts sight. We are completely unable to free ourselves from slavery to sin. We are completely unable to turn from ignorance to truth. We are completely unable to stop rebelling against God, stop being hostile to His Word.
So far the point about “Man is responsible for rejecting God” is not in the cards. Romans 1:19-20:
- since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made.al As a result, people are without excuse. (CSB).
- God punishes them, because what can be known about God is plain to them, for God himself made it plain. Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made. So those people have no excuse at all! (GNB)
- because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (NASB95)
- For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God himself has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes—his eternal power and divine nature—have been understood and observed by what he made, so that people are without excuse. (ISV)
- since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. (NIV)
- For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (ESV)
Romans continues to say (CSB): “For though they knew God, …. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” So, they knew God, and had the truth, but with the hardening of their hearts and chasing after worldly pleasure and letting their emotions trample on the Imago Dei, they handed over that plain truth to lies and sensuality.
MacArthur and the others contradict the plain reading of Scripture, and they have to throw in Lazarus to try and prove their point by Eisogesis rather that exegesis. Because Christ Himself told us what that story meant.
- Jesus, however, was speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking about natural sleep. So Jesus then told them plainly, “Lazarus has died. I’m glad for you that I wasn’t there so that you may believe…” (John 11:13-15, CSB)
Notice what Jesus didn’t say, via the HCBV (Honest Calvinist Bible Version):
Jesus, however, was speaking about his death, but they thought he was speaking about natural sleep. So Jesus then told them “plainly,”
Lazarus serves as an example that everyone on earth is born spiritually dead. Not everybody is as bad as they could be with their hands, but spiritually they are bad as they could be. Completely blind, unable to respond to any grace enablements, so the words I speak and the truth I present are 100% impossible to be responded to, the 115 passages which condition salvation on believing alone, and about 35 simply on faith… all that is poppycock I tell you, truly!
There is a narrow way in which I effectually call you from before time was created, and nothing you have or will do made God choose you. You were arbitrarily and unconditionally chosen, and the vast majority of people made in my image I [God] chose for perdition, hell. They cannot respond because they are totally unable, not effectually called and drawn irresistibly to truth.
So my death to come soon on Calvary is secondary to that unconditional, arbitrary choice. Sorry, many here I have chosen, irresistibly, to end up in eternal torment — not based on them rejecting anything; because, if you are unconditionally chosen, likewise, you are unconditionally ‘unchosen.’ Too bad, soo ‘sad’ that you have not been predestined for salvation but damnation.
Truly, truly I tell you, that when you’re in heaven, the very few listening to my words I have chosen since before time will be so sanctified that you will be able to see your own mother, brother, sister, best friend standing next to you now — in hell — and rejoice in that, knowing that God’s perfect justice is being carried out. Again I tell you, You will be so sanctified in heaven that you can look into the pit of hell, see your mother there, and be glad.
Remember when I said to Matthew:
- Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
Or what Peter clearly heard, that
- the Lord is not slow about his promise, as some people understand slowness, but is being patient with you. He does not want anyone to perish, but wants everyone to come to repentance.
Those are merely my public statements. Secretly I care for birds more than you and wish most to be damned. I will only allow a very select few to understand this gnosis [secret] of the material flesh being bad and the ‘secret will of my counsel,’ so that much the Gnostics got right — So toughen up buttercup, eternal torture is in store for most hearing and reading my words… not because of anything you didn’t do, but because of what I didn’t do.
I wish to be clear, I realize I told an audience in front of my beloved disciple, John,
- You study the Scriptures, because you think that in them you will find eternal life. And these very Scriptures speak about me! Yet you are not willing to come to me in order to have life.
What I was REALLY SAYING was this:
- You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, but there is no salvation in the book called the Bible unless I irresistible and effectually called you to believe… the Gospel is powerless to effectually save you, and yet they testify about me. But I have not elected you for effectual salvation before the foundation of the world so that you can not irresistibly come to me so that you may have life.
So that you may believe. HOW?
By God forcing you to believe — against your will.
Got it? Good. Selah.
[See: Born Dead? and The Walking Dead]
In other words, Jesus didn’t teach Calvinism. The Calvinist repeatedly uses such unbiblical and utterly fallacious reasoning. The Calvinist also assumes a contradiction between sovereignty and free will that doesn’t exist.
- If God merely foresaw human events, and did not also arrange and dispose of them at his pleasure, there might be room for agitating the question [of free will] …but since he foresees the things which are to happen, simply because he has decreed them, they are so to happen, it is vain to debate about prescience. … If this frigid fiction [of free will] is received, where will be the omnipotence of God, by which, according to his secret counsel on which everything depends, he rules over all? (Calvin, Institutes, III: xxiii, 6–7.)
VERSUS TOZER:
- Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, What doest thou? Mans will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.
Tozer is saying that the Calvinist God is too small. Can I return quickly to Johnny Mac?
He said this of the Lazarus story:
Especially would I never say to a dead man, “Bill, come forth.” I mean, you wouldn’t waste words. You’d look foolish. Dead men can’t hear. Dead men can’t think. Dead men can’t respond cause they’re dead and dead means the absolute inability to do anything in response to any stimulus. There’s no will. There’s no power to think or act.
What I personally view as foolish is that God is made to look like a fool with that non-Biblical retelling through the lens of a systematic invented in the 16th century. If [BIG IF] the “T” from TULIP is correct, why restrain? Why harden? Why provoke? Why mention to resist the Devil or veil things? That would be like going around a graveyard and digging up bodies and putting blindfolds on them and ear plugs in their ear — or what is left of the cadavers.
It also changes the nature of God in a dangerous way. Making the God of the Bible more like Allah of the Qur’an.
- God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed. (Genesis 1:31, CSB)
I just added the below quote from Calvin to Genesis 1:31 in my Bible…. if Calvinism is correct, and the theistic determinism that is its baggage, then God called “good” His creation [man] by nature destined by decree to sin.
- “God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at His own pleasure arranged it … Though their perdition depends on the predestination of God, the cause and matter of it is in themselves … Man therefore falls, divine providence so ordaining, but he falls by his own fault.” (John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.7; 3.23.8)
Gordon H. Clark: “I wish very Frankly and pointedly to assert that if a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the will of God that he should do so …In Ephesians 1:11, Paul tells us that God works all things, not some things only, after the counsel of his own will.”
- They have built high places to Baal on which to burn their children in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, something I have never commanded or mentioned; I never entertained the thought (Jeremiah 19:5, CSB)
James 1 says every good gift that we get is from God. He doesn’t cause our sin thru 1st or secondary causes.
- No one undergoing a trial should say, “I am being tempted by God,” since God is not tempted by evil, and he himself doesn’t tempt anyone. But each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death. Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. (James 1:13-17, CSB)
Otherwise, He would be redeeming His own decree, a dualistic God of Eastern metaphysics. Even our prayers are rendered useless, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” ~ His will is being done, to the “T”. Which is why when challenged in a lecture about prayer and Reformed ideas, Wayne Grudem said our prayers were even decreed [scripted] before the creation of the time-space-continuum.
To be clear, I do not worship a God restricted by a Calvinistic theological systematic.
- “…how foolish and frail is the support of divine justice afforded by the suggestion that evils come to be, not by His will but by His permission…It is a quite frivolous refuge to say that God otiosely permits them, when Scripture shows Him not only willing, but the author of them…Who does not tremble at these judgments with which God works in the hearts of even the wicked whatever He will, rewarding them nonetheless according to desert? Again it is quite clear from the evidence of Scripture that God works in the hearts of men to incline their wills just as he will, whether to good for His mercy’s sake, or to evil according to their merits. ” — John Calvin, “The Eternal Predestination of God,” 10:11)
- “Hence we maintain that, by his providence, not heaven and earth and inanimate creatures only, but also the counsels and wills of men are so governed as to move exactly in the course which he has destined.” — John Calvin, Inst. I.xvi.8. 1539 edition. Quoted in A.N.S. Lane, “Did Calvin Believe in Freewill?” Vox Evangelica 12 (1981): 73
- “Men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss and deliberate on anything but what he has previously decreed with himself, and brings to pass by his secret direction.” — John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God 177 (OC 8.360) (‘summam et praecipuam rerum omnium causam’). Cf. Inst. I.xviii.2 (1559). See A.N.S. Lane, “Did Calvin Believe in Freewill?” Vox Evangelica 12 (1981): 73
- “Plainly it was God’s will that sin should enter this world, otherwise it would not have entered, for nothing happens except what God has eternally decreed. Moreover, there was more than a simple permission, for God only permits things that fulfill his purpose.” — A.W Pink, The Sovereignty of God, 2009, 162.
- (Eph 1:11) “works all things according to the counsel of his will.” Here the Greek word for “works” is 𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑒ø, which indicates that God not merely carries all of the universe’s objects and events to their appointed ends but that he actually 𝑏𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 all things in accordance with his will. In other words, it isn’t just that God manages to turn the evil aspects of our world to good for those who love him; it is rather that he himself brings about these evil aspects for his glory (see Ex. 9:13-16; John 9:3) and his people’s good (see Heb. 12:3-11; James 1:2-4). This includes—as incredible and as unacceptable as it may currently seem—God’s having even brought about the Nazis’ brutality at Birkenau and Auschwitz as well as the terrible killings of Dennis Rader and even the sexual abuse of a young child: “The LORD has made everything for its own purpose, even the wicked for the day of evil” (Prov. 16:4, NASB ).14 “When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other” (Eccl. 7:14, NIV). — John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds., Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2006), 42.
This is unbiblical. And as C.S. Lewis cogently noted:
“On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.
On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity— when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing— may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.”
CS LEWIS, from chapter 3 of The Problem of Pain.
Yep, I refuse to worship “a god” that is the “devil behind Satan.”
God has never desired sin, nor will He ever. God always desires holiness.
TO SUMMARIZE:
- If the “T” is correct, there is no rebellion against God’s will. Add the “U” and the “I,” the Gospel is rendered meaningless. It is sad, but it is a logical outgrowth of those. The Word of God, the Gospel message sent to a dying and sick world is secondary, Calvary becomes moot. Your hope can only be in if you won the cosmic lottery.
So when the unbeliever stands before God and Romans 1:19-20 is in the thought of our Holy God, when the words come out of said unbelievers mouth,
“I could not believe in your salvific offer because of my nature which you ensured. I suspect you won’t torture a cow [cows are biologically designed to eat grass] for eternity because your command was to eat meat, but ensured their nature was vegetarian.
What should God’s response be?
