Evil God

How To Pray Like An Honest Calvinist | IDOL KILLER (+RPT)

Published by Papa Giorgio

The 2nd video is Idol Killer’s original, the first is my reimagining it:

Praying Like A Consistent Calvinist | Adapted from Idol Killer >>> I rejiggered it into a better order [IMHO], added some graphics/quotes, and uploaded it a second time finding an edit error on my part.

Not for the faint of heart!

Somewhere outside the city of Geneva, on Earth 1689, it happened that a Calvinist Theologian was praying, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Pastor, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples.” and he said to them:

“Oh Sovereign God, whom from all eternity, freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass, I thank you… I know you bring about all things in accordance with your will,… I know the evils of this world have NOT arisen by your mere permission, (or as a result of your patient call to repentance), but that YOU yourself bring about all evils for your glory and good pleasure,…

I thank you for bringing evil into the world. I thank you for the brutality at Birkenau and at Auschwitz.

I thank you for the terrible killings of Dennis Rader.

I thank you for the brutality of war, and the countless widows and orphans it creates. I thank you for the perverse abuse of young children. I know these evil men were perfectly obeying your Sovereign will.

I thank you. I see your gracious hand in the hurts others do to me, (like the Ford Focus that cut me off at the light this afternoon).

I thank you. I thank you for my wife, and the abuse she inflicts upon our children while I’m away from the home. I know you did this to build mine and my children’s character. I thank you that its only been bruises and bloody noses. I know you saw fit to have my boss fire me from my job, during the holiday season, just as I know it was your Sovereign will that he hire Stephanie this past Spring and that we have an affair.

I thank you for giving me an irresistible desire for red heads. Above all, I know it was your Sovereign hand keeping my wife ignorant of our illicit love making, (during our lunch break at the motel six).

I thank you. I know that it was your perfect will that my neighbor got drunk and took his own life this morning, just as it was your perfect will that I was distracted on my cell phone and backed the car over his son last week.

I thank you. I know you’ve regenerated me and elected me unto salvation, and while I’m unsure about my wife and children’s eternal destiny, I thank you. Please bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and bless the hands that prepared it, or don’t. Whatever your Sovereign will is. Thank you, and amen!”

The Origin of Evil… Calvinist’s Say God, Same as the Atheist

Published by Papa Giorgio

CLICK TO ENLARGE

(Below Video Description) Dr. Leighton Flowers plays clips from Drs. James White, RC Sproul and John Piper on the question of the origin of moral evil so as to compare and contrast the various perspectives and the apparent inconsistencies of the Calvinistic worldview.

See my other posts on this topic:

William Lane Craig discusses [below] being a “consistent Calvinist” vs. an “inconsistent Calvinism”

Is the Calvinist God the Author of Evil? w/ William Lane Craig Dr. William Lane Craig explains why he believes that Calvinism is forced to conclude that God is the author of evil.

The below is from my “Challenges To Strict 5-Point Calvinism | Tozer/Winger/Geisler/Lewis“

“Divine Goodness”

Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threat­ens us with the following dilemma.

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.

The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the man of infe­rior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept their standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. When I came first to the University I was as nearly with­out a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint dis­taste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as ‘white’ what was hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but ‘as lords that are certainly expected’. You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. But the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into soci­ety that one is unfit for. It is in the light of such experi­ences that we must consider the goodness of God. Beyond all doubt, His idea of ‘goodness’ differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent—a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise. He appeals to our existing moral judgement—‘Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’ (Luke 12:57) God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis of their own concep­tions of gratitude, fidelity, and fair play: and puts Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures—‘What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?’ (Jeremiah 2:5.) …

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 3)

“Human Wickedness”

…A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one always inexplicably angry. Most of us have at times felt a secret sympathy with the dying farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance by asking ‘What harm have I ever done Him?’ There is the real rub. The worst we have done to God is to leave Him alone—why can’t He return the compliment? Why not live and let live? What call has He, of all beings, to be ‘angry’? It’s easy for Him to be good!

Now at the moment when a man feels real guilt— moments too rare in our lives—all these blasphemies vanish away. Much, we may feel, can be excused to human infirmities: but not this—this incredibly mean and ugly action which none of our friends would have done, which even such a thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of, which we would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment we really do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above man, to them. A God who did not regard this with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God—it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abol­ished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath hap­pens to stink.

When we merely say that we are bad, the ‘wrath’ of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness. To keep ever before us the insight derived from such a moment as I have been describing, to learn to detect the same real inexcusable corruption under more and more of its complex disguises, is therefore indis­pensable to a real understanding of the Christian faith. This is not, of course, a new doctrine. I am attempting nothing very splendid in this chapter. I am merely trying to get my reader (and, still more, myself) over a pons asi-norum—to take the first step out of fools’ paradise and utter illusion. But the illusion has grown, in modern times, so strong, that I must add a few considerations tending to make the reality less incredible.

  1. We are deceived by looking on the outside of things. We suppose ourselves to be roughly not much worse than Y, whom all acknowledge for a decent sort of person, and certainly (though we should not claim it out loud) better than the abominable X. Even on the superficial level we are probably deceived about this. Don’t be too sure that your friends think you as good as Y. The very fact that you selected him for the comparison is suspicious: he is prob­ably head and shoulders above you and your circle. But let us suppose that Y and yourself both appear ‘not bad’. How far Y’s appearance is deceptive, is between Y and God. His may not be deceptive: you know that yours is.

Does this seem to you a mere trick, because I could say the same to Y and so to every man in turn? But that is just the point. Every man, not very holy or very arrogant, has to ‘live up to’ the outward appearance of other men: he knows there is that within him which falls far below even his most careless public behaviour, even his loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things pass through your mind? We have never told the whole truth. We may confess ugly facts— the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the tone is false. The very act of confess-ing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are excep­tional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his nor­mal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the  important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.

  1. A reaction—in itself wholesome—is now going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of moral­ity, a reawakening of the social We feel our­selves to be involved in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with ‘the system’ and which can be dealt with without waiting for the mil­lennium. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and cer­tainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. But we must learn to walk before we run.
  2. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it fur­nished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eter­nal moment St Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong— forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, ‘an acquired taste’—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind.
  3. We must guard against the feeling that there is ‘safety in numbers’. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excus­able. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety per cent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human soci-ety—some particular school, college, regiment or profes­sion where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (‘Every­one does it’) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad soci­ety we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our ‘normal’ was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our ‘Quixotic’ was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the ‘pocket’ now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. But is there any evidence—except Christian doctrine itself—that this is so? I am afraid there is. In the first place, there are those odd people among us who do not accept the local stan­dard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite dif­ferent behaviour is, in fact, possible. Worse still, there is the fact that these people, even when separated widely in space and time, have a suspicious knack of agreeing with one another in the main—almost as if they were in touch with some larger public opinion outside the pocket. What is common to Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gautama, Christ1 and Marcus Aurelius, is something pretty sub­stantial. Thirdly, we find in ourselves even now a theoret­ical approval of this behaviour which no one practises. Even inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger world—and that when the term ends we might find ourselves facing the public opin­ion of that larger world. But the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the ‘pocket’ from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease, and that nothing else will. It may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but even now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life. It is then that we shall envy the ‘morbid’ person, the ‘pedant’ or ‘enthusiast’ who really has taught his company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles.

[….]

This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature. Nor am I recommending universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his ‘faith in human nature’, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 4)

Does God Love All Persons? Or Does He Hate Most?

Published by Papa Giorgio

As surely as I live, says the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of wicked people. I only want them to turn from their wicked ways so they can live. Turn! Turn from your wickedness, O people of Israel! Why should you die? (Ezek. 33:11, NLT)

In my small group conversation was just getting off the ground regarding this topic, of God’s love. I had, providentially, just listed to this video [below] and was going to adopt this tact into my response. As I was just gonna get going another brother in Christ came in and conversation changed. So I followed up with the ppl in the original short discussion:

  • Like Paul Harvey would say, “Here is the rest of the story.” Frank Turek notes the view that I said was jaundiced in group…. that the splitting of God’s will creates an “infinite application of God’s justice,” but a “finite application of His love.” It bifurcates God in a way the Bible does not. God is a Whole. (5 minutes):

If God Wants All Saved, Why Isn’t Everyone Saved?

(Above Video, description) Can anyone truly produce good works apart from Christ, or even choose to submit to God on their own? A Calvinist questions Frank on predestination, human freedom, and whether we are capable or incapable of choosing God. Join the conversation and share where you land in the comments!

Here is more to connect the idea above.

(Below Video description) Does God want to save all men? Yes He does! The Calvinists are wrong.

In the short conversation, Psalm 5:5 was mentioned, which reads:

  • The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity. (NKJV)

Here, we have a picture, not of where man begins, but where sin’s grip will take him if he continues in rebellion against God. (As an aside, I like Bible Hub’s dealing with this sticky issue) I had a discussion of this verse on my Facebook, but cannot find it unfortunately. So I will respond to the ideas herein. The first few clips are showing how reading Scripture without the additional lenses of a 16th century philosophy can bring out the beauty, assurance in God, and the meaning to the audience David intended:

Prayer regarding enemies (5:4–12). The psalmist next complains to God about his enemies—especially their destructive speech which consists of lies and flattery. He urges God to indict them and let them experience the consequences of their destructive behavior. He also asks God to get them away from him. The psalmist turns from God’s enemies to those who seek God’s protection. For these, the psalmist asks protection, joy, a sense of great security.

Dana Gould, Psalms 1-50, Shepherd’s Notes (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 1999), 25.

The assurance of being heard is now won by the petitioner from the fact that the wicked are not allowed to appear before Yahweh, whereas he himself, the petitioner, has access to the sanctuary

Hans-Joachim Kraus, A Continental Commentary: Psalms 1–59 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 155.

Stanza 2 focuses on the accusers, but in the form of praise for God’s judgment of the wicked. The foes are described (vv. 4–6, 9–10) [Enemies]. With mouth and tongue they destroy. They are boastful and speak lies; they are bloodthirsty and deceitful (vv. 5–6). Such persons cannot stand in God’s sight; for God, such behavior must be abhorrent (v. 6). The implication is that the LORD will never permit the wicked access to the sanctuary, to which the psalmist now seeks entry.

James H. Waltner, Psalms, Believers Church Bible Commentary (Scottdale, PA; Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 2006), 50.

Verses 4–6: David distances himself from his enemies

Now he is sure that God is hearing him, David’s thoughts of his enemies are different from what they were in Psalm 3. Then he was thinking of the strength of their numbers (3:1), now he is thinking of the weakness of their position before God. God cannot dwell with them because they are wicked and God takes no pleasure in evil (v. 4) in fact he hates such (v. 5). Since God is not with them, they will not stand. When he appears among them it will not be to prosper but to destroy them.

For God is just, and their charges against David have no basis in fact but are lies (v. 6). Absalom and his party were acting against him out of sheer deceit and cruelty; they are bloodthirsty and deceitful men. This is the truth behind Absalom and his campaign. It is sufficient ground for David to believe they will not succeed and that he will return, as he goes on to say.

Eric Lane, Psalms 1-89: The Lord Saves, Focus on the Bible Commentary (Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 2006), 42.

The first response is via Calvinism Answered Verse By Verse and Subject by Subject. Here is there response to this idea:

How do non-Calvinists deal with certain Bible verses which show that God hates certain people?

  • Psalm 5:5: “The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all who do iniquity.”
  • Psalm 7:11: “God is a righteous judge, and a God who has indignation every day.”
  • Psalm 26:5: “I hate the assembly of evildoers, and I will not sit with the wicked.”
  • Malachi 1:3: “But I have hated Esau [referencing Edom], and I have made his mountains a desolation and appointed his inheritance for the jackals of the wilderness.”

It is answered in two ways. In some instances, the word “hate” just reflects preference, such as Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.” However, that may not be a suitable understanding for all occurrences, such as Malachi 1:3, in which God said that He is “indignant forever” with the Edomites, regarding their betrayal of Israel during the Babylonian captivity. So, how can a God who “is love” (1st John 4:8, 10) hate anyone? It’s not that He wants to, or that He needed to create people to hate. God’s wrath is conditional. Evil distorts God’s perfect ways, and for those who do commit evil, God would rather have it that they turn back to Him, so that He may show them mercy, than to have to exercise judgment upon them.

Micah 7:18: “Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity and passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His possession? He does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in unchanging love.”

So, although God may declare that He hates a particular sinner, that does not preclude His longing to see restoration through repentance. One example is that of wicked King Ahab, when God was delighted to see his repentance, and in turn, relented from His intentions of judging him: “‘Do you see how Ahab has humbled himself before Me? Because he has humbled himself before Me, I will not bring the evil in his days, but I will bring the evil upon his house in his son’s days.’” (1st Kings 21:29)

To further illustrate, I might say: “I hate people who tailgate on the highway and drive recklessly,” or I might say, “I hate people who don’t flush the toilet when they’re done.” This doesn’t mean that I have arbitrarily thrown names into a hat, and chosen to unconditionally hate them for no reason whatsoever. Rather, it means that my disapproval of them is based upon their free will choice to commit an act which I disapprove of. This is what God is expressing at verses like Psalm 5:5, Psalm 7:11, etc., as He is defining a certain class of people who have freely chosen to enter that class, by freely choosing to sin. It’s somewhat similar to when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a desire for his children to be judged, “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Make no mistake, God still does judge people. However, He judges them for the “content of their character,” so to speak, as displayed by the type of actions that they chose to engage in. (In other words, He doesn’t judge them on arbitrary things, such as skin color, or whether or not He unconditionally picked their name out of a hat from eternity, and arbitrarily decided to hate them for no other reason than that their name was selected.) God looks to the heart, and judges people accordingly: “‘I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, even to give to each man according to his ways, according to the results of his deeds.’” (Jeremiah 17:10)

Of course Leighton Flowers deals with this. I will clip his longer video, but my clip is still long mind you. He is essentially reading from his own article: “Does God Love or Hate His Enemies?” Here is the “truncated” version:

In a favored site I like this comment:

  • The wages of sin is death, but it is not God’s pleasure to see the death of anyone. However, anyone who hates Him and refuses to return, will see death. In every man-made government the penalty for high treason is death; it is no different in the Kingdom of God.

The whole thread is worth a read — it includes many from varying theological assumptions. (This resource was mentioned, click to enlarge)

I wish to note as well, that Calvin’s Institutes is a work I do not like all that much. However, I hold his commentary on a higher level because he withholds much of the Augustinian influence at bay, so-to-speak. Here is his commentary on verses 4-6 of Psalm 5:

Verses 4-6

  • 4 For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness; evil shall not dwell Smith thee. 5 The foolish shall not stand in thy sight; thou hatest all that commit iniquity. 6 Thou shalt destroy them that speak falsehood; Jehovah will abhor the blood-thirsty 9 and deceitful man.

Here David makes the malice and wickedness of his enemies an argument to enforce his prayer for the divine favor towards him. The language is indeed abrupt, as the saints in prayer will often stammer; but this stammering is more acceptable to God than all the figures of rhetoric, be they ever so fine and glittering. Besides, the great object which David has in view, is to show, that since the cruelty and treachery of his enemies had reached their utmost height, it was impossible but that God would soon arrest them in their course. His reasoning is grounded upon the nature of God. Since righteousness and upright dealing are pleasing to him, David, from this, concludes that he will take vengeance on all the unjust and wicked. And how is it possible for them to escape from his hand unpunished, seeing he is the judge of the world? The passage is worthy of our most special attention. For we know how greatly we are discouraged by the unbounded insolence of the wicked. If God does not immediately restrain it, we are either stupified and dismayed, or cast down into despair. But David, from this, rather finds matter of encouragement and confidence. The greater the lawlessness with which his enemies proceeded against him, the more earnestly did he supplicate preservation from God, whose office it is to destroy all the wicked, because he hates all wickedness. Let all the godly, therefore, learn, as often as they have to contend against violence, deceit, and injustice, to raise their thoughts to God in order to encourage themselves in the certain hope of deliverance, according as Paul also exhorts them in 2 Thessalonians 1:5, “Which is,” says he, “a manifest token of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer: seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you; and to you who are troubled, rest with us.” And assuredly he would not be the judge of the world if there were not laid up in store with him a recompense for all the ungodly. One use, then, which may be made of this doctrine is this, – when we see the wicked indulging themselves in their lusts, and when, in consequence, doubts steal into our minds as to whether God takes any care of us, we should learn to satisfy ourselves with the consideration that God, who hates and abhors all iniquity, will not permit them to pass unpunished, and although he bear with them for a time, he will at length ascend into the judgment-seat, and show himself an avenger, as he is the protector and defender of his people. 10 Again, we may infer from this passage the common doctrine, that God, although he works by Satan and by the ungodly, and makes use of their malice for executing his judgments, is not, on this account, the author of sin, nor is pleased with it because the end which he purposes is always righteous; and he justly condemns and punishes those who, by his mysterious providence, are driven whithersoever he pleases.

In the 4th verse some take ra, in the masculine gender, for a wicked man; but I understand it rather of wickedness itself David declares simply, that there is no agreement between God and unrighteousness. He immediately after proceeds to speak of the men themselves, saying, the foolish shall not stand in thy sight; and it is a very just inference from this, that iniquity its hateful to God, and that, therefore, he will execute just punishment upon all the wicked. He calls those fools, according to a frequent use of the term in Scripture, who, impelled by blind passion, rush headlong into sin. Nothing is more foolish, than for the ungodly to cast away the fear of God, and suffer the desire of doing mischief to be their ruling principle; yea, there is no madness worse than the contempt of God, under the influence of which men pervert all right. David sets this truth before himself for his own comfort; but we also may draw from it doctrine very useful in training us to the fear of God; for the Holy Spirit, by declaring God to be the avenger of wickedness, puts a bridle upon us, to restrain us from committing sin, in the vain hope of escaping with impunity.

Some INSPIRING PHILOSOPHY YouTube Shorts:

In the debate Dr. Turek mentions in the YouTube Short to the right, his memory was a bit off [graphic at the bottom with the corrected reference], however, he is still correct… as many 5-pointers mention God not allowing Adam and Eve to sin, but actually causing it. See my two posts:

  1. Is God the “devil” Behind Satan? | Sovereign Puppeteer
  2. RC Sproul and Adams Fall | Calvinist Obfuscations

In a dealing with Psalm 5:5-6, Dr. Eitan Bar (co-founder of one of my go-to Jewish ministries, ONE FOR ISRAEL — although he is no longer affiliated with them. Which I kind of agree with – he rejects an eternal punishment in hell as well as the penal substitutionary theory.)

But Doesn’t God Hate Sinners?

You hate all who do wrong. – Psalm 5:5

Marco from Reading, Pennsylvania, wrote to ask pastor John Piper: “Pastor John, what do you make of the saying, ‘God loves the sinner, but hates the sin?’” John Piper’s answer included a quotation of Psalm 5:5 as well as the following statement:

It is just not true to give the impression that God doesn’t hate sinners by saying, ‘he loves the sinner and hates the sin.’ He does hate sinners. – John Piper

Likewise, pastor Mark Driscoll preached to his congregation the same motif:

The Bible speaks of God not just hating sin but sinners… Psalm 5:5, “You,” speaking of God, “hate all evildoers.” God doesn’t just hate what you do. He hates who you are! – Mark Driscoll

In the same way, Reformed Baptist pastor David Platt wrote:

Does God hate sinners? Listen closely to Psalm 5:5-6: “The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; You hate all who do wrong.“ – David Platt

The ECT’s (Eternal Conscious Torment) logic in quoting Psalm 5:5-6 goes something like this:

  1. Those who sin are sinners.
  2. Everyone sins.
  3. God hates sinners.
  4. God must separate Himself from sinners.
  5. Therefore, God hates everyone and must condemn all to hellfire.

Practically speaking, fundamentalist preachers believe that every cute newborn, every sweet toddler, and every child playing in your neighborhood’s park—are all sinners condemned to hellfire as God hates them.

A Ronnie Rogers Break (SOURCE):

Once we dismiss the pleasantries of Calvinism, the only reason some are in heaven and some are in hell is because it pleased God for them to be there. Notwithstanding the weak and misleading arguments to the contrary by many Calvinists, I maintain all consistent Calvinists inevitably believe in double predestination. They either believe God actively predestined some to hell, as Calvin does, or he did so by choosing not to offer what would have surely delivered them from hell to heaven, which is unconditional election and selective regeneration. Calvin refers to this cold, inescapable reality as the product of God’s wish, pleasure, and counsel.*

* John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1997), vol. 2, bk. 3, chap. 21, sec. 7, pg. 210.

On the surface, Psalm 5 seems to contradict verses like John 3:16, which states, “For God so loved the world.” In “World,” John speaks about the people in it, not the waters and soil. John essentially says, “For God so loved the sinners.”

So, is there a conflict between Psalm 5 and John 3:16?

Psalm 5:5

Biblical Hebrew has a limited vocabulary, so many Hebrew words carry a broad range of meanings, varying according to context. Moreover, the meanings of words often evolve over time.

To fully grasp the message of Psalm 5:5, it’s crucial first to understand its context. Hebraist scholar Mitchell Dahood interprets Psalm 5 as a “repudiation of false gods when one was accused of idolatry.” In a similar vein, VanGemeren, Professor Emeritus of Old Testament and Semitic Languages, views Psalm 5 as God’s self-distinction from other deities, asserting that “whereas other religions brought together good and evil at the level of the gods, God had revealed that evil exists apart from him.”

Thus, with this context in mind, more accurate than ‘God hates everyone’ will be to conclude that God hates idol worshippers. Remember, the pagans around ancient Israel would not only steal office pens and lie about how lovely you looked in your new evening dress tonight; they would burn their babies in the fire as a sacrifice for their idols. The pagans were cruel and evil. So, it is they, in this context, that God hates.

But this isn’t even the main problem with how Psalm 5:5-6 is being misused.

The Biblical Meaning of “Hate”

Much like “love,” the English word “hate” has become heavily loaded with strong emotional connotations in contemporary language. “Hate,” often used to express extremely strong emotions, is usually associated with images of violence, wrath, death, and anger. In biblical Hebrew, however, “hate” means something else altogether.

Regrettably, preachers often misinterpret ancient Hebrew (and Greek) terms when reading a translation in their native languages, applying modern perspectives and interpretations. This misinterpretation can occur accidentally, but at times, it might also stem from a desire to support a pre-existing theological agenda.

SANE = To avoid, reject, and ignore

The Hebrew word translated to “hate” is SANE. The Hebrew Bible frequently uses SANE as a synonym for ‘reject,’ ‘avoid,’ ‘deny,’ or ‘ignore.’ If you don’t trust my Hebrew skills as a native Hebrew speaker, then allow me to point you over to the Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible, where ‘SANE ’ is explained as something one avoids:

The pictograph is a picture of a thorn, then is a picture of seed. Combined, these mean “thorn seed.” The thorn, (the seed of a plant with small sharp points) causes one to turn in directions to avoid them.

Hate as reject: In Romans 9:10-13, Paul clearly uses “hate” in a matter of election. God elected Jacob yet rejected (SANE/hated) Esau. “Esau I have hated” is not about God wishing for Esau a violent and painful death but about God rejecting Esau and electing Jacob instead.

Thus, biblically speaking, to hate someone is to reject or avoid them—to deny your attention, election, intimacy, or blessings from them. If a woman hates her husband, she turns indifferent, pushes him away, avoids him, and leaves him. On the other hand, if she still cares for him — loves him — she will get angry and fight loudly and emotionally. You go to battle over the things you cherish most but avoid associating with those you hate and are apathetic about.

Hate as ignore/avoid: Paul’s understanding of “hate” is also why Paul says, “No one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body.” (Ephesians 5:29). We all know people who emotionally hate their body or parts of it. I emotionally hated mine when I was a fat kid with zits on my face. But as we just established, biblical hate is not about emotions or feelings of detestation. Paul was saying that no one ignores their body. We indeed drink water when we are thirsty and don’t avoid going to the toilet when our body tells us to (even if emotionally we “hate” ourselves).

The understanding that to ‘hate’ means to reject, ignore, or avoid is the only way the words of Jesus would make any sense:

If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. – Luke 14:26

Love would not demand that you “hate” (in the modern emotional sense of the word) others or your family because that would contradict Jesus’ commandment to love even our enemies. So clearly, to “hate” your family must mean we have to choose him over them, not loathe and despise them.

As a Jew, I had to experience Luke 14:26 when my Jewish mother first found out I believed in Jesus. When she demanded I stop believing and reject Jesus, I had to reject her plea, choosing Christ instead.

In the same way, we should read Psalm 5:5-6. God rejects the evildoers—the idols and those who worship them. God’s rejection of idols stems from their influence in leading Israel to commit heinous acts, such as the burning of their children.

To conclude, from a biblical standpoint, when you reject, avoid, or ignore someone, you SANE (“hate”) them. Therefore, God may “hate” in the sense of withdrawing blessings and protection from people, rejecting their appeals, or avoiding them. However, God loves even the greatest of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15).

RC Sproul and Adams Fall | Calvinist Obfuscations

Published by Papa Giorgio

(There are only two types of Calvinists/”Reformed” models: consistent and inconsistent. Double predestination is consistent.) In the video that follows these two quotes, you will see the quote by John Calvin… but I wanted to put an old quote by RC Sproul — who — apparently hasn’t read John Calvin:

DO YOU SCHOLAR MUCH RC?

  • Herein lies the problem. Before a person can commit an act of sin he must first have a desire to perform that act. The Bible tells us that evil actions flow from evil desires. But the presence of an evil desire is already sin. We sin because we are sinners. We were born with a sin nature. We are fallen creatures. But Adam and Eve were not created fallen. They had no sin nature. They were good creatures with a free will. Yet they chose to sin. Why ? I don’t know. Nor have I found anyone yet who does know.

RC Sproul, Chosen By God (Wheaton, IL: Thomas Nelson Inc., Publishers, 1986), 30-31

  • “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

What if Calvin was more extreme than most Calvinists today? In this clip, Austin Fischer and Leighton Flowers unpack the forgotten (or ignored) parts of Calvin’s own words—especially around God ordaining the Fall and reprobation. If you’ve ever been told Calvinism is misrepresented, this is the clip you need to see.

MORE:

  • “Even the fall of Adam, and through him the fall of the race, was not by chance or accident, but was so ordained in the secret counsels of God.”1
  • “Surely, if God had not willed the fall, He could, and no doubt would, have prevented it; but He did not prevent it: ergo He willed it. And if He willed it, He certainly decreed it”2
  • “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.”3
  • “Not only did God have a perfect foreknowledge of the outcome of Adam’s trial; not only did His omniscient eye see Adam eating of the forbidden fruit, but He decreed beforehand that he should do so.”4
  • “Also, Calvinists often affirm that Adam was free before the Fall. But again, I always speak of freedom relative to God, and from this perspective, I would say that Adam had no freedom whatsoever even before the Fall. To be “free” from sin is irrelevant. The issue is whether Adam was free from God to choose to remain free from sin – he was not. In addition, I would not say that God permitted Adam to fall, but that God caused it.”5

1 Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, p. 234

2 Jerome Zanchius, The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination, Ch. II, Sec. II, Par. 4 (Link)

3 A.W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God, p. 162

4 A.W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God, Appendix II, The Case of Adam, p. 283

5 Vicent Cheung, The Author of Sin (WEBSITE), last accessed 7/29/2025.

In an excellent post, Robin Phillips explains the reasoning behind the “Reformers” positing WHY God HAD TO make mankind fall:

…. As already mentioned, this theory says that God hates evil so much that He must ensure its eternal perpetuation, for if in a trillion years from now there was even a millisecond of time in which God didn’t have a group of sinners to be angry at, then this would be tragic as one whole part of His character (justice) would be unable to be expressed.

As Douglas Wilson once put it on his blog,

In a world without sin, two of God’s most glorious attributes—His justice and His mercy—would go undisplayed. This, obviously, would be horrible … In a world without sin and evil, at least two attributes of God would have gone unrevealed and unmanifested, those attributes being wrath and mercy. Since this is obviously intolerable, God determined to direct our affairs the way that He did.

Jonathan Edwards expressed a similar idea when he wrote:

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all … Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired … So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect.

The same notion is present in the works of Saint Augustine:

…if all had remained condemned to the punishment entailed by just condemnation, then God’s merciful grace would not have been seen at work in anyone, on the other hand, if all had been transferred from darkness to light, the truth of God’s vengeance would not have been made evident. —City of God 21.11

[….]

The problem with Calvinism is that its quest for rationalistic clarity does away with this necessary mystery. Calvinism asserts that evil exists because God wants it to be there—end of story. As Calvin put it in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “I say with Augustine that the Lord has created those who, as He certainly foreknew, were to go to destruction, and He did so because He so willed,” while later Calvin extends this idea to its consistent corollary, which is that “man by the righteous impulsion of God does that which is unlawful.” In other words, according to Calvin, the sinner sins because God impels him to do so.

Calvin picked up on this same theme later when he wrote that:

[M]an falls, the Providence of God so ordaining …that by the will of God all the sons of Adam fell into the state of wretchedness in which they are now involved … Nor ought it to seem absurd when I say, that 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.

God, in His own pleasure, arranged evil?

These are difficult words, especially since they appear to directly implicate God in all the wickedness of the world. It easily solves the problem of evil, but does so at the expense of other scriptural teaching. For example, Psalm 5:5. In the Septuagint—the Old Testament text quoted by the New Testament writers and the canonical text of the ancient Church—Psalms 5:4 reads “For You are not a God who wills (thelon) lawlessness (anomian).”

In fairness to Calvin, he was able to maintain some degree of dialectical balance that would be lacking in his followers. That is why my critique of Calvinism recognizes that Calvinism is larger than simply the teachings of John Calvin. This was impressed upon me when our former church put on a family camp and invited R.C. Sproul, Jr. to speak. The younger Sproul has taken Calvin’s teachings to such an extreme, going even further than his father—let alone Calvin himself. For example, Sproul took particular delight in describing to us in detail how God desired sin to come about, and how God forced the devil to sin like a man operating a remote control. In his book Almighty Over All, Sproul expands on this point, writing, “I am suggesting that he [God] created sin … Where, I must ask, does the law of God forbid the creation of evil? I would suggest that it just isn’t there.”

This leads to what I consider to be a trivialization of evil.

R.C. Sproul, Jr. posted a Facebook status saying that since God is sovereign, even those things which are not as they ought to be really are just as things ought to be. He went on to say that there are ultimately no “bad” things, since God is completely sovereign. Now if all he means is that even bad things work out ultimately for good, then I have no problem. But there is a great difference between saying, on the one hand, that God works good out of evil, and on the other hand, saying that that since God is the author of all things, evil isn’t really bad (or that everything which happens ought to be).

If, as Sproul maintains, God is the author of evil, then we would have to say that He fosters wickedness in people’s hearts. But if so, then God is sinful by the Biblical definitions of sin and evil. Consider that in the Proverbs, the ones who incite and tempt to evil (like the fool’s friends or the prostitute) are as morally guilty as the simple man who falls prey to those temptations. James says that God does not tempt us, but if God is the author of evil then He is doing a lot more than merely tempting us: He is fostering the evil in our hearts and inciting us to sin.

Under this scheme, the words “God is good” are no longer intelligible, as God is violating His own self-revelation of what constitutes “goodness.” Consequently, if God really is the energizing principle behind both the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, then we would have to conclude that the Biblical categories used to describe God are ultimately non-descriptive. Moreover, it would make a mockery of the antithesis that we find throughout the war-Psalms, if God is the causal force behind both sides.

Moreover, if God is the author of evil, then we would have to conclude that evil is just as much an intrinsic part of God’s character as His goodness. But in that case, we are left without a standard for distinguishing between good and evil. Using God’s character as the standard would then be akin to using a tape measure on which inches and centimeters are all mixed up. God can only be the standard for distinguishing between good and evil if the former and not the latter is fundamental to His character. …

I will finish the thought I have…

GOD NEEDED TO CREATE MAN TO BE WHOLE

… according to Calvinism. A theological “heresy” in my mind at least.

 

Is God the “devil” Behind Satan? | Sovereign Puppeteer (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

I sent a friend the video of Dr. Theodore Zachariades stating that God wills [causes, not just permits] a man to be unfaithful to his wife.

  • God works all things after the Council of His will. Even keeping those kings who want to commit adultery from committing so! And when He wants to, he orders those to commit adultery when he wants to! (Video)

My friend dismissed this person as a hyper-Calvinist. But as the video below notes, using his definition of a “hyper Calvinist,” A.W. Pink, John Piper, Jeff Durbin, James White, and many-many more, would thus be considered the same. Because of the age restriction, the video must be watch on YouTube, link in pic.

When I asked him: “Question RW, is Piper, Calvin, White and Durbin hyper-Calvinists?” He simply replied “Fishing Bait.” But this is an interesting phenomena… and after decades of encountering Mormons and J-Dubs, the disconnect is the same. I get links and not actualizing on statements made when challenged. When shown a person who follows to the end the logical conclusion of theistic determinism found in Calvinism, the person who is the Calvinist is dismissed as a “hyper-Calvinist” by their fellow Calvinist’s if they are challenged. When that label is then applied rightly to others for the same reason — meaning, using RW’s definition of what a hyper-Calvinist is — then all these others have said worse; and would be by definition, hyper-Calvinists.

Two quick examples. 1st John Calvin, then, John Piper:

John CALVIN:

… 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

John Piper:

Ephesians 1:11 goes even further by declaring that God in Christ

“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. (FULLER QUOTE VIA THIS PDF)

John Lennox notes in his wonderful book,  “Determined to Believe? The Sovereignty of God, Freedom, Faith, and Human Responsibility,” that Martin Luther struggled with the consequences of this form of thought:

Martin Luther at the time of the Reformation. In his book The Bondage of the Will, written in response to Erasmus’ essay On Free Will, Luther said:

[The] omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, I repeat, utterly destroy the doctrine of “free-will”… Doubtless it gives the greatest possible offence to common sense or natural reason, that God, Who is proclaimed as being full of mercy and goodness, and so on, should of His own mere will abandon, harden and damn men, as though He delighted in the sins and great eternal torments of such poor wretches. It seems an iniquitous, cruel, intolerable thought to think of God; and it is this that has been such a stumbling block to so many great men down through the ages. And who would not stumble at it? I have stumbled at it myself more than once, down to the deepest pit of despair, so that I wished I had never been made a man. (That was before I knew how health-giving that despair was, and how close to grace.)

In this passage Luther seems to be aware that there is a deep moral problem with aspects of his view… [RPT: before redefining “grace” that is – almost like what is, is.]

Calvinism’s [T.U.L.I.P.] Logical Conclusion Displayed

In a reference in that above book is this paper: “I Believe In Divine Sovereignty,” by Thomas H. McCall in Trinity Journal (TRINJ 29:2 [Fall 2008]), 209-210. Of which I excerpt:

… He [John Piper] works long and hard to illustrate this [theistic determinism] from Rom 9:1-23, which he concludes is about the purposes of God being preserved “by means of the predestination of individuals to their respective eternal destines.”11 And we are not to think that God is righteous in spite of such action—instead we are to see that God is righteous because of this action, for the “heart of Paul’s defense” is this: “in choosing unconditionally those on whom he will have mercy and those whom he will harden God is not unrighteous, for in this ‘electing purpose’ he is acting out of a full allegiance to his name and esteem of his glory.”12

This all-determining action of God notably includes predestination and election, but it extends far beyond—it extends to everything. God determines all events that occur in the universe, including all demonic and satanic action.13 As Mark R. Talbot puts it, God creates, sends, instigates, and moves others to do evil, because “nothing that exists or occurs falls outside God’s ordaining will.”14 Talbot makes the point with relentless and unmistakable clarity:

Nothing, including no evil person or thing or event or deed. God’s foreordination is the ultimate reason why everything comes about, including the existence of all evil persons and things and the occurrence of any evil acts or events.15

Make no mistake: “when even the worst of evils befall us, they do not ultimately come from anywhere other than God’s hand.”16 …

NOTES:

11. John Piper, The Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1-23 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 218, cf. 56-73.

12. Ibid., 219.

13. On this see John Piper, “Suffering and the Sovereignty of God: Ten Aspects of God’s Sovereignty Over Satan and Satan’s Hand in It,” in Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, 19-30. Piper here uses the rather confusing (given his determinism) language of “permission.” By my lights, what he means when he says that God “permits” something is this (a) God determines it to occur and then (b) does not act so as to override his previous ordination. Regarding talk of “permission,” I think that John Calvin’s approach is more consistent, [….]  see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.xviii.1, and John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), 696.

14. Mark R. Talbot, “‘All the Good That Is Ours in Christ: Seeing God’s Gracious Hand in the Hurts Others Do to Us,” in Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, 43 (41-43), emphasis original.

15. Ibid., 43-44.

16. lbid., 47.

Dave Hunt is right to say that Calvin uses unbiblical positions in dealing with this Augustinian determinism:

There is yet another question that troubles many: If man is free to choose between options, would that not in itself deny both God’s sovereignty and His foreknowledge? Luther claimed that this question was the very heart of the Reformation and of the gospel itself. In fact, Luther dogmatically insisted that it was impossible for God to foreknow the future and for man at the same time to be a free agent to act as he wills.

Believing firmly in God’s foreknowledge, Luther wrote an entire book titled The Bondage of the Will, to prove that the very idea of man’s free will is a fallacy and an illusion. Several reasons have already been given as to why Luther was wrong on this point, and that issue will be dealt with further in the next chapter.

Though Calvin took so much from Augustine, like Luther he also rejected the Augustinian belief that God could foreknow the future, while at the same time man could have a free will. According to Calvin, foreknowledge leaves no room whatsoever for free will, because foreknowledge is the same as predestination:

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.)

Calvin repeatedly uses such unbiblical and utterly fallacious reasoning.

The Calvinist assumes a contradiction between sovereignty and free will that doesn’t exist. The fact that God is able to allow man freedom of choice, while still effecting His purposes unhindered, is all the more glorifying to His sovereign wisdom, power, and foreknowledge.

And one last point on this via MONERGISM.COM:

  • In order to understand this better theologians have come up with the term “compatibilism” to describe the concurrence of God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility. Compatibilism is a form of determinism and it should be noted that this position is no less deterministic than hard determinism. — John Hendryx (John Hendryx is the creator and editor of Monergism.com | SEE: “We are not Determinists!” for more)

Here is A.W. Tozer’s take of the above:

  • 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. Something I run through with Mormon Elders if they decide to come into my home to discuss further their “mission.” In a similar vein, philosophical determinism (atheism/evolutionary paradigms). In what follows — quote’wise — if this is true fore secular forms of determinism, then so to it applies to THEISTIC DETERMINISM:

Atheists reject evidence as illusory…

Why?

Because they “have to.”

Donald C. Abel in his book, Fifty Readings in Philosophy, asks us to imagine for a moment that you walking along and come to a fork in the road. One street is called Divinity Avenue, the other Oxford Street. Assuming you have to walk down one of them, there is a confrontation of choice.  Continuing he says,

  • Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street. In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see the two alternative universes; one of them with me walking through Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists, you believe one of these universes eternally impossible, because of the intrinsic irrationality or accidentality somewhere involved in it. However, looking outwardly at these universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and which the rational and necessary one?

Donald C. Abel, Fifty Readings in Philosophy (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 296.

  • “He thus acknowledged the need for any theory to allow that humans have genuine freedom to recognize the truth. He (again, correctly) saw that if all thought, belief, feeling, and choice are determined (i.e., forced on humans by outside conditions) then so is the determinists’ acceptance of the theory of determinism forced on them by those same conditions. In that case they could never claim to know their theory is true since the theory making that claim would be self-referentially incoherent. In other words, the theory requires that no belief is ever a free judgment made on the basis of experience or reason, but is always a compulsion over which the believer has no control.”

Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 174.

The implications of strict naturalism are grim or even counterintuitive. For example, Bertrand Russell affirmed that any philosophy hoping to stand must ultimately take for granted the (naturalistic) picture of unguided causes and accidental collocations of atoms and must be built on the “firm foundation of unyielding despair.” When it comes to naturalism’s implications for morality, naturalist Kai Nielsen contends that reason can’t bring us to morality; this picture ”is not a pleasant one,” and that reflecting on it ”depresses me.” When it comes to consciousness, naturalist Daniel Dennett considers it an illusion- -something fellow-atheist Thomas Nagel finds utterly confused:

  • You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience …. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not … the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about …. The view [of Dennett] is so unnatural that it is hard to convey …. Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious. … And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, ”maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

Jaegwon Kim acknowledges the stark picture painted by the naturalistic brush. Naturalism is ”imperialistic; it demands ‘full coverage’ … and exacts a terribly high ontological price.”

Paul Copan and Charles Taliaferro (editors), The Naturalness of Belief: New Essays on Theism’s Rationality (New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2019), viii

I could go on, but you get the point. To fashion the issue for you to see, Jaegwon Kim could have said:

  • Theistic determinism is ”imperialistic; it demands ‘full coverage’ … and exacts a terribly high ontological price.” (added for emphasis) 

What is this price? Here is just one example… God vs. God:

Here is a Facebook post I recently posted:

  • “What is there for God to harden, provoke, or restrain if not the autonomous will of creatures?”

If God knows the future because He planned the future [Sproul, Piper, MacArthur, etc.], when God hardens, provokes, or restraines…. is He working against Himself?

If the “T” of TULIP [total depravity] is a reality, wouldn’t hardening, provoking, or restraining someone be the same thing as digging up bodies in a cemetery and putting blindfolds on the rotting cadavers?

In other words, does He plan the abuse of a child just to redeem that act in some way to bring glory to Himself? Is Satan superfluous?

Are all the prescriptions in the Bible making God out to be duplicitous – since he has planned our actions thru determinitive means?

You could not argue that “evil” is really “evil.” Eastern philosophies run into the same problems as the atheist’s/evolutionist’s I just noted above. The Calvinist runs into the same issue. And it is a distortion of Christianity (T.U.L.I.P.):

(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.

Or…

Is it more like Tozer notes — which lowers man’s position by making him/her responsible to God’s law; and keeps God’s holiness and glory intact as He truly redeems or judges such actions (is He judging Himself in Calvinism? Working against His own will? Secretly?)

TOZER:

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?’ Man’s 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.

There is an analogy of two chess players. As you walk up on one professional chess player, he is sitting on one side of the bench, and at the end of his move he gets up walks to the other side, sits down, thinks a moment and makes his move. This process is repeated until the game is over and the chess player wins.

Guaranteed.

When you ask him why he is playing chess alone, he says to ensure his victory. Or as Piper notes in his book astonished by God: “…the reason God knows the future is because he plans the future and accomplishes it.”

You wouldn’t think too highly of his skills, would you? As you walk down the road a bit further, you come across another chess master. This time however, there is a line of players, world famous chess players, lined up as far as the eye could see. As you watched, the one chess player was handily beating every player that sat before him. Player after player.

With whom would you be more impressed with?

And it is this perceived contradiction that leads Calvinists to a polluting of God’s character, which A.W. Tozer tackles in his book, Knowledge of the Holy. Here is a excerpt…. I changed a couple words to read better:

… While a complete explanation of the origin of sin eludes us, there are a few things we do know. In His sovereign wisdom God has permitted evil to exist in carefully restricted areas of His creation, a kind of fugitive outlaw whose activities are temporary and limited in scope. In doing this God has acted according to His infinite wisdom and goodness. More than that no one knows at present; and more than that no one needs to know. The name of God is sufficient guarantee of the perfection of His works.

Another real problem created by the doctrine of the divine sovereignty has to do with the will of man. If God rules His universe by His sovereign decrees, how is it possible for man to exercise free choice? And if he cannot exercise freedom of choice, how can he be held responsible for his conduct? Is he not a mere puppet whose actions are determined by a behind-the-scenes God who pulls the strings as it pleases Him?

The attempt to answer these questions has divided the Christian church neatly into two camps which have borne the names of two distinguished theologians, Jacobus Arminius and John Calvin. Most Christians are content to get into one camp or the other and deny either sovereignty to God or free will to man. It appears possible, however, to reconcile these two positions without doing violence to either, although the effort that follows may prove deficient to partisans of one camp or the other.

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.

Perhaps a homely illustration might help us to understand. An ocean liner leaves New York bound for Liverpool. Its destination has been determined by proper authorities. Nothing can change it. This is at least a faint picture of sovereignty.

On board the liner are several scores of passengers. These are not in chains, neither are their activities determined for them by decree. They are completely free to move about as they will. They eat, sleep, play, lounge about on the deck, read, talk, altogether as they please; but all the while the great liner is carrying them steadily onward toward a predetermined port.

Both freedom and sovereignty are present here and they do not contradict each other. So it is, I believe, with mans freedom and the sovereignty of God. The mighty liner of Gods sovereign design keeps its steady course over the sea of history. God moves undisturbed and unhindered toward the fulfilment of those eternal purposes which He purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. We do not know all that is included in those purposes, but enough has been disclosed to furnish us with a broad outline of things to come and to give us good hope and firm assurance of future well-being.

We know that God will fulfil every promise made to the prophets; we know that sinners will some day be cleansed out of the earth; we know that a ransomed company will enter into the joy of God and that the righteous will shine forth in the kingdom of their Father; we know that Gods perfections will yet receive universal acclamation, that all created intelligences will own Jesus Christ Lord to the glory of God the Father, that the present imperfect order will be done away, and a new heaven and a new earth be established forever.

Toward all this God is moving with infinite wisdom and perfect precision of action. No one can dissuade Him from His purposes; nothing turn Him aside from His plans. Since He is omniscient, there can be no unforeseen circumstances, no accidents. As He is sovereign, there can be no countermanded orders, no breakdown in authority; and as He is omninpotent, there can be no want of power to achieve His chosen ends. God is sufficient unto Himself for all these things.

In the meanwhile things are not as smooth as this quick outline might suggest. The mystery of iniquity doth already work. Within the broad field of Gods sovereign, permissive will the deadly conflict of good with evil continues with increasing fury. God will yet have His way in the whirlwind and the storm, but the storm and the whirlwind are here, and as responsible beings we must make our choice in the present moral situation.

Certain things have been decreed by the free determination of God, and one of these is the law of choice and consequences. God has decreed that all who willingly commit themselves to His Son Jesus Christ in the obedience of faith shall receive eternal life and become sons of God. He has also decreed that all who love darkness and continue in rebellion against the high authority of heaven shall remain in a state of spiritual alienation and suffer eternal death at last.

Reducing the whole matter to individual terms, we arrive at some vital and highly personal conclusions. In the moral conflict now raging around us whoever is on Gods side is on the winning side and cannot lose; whoever is on the other side is on the losing side and cannot win. Here there is no chance, no gamble. There is freedom to choose which side we shall be on but no freedom to negotiate the results of the choice once it is made. By the mercy of God we may repent a wrong choice and alter the consequences by making a new and right choice. Beyond that we cannot go.

The whole matter of moral choice centers around Jesus Christ. Christ stated it plainly: He that is not with me is against me, and No man cometh unto the Father, but by me. The gospel message embodies three distinct elements: an announcement, a command, and a call. It announces the good news of redemption accomplished in mercy; it commands all men everywhere to repent and it calls all men to surrender to the terms of grace by believing on Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

We must all choose whether we will obey the gospel or turn away in unbelief and reject its authority. Our choice is our own, but the consequences of the choice have already been determined by the sovereign will of God, and from this there is no appeal.

James White and Jeff Durbin’s Horrendous 5-Point View of God

Published by Papa Giorgio

James White and Jeff Durbin exemplify just how 5-point Calvinism can destroy a good apologetic. It allows for an easy refutation of a Mormon apologist to show the God of Christianity is an evil god.

This defining sovereignty as some “determinism” creates a god more in line with a Muslim view of god than a Judeo-Christian view. 5-Pointers admit infants are created for destruction in Calvinism:

  • “We may rest assured that God would never have suffered any infants to be slain except those who were already damned and predestined for eternal death.” — John Calvin

The same in ISLAM: Babies CAN Go To HELL In Islam | Not only that, but we are more moral than the god of Calvinism or Islam.

In other words, the god of Calvinism is, as Lewis aptly notes, this thinking “may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.” Yup:

Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threat­ens us with the following dilemma.

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.

The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the man of infe­rior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept their standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. When I came first to the University I was as nearly with­out a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint dis­taste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as ‘white’ what was hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but ‘as lords that are certainly expected’. You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. But the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into soci­ety that one is unfit for. It is in the light of such experi­ences that we must consider the goodness of God. Beyond all doubt, His idea of ‘goodness’ differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

SEE MORE IN MY POST TITLED:

Challenges To Strict 5-Point Calvinism | Tozer/Winger/Geisler/Lewis

Children and Depravity – Two Shorts

(Left video) 5-minutes plus; (Right video) 15-minutes plus

(See more about who introduced such “determinism into the church in a previous post, HERE)

As I am studying this, I wonder if a few of the Reformers borrowed the fatalism of Allah. At any rate, you can watch James and Jeff (and other Calvinistic theologians/pastors, but not always stated as clearly) say that the god of the Bible authored sex trafficking and the Holocaust. Bravo to the Mormon in slapping these two down. Mormons are easy to discuss issues with… unless you posit a god thru the rose colored lenses of the Calvinistic systematic. [See my using lower case for “god” — the Calvinistic god is too small. Like the Mormon god… not the God of the Bible] BTW, these are all arguments a healthy view of a theistic God used against philosophical naturalism – atheism.

Observe How Calvinistic Determinism Undermines Christian Apologetics

Dr. Leighton Flowers interacts with a recent video where a young Mormon picks apart the Calvinistic determinism of James White and Jeff Durbin making their perspective seem completely irrational and untenable. Theistic determinism is an unnecessary burden that some Christians have adopted making it virtually impossible to rationally defend scriptural truths against the false teaching of groups like Mormons. Theology will drive your methodology and one’s apologetic suffers when they adopt a deterministic theology, as witnessed in this video. (Full Video Here)

John Calvin, for which the systematic is named, explains more ~ via an excerpt from The Potter’s Promise: A Biblical Defense of Traditional Soteriology:

If you do not already know what Calvinism is all about, I recommend that you study the teachings of Calvinists themselves and keep in mind that not all Calvinists are the same.[2] Learn from my mistake, you should always study the opposition’s viewpoint for yourself.

Back when I was a Calvinist, I had so saturated myself with Calvinistic preachers and authors that the only thing I knew of the opposing views was what they told me. Thus, I had been led to believe the only real alternative to Calvinism was this strange concept of God “looking through the corridors of time to elect those He foresees would choose Him.” Notable Calvinistic teachers almost always paint non-Calvinistic scholars as holding to this perspective. Once I realized I had been misled on this point, I was more open to consider other interpretations objectively. So, just as it is only fair to learn Calvinism from actual Calvinists, it is also only fair to learn Traditionalism from a Southern Baptist Traditionalist.[3]

With this in mind, here is a direct quote from John Calvin which most clearly reveals the Traditionalist’s major point of contention with our Calvinistic brethren:

“By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which He determined with Himself whatever He wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of those ends, we say that he has been predestined to life or death…[4] Some are predestined to salvation, others to damnation… Regarding the lost: it was His good pleasure to doom to destruction… Since the disposition of all things is in the hands of God and He can give life or death at His pleasure, He dispenses and ordains by His judgment that some, from their mother’s womb, are destined irrevocably to eternal death in order to glorify His name in their perdition… All are not created on equal terms, but some are predestined to eternal life, others to eternal damnation…”[5]

The very thought of a creator making human beings, with real conscious feelings and emotions, for the sole purpose of pouring out His everlasting wrath so as to manifest His glory leaves even Calvinists pondering.[6]

The “dreadfulness” of such a decree may accomplish some measure of terror filled “thankfulness” in the hearts of those who happen to be rescued from this unthinkable fate, but no one can objectively claim that they are not on some level troubled by such a doctrine.[7] If the Scripture clearly teaches us to adopt these doctrines and the emotional abhorrence that typically follows, then we certainly must submit ourselves to it. However, suppose that was not the intention of the biblical authors at all? Think of what damage such interpretations impose upon the church and the believer’s view of God if the “dreadfulness” of these doctrines are simply untrue.

[….]

John Calvin forthrightly reveals where his own systematic leads:

“A distinction has been invented between doing and permitting, because to many it seemed altogether inexplicable how Satan and all the wicked are so under the hand and authority of God, that He directs their malice to whatever end He pleases, and employs their iniquities to execute His judgments…

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.”[32]  

Many modern day Calvinists would not go so far as to candidly admit what John Calvin does in the quote above. Yet, can the Calvinistic systematic avoid the necessity of this logical end? Their namesake does not think so.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Examples of other points where Calvinists simply do not agree among themselves: (1) Atonement: Phil Johnson, President of Grace to You ministries, writes, “But second, don’t imagine that there is just one view for the Limited Atonement position and another view for the Unlimited Atonement position. As if there are two polar opposites here and they compete against each other. This is not really an either/or position even among Calvinists. And in fact, historically, the most intense debates about Limited Atonement have come over the past 400 years, they’ve all been intramural debates between Calvinists, among Calvinists… There are at least six possible Calvinists’ interpretations of it [Scripture]…” Phil Johnson, The Nature of the Atonement: Why and for Whom did Christ die? Quote taken from: http://www.bible-bb.com/files/MAC/SC03-1027.htm; [date accessed: 4/2/15] (2) God’s Love for All, see John MacArthur, Does God Love the World? (3) Lapsarian Controversy (4) God’s genuine desire for all to be saved (5) The “order salutis” (the temporal vs. logical order).

[3] Non-Calvinistic Southern Baptists have been using the term “Traditionalist” to describe the most commonly held Southern Baptist view of salvation taught by leaders over the last one hundred years or so. In 2012, a document was produced to better articulate the scholarly non-Calvinistic soteriology of Southern Baptists, whose primary author was Eric Hankins, and was entitled A Statement of the Traditional Southern Baptist Understanding of God’s Plan of Salvation. The word “traditional” was again used for the basic Baptist view of non-Calvinists. This term has never been meant to suggest that all Southern Baptists have been non-Calvinistic because it is clear there have been two clear streams of soteriology throughout Baptist history. […]

[4] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2002), sec. 5, 1030–1031.

[5] Gilbert VanOrder, Jr. Calvinism’s Conflicts: An Examination of the Problems in Reformed Theology (Lulu Publishers, 2013), 99.

[6] John Calvin, pg. 124: “How it was ordained by the foreknowledge and decree of God what man’s future was without God being implicated as associate in the fault as the author or approver of transgression, is clearly a secret so much excelling the insight of the human mind, that I am not ashamed to confess ignorance…. I daily so meditate on these mysteries of his judgments that curiosity to know anything more does not attract me.”

[7] John Calvin himself admitted the dreadfulness of this teaching: “Again I ask: whence does it happen that Adam’s fall irremediably involved so many peoples, together with their infant offspring, in eternal death unless because it so pleased God? Here their tongues, otherwise so loquacious, must become mute. The decree is dreadful indeed, I confess. Yet no one can deny that God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him, and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by His decree.” Quote taken from: http://postbarthian.com/2014/05/31/john-calvin-confessed-double-prede-stination-horrible-dreadful-decree/; [date accessed: 3/25/15]

[….]

[32] John Calvin, The Eternal Predestination of God; 10:11, [emphasis added.]

4-more examples of this evil god:

THEODORE ZACHARIADES

CONSISTENT CALVINIST

JOHN PIPER

CALVINISM ON RAVI’S FALL

 

Is Evil Proof Against God? Where Does It Come From?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted January of 2016 – fixed some media today

Description of the above video:

  • If there is a God, why is there so much evil? How could any God that cares about right and wrong allow so much bad to happen? And if there is no God, who then determines what is right and what is wrong? The answers to these questions, as Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft explains, go to the heart of ethics, morality and how we know what it means to be a decent person.

The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either.

[….]

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 13, 38.

Description of the above video:

  • Isn’t human suffering proof that a just, all-powerful God must not exist? On the contrary, says Boston College Professor of Philosophy Peter Kreeft. How can “suffering” exist without an objective standard against which to judge it? Absent a standard, there is no justice. If there is no justice, there is no injustice. And if there is no injustice, there is no suffering. On the other hand, if justice exists, God exists. In five minutes, learn more.

Description of the above video:

  • A student asks a question of Ravi Zacharias about God condemning people [atheists] to hell. This Q&A occurred after a presentation Ravi gave at Harvard University, and is now one of his most well-known responses in the apologetic sub-culture. This is an updated version to my 2nd edit of this on my YouTube.

Description of the above video:

  • Is evil rational? If it is, then how can we depend on reason alone to make a better world? Best-selling author Dennis Prager has a challenging answer.

Description of the above video:

  • Atheists Trying to Have Their Cake and Eat It Too on Morality. This video shows that when an atheist denies objective morality they also affirm moral good and evil without the thought of any contradiction or inconsistency on their part.

EVERY ONE HAS HEARD people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”–‘That’s my seat, I was there first”–“Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”–“Why should you shove in first?”–“Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”–“Come on, you promised.” People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.” Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that some thing has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

(accuser) “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”

(responder) “Your right, I apologize.”

(accuser) “That’s my seat, I was there first!”

(responder) “Your right, you were. Here you go.”

(accuser) “Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine.”

(responder) “Oh gosh, I forgot, here you go.”

(accuser) “Come on, you promised.”

(responder) “Your right, lets go to the movies.”

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong “the Law of Nature,” they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law–with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are color-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behavior was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practiced! If they had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the color of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behavior known to all men is unsound, because different civilizations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Creeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to–whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put Yourself first. selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong–in other words, if there is no Law of Nature–what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, 1 apologize to them. They had much better read some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money–the one you have almost forgotten-came when you were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done–well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behavior to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it–and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much–we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so–that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 17-21.

After reading that portion of CLASSIC Lewis, here is some thoughts from a philosopher that I disagree with on many points (he is an atheist after all), but he argues well for the following, even if later rejecting it:

If the reader is not familiar with Mere Christianity, I would urge him or her to buy it. The first chapter alone is worth the cost of the book. It is a brilliant piece of psychology. In it, Lewis sums up two crucial aspects of the human condition. We can see the first aspect in the passage quoted. Human beings do quarrel in the way Lewis describes. We are moral agents who cannot help feeling that there are some things we ought to do, and that there are other things we ought not to do. We believe, sometimes despite ourselves, that there is such a thing as right and wrong, and that there are certain principles of conduct to which we and all other human beings ought to adhere. In our dealings with other people we constantly appeal to those principles. We are quick to notice when others violate them. We get defensive and make excuses when it appears that we have violated them ourselves. We get defensive even when no one else is around. We accuse ourselves when no else does, and we rationalize our behavior in front of our consciences just as we would in front of another person. We cannot help applying to ourselves the principles we firmly believe apply to all. To use Alvin Plantinga’s term, the belief in morality is basic. Even when we reject that belief in our theoretical reasoning, it comes back to haunt us at every turn. We can never really get away from it. There is a reason why our legal system defines insanity as the inability to tell right from wrong: people who lack that ability have lost an important part of their humanity. They have taken a step down towards the level of beasts.

Even if, in our heart of hearts, we all believe in morality, we do not necessarily share the exact same moral values. Differences regarding values are at least a part of what we quarrel about. Yet Lewis correctly recognizes that our differences in this area never amount to a total difference. The moral beliefs human beings entertain display broad cross-cultural similarities. Ancient Egyptians did not appreciate having their property stolen any more than we do. A brother’s murder, a wife’s infidelity, or a friend’s betrayal would have angered them, just as it angers us. Human nature has not changed much for tens of thousands of years. It does not change at all when one travels to the other side of the globe.

I did not believe Lewis the first time I read him, or even the second time. This idea, that there is a fundamental underlying unity to the moral fabric of humanity, is a hard one to accept. Think about those suicidal fanatics who crashed planes into the World Trade Center. They “knew” they were doing the right thing, that Allah would reward them in heaven with virgins galore. How radically different from our own values the values of some Muslims must seem! Yet there is common ground. Even the most militant Muslims despise thieves, cheats, and liars, just as Christians. Jews, and atheists do. They value loyalty and friendship. just as we do. They love their children and their parents. just as we do. They even condemn murder, at least within their own societies. It is only when they deal with outsiders like us that some of them may seem like (and in fact, be) monsters. To distinguish between insiders and outsiders, and to treat the latter horribly, is actually not so unusual in human history. Expanding one’s “inside group” until it encompasses all of humanity is something of an innovation. When we consider all this, the moral gulf between us and them does not seem so unbridgeable. Our admittedly great differences occur against a background of fundamental similarities. Similarities guaranteed by the fact that we are all stuck being human. So it seems Lewis was right, despite my earlier skepticism. Universal moral themes can and do underpin the diversity of our moral opinions.

[….]

Moral statements, then, cannot be mere matters of taste and opinion. They essentially involve an appeal to principles that transcend both the wishes of any one individual, and the customs of any one culture or society. That there are such principles, and that we cannot really escape from them, are points Lewis successfully illuminates. It thus seems very plausible to suppose that when our moral statements appeal to these principles in an appropriate and rational manner, they deserve to be called truths.

Andrew Marker, The Ladder: Escaping from Plato’s Cave (iUniverse.com, 2010), 108-110, 111-112.

These two babies explain better:

Challenges To Strict 5-Point Calvinism | Tozer/Winger/Geisler/Lewis

Published by Papa Giorgio

This post will include lengthy excerpts combined with media… so buckle up buttercup!

  • Let him, therefore, who would beware of such unbelief, always bear in mind, that there is no random power, or agency, or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed. – John Calvin

I reject this strict interpretation by Calvin… Tozer reopens this “knowingly and willingly decreed” to a slightly different understanding that I see is a better fit to this mystery God has unveiled.

This first audio is from A.W. Tozer regarding God’s sovereignty. I also include a partial excerpt from his book, The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God. Their Meaning in the Christian Life, chapter 22 ~ “The Sovereignty of God” ~ of which the entire chapter is here.

Here is that partial chapter excerpt.

I changed a couple words as can not reads better as cannot:

… While a complete explanation of the origin of sin eludes us, there are a few things we do know. In His sovereign wisdom God has permitted evil to exist in carefully restricted areas of His creation, a kind of fugitive outlaw whose activities are temporary and limited in scope. In doing this God has acted according to His infinite wisdom and goodness. More than that no one knows at present; and more than that no one needs to know. The name of God is sufficient guarantee of the perfection of His works.

Another real problem created by the doctrine of the divine sovereignty has to do with the will of man. If God rules His universe by His sovereign decrees, how is it possible for man to exercise free choice? And if he cannot exercise freedom of choice, how can he be held responsible for his conduct? Is he not a mere puppet whose actions are determined by a behind-the-scenes God who pulls the strings as it pleases Him?

The attempt to answer these questions has divided the Christian church neatly into two camps which have borne the names of two distinguished theologians, Jacobus Arminius and John Calvin. Most Christians are content to get into one camp or the other and deny either sovereignty to God or free will to man. It appears possible, however, to reconcile these two positions without doing violence to either, although the effort that follows may prove deficient to partisans of one camp or the other.

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.

Perhaps a homely illustration might help us to understand. An ocean liner leaves New York bound for Liverpool. Its destination has been determined by proper authorities. Nothing can change it. This is at least a faint picture of sovereignty.

On board the liner are several scores of passengers. These are not in chains, neither are their activities determined for them by decree. They are completely free to move about as they will. They eat, sleep, play, lounge about on the deck, read, talk, altogether as they please; but all the while the great liner is carrying them steadily onward toward a predetermined port.

Both freedom and sovereignty are present here and they do not contradict each other. So it is, I believe, with mans freedom and the sovereignty of God. The mighty liner of Gods sovereign design keeps its steady course over the sea of history. God moves undisturbed and unhindered toward the fulfilment of those eternal purposes which He purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. We do not know all that is included in those purposes, but enough has been disclosed to furnish us with a broad outline of things to come and to give us good hope and firm assurance of future well-being.

We know that God will fulfil every promise made to the prophets; we know that sinners will some day be cleansed out of the earth; we know that a ransomed company will enter into the joy of God and that the righteous will shine forth in the kingdom of their Father; we know that Gods perfections will yet receive universal acclamation, that all created intelligences will own Jesus Christ Lord to the glory of God the Father, that the present imperfect order will be done away, and a new heaven and a new earth be established forever.

Toward all this God is moving with infinite wisdom and perfect precision of action. No one can dissuade Him from His purposes; nothing turn Him aside from His plans. Since He is omniscient, there can be no unforeseen circumstances, no accidents. As He is sovereign, there can be no countermanded orders, no breakdown in authority; and as He is omninpotent, there can be no want of power to achieve His chosen ends. God is sufficient unto Himself for all these things.

In the meanwhile things are not as smooth as this quick outline might suggest. The mystery of iniquity doth already work. Within the broad field of Gods sovereign, permissive will the deadly conflict of good with evil continues with increasing fury. God will yet have His way in the whirlwind and the storm, but the storm and the whirlwind are here, and as responsible beings we must make our choice in the present moral situation.

Certain things have been decreed by the free determination of God, and one of these is the law of choice and consequences. God has decreed that all who willingly commit themselves to His Son Jesus Christ in the obedience of faith shall receive eternal life and become sons of God. He has also decreed that all who love darkness and continue in rebellion against the high authority of heaven shall remain in a state of spiritual alienation and suffer eternal death at last.

Reducing the whole matter to individual terms, we arrive at some vital and highly personal conclusions. In the moral conflict now raging around us whoever is on Gods side is on the winning side and cannot lose; whoever is on the other side is on the losing side and cannot win. Here there is no chance, no gamble. There is freedom to choose which side we shall be on but no freedom to negotiate the results of the choice once it is made. By the mercy of God we may repent a wrong choice and alter the consequences by making a new and right choice. Beyond that we cannot go.

The whole matter of moral choice centers around Jesus Christ. Christ stated it plainly: He that is not with me is against me, and No man cometh unto the Father, but by me. The gospel message embodies three distinct elements: an announcement, a command, and a call. It announces the good news of redemption accomplished in mercy; it commands all men everywhere to repent and it calls all men to surrender to the terms of grace by believing on Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

We must all choose whether we will obey the gospel or turn away in unbelief and reject its authority. Our choice is our own, but the consequences of the choice have already been determined by the sovereign will of God, and from this there is no appeal.

Here is the excellent first question [of twenty] Mike was attempting to get to get through, which then prompted me to go thru a bunch of his videos. I will include links to those below the video I grabbed the response to that first question from:

Why God Hardens Hearts: Romans 9:17-24 (YouTube) – This topic is what, many years ago led me to come up with the idea that as God [in His perfect justice] and Man [in his freedom to rebel] working in a mystery together led to the eventual hardening of Pharoah’s heart. God’s perfect sovereignty and man’s limited freedom will culminate in God’s will/plan/glory being executed perfectly.

AND THIS IS A MYSTERY

Our freedoms — as such, and God’s sovereignty. Working in tandem. One of many mysteries involving an infinite Being: the Judeo/Christian God, YHWH.

  • “But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt.”  – Exodus 7:3
  • “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he did not listen to them, as the LORD had told Moses.” – Exodus 9:12
  • “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them.’” – Exodus 10:1
  • “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will pursue them. Then I will receive glory by means of Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the LORD.” So the Israelites did this.” – Exodus 14:4
  • “The LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and he pursued the Israelites, who were going out defiantly.” – Exodus 14:8

— combined with Romans 1:18-25:

For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, 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. As a result, people are without excuse. For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.

Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen.

A good dealing with the order of the verbs in these and other passages of the hardening of Pharoah’s heart is HERE (it is a must read in my opinion, even though it is long). The author is more on the hard-Armenian side of the aisle, but nonetheless his treatment of the issue is one I made years ago. I believe both the strict 5-pointer and the Arminian over-step their bound like we try to relegate the Trinity to water/ice/steam. We all misuse language in trying to describe the God who saved us, and we will continue in this failure/endeavor in our discussions. Thankfully the Holy Spirit is the giver of real Truth by pointing us to Jesus for the Glory of the Father:

… fundamentally, the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am condemned by God,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth; that such an experience Provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it.

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 43

Other Mike Winger YouTube discussions are…

BTW, there are many debates I have watched on this topic by James White. I highly recommend Dr. White and his ministry, they have had a huge apologetic influence on me over the years.

I also use thinking over the years to note this idea of God’s sovereignty and foreknowledge in my life in a two page testimony I use this graphic in:

Another influential apologetics “coach” in my life was Dr. Norman Geisler. Here is a presentation I uploaded for this post:

CS LEWIS was another huge influence on my apologetic life. I noted in his book, The Problem of Pain, this part from chapter 3 and 4,

“Divine Goodness”

Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threat­ens us with the following dilemma.

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.

The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the man of infe­rior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept their standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. When I came first to the University I was as nearly with­out a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint dis­taste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as ‘white’ what was hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but ‘as lords that are certainly expected’. You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. But the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into soci­ety that one is unfit for. It is in the light of such experi­ences that we must consider the goodness of God. Beyond all doubt, His idea of ‘goodness’ differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent—a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise. He appeals to our existing moral judgement—‘Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’ (Luke 12:57) God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis of their own concep­tions of gratitude, fidelity, and fair play: and puts Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures—‘What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?’ (Jeremiah 2:5.) …

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 3)

“Human Wickedness”

…A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one always inexplicably angry. Most of us have at times felt a secret sympathy with the dying farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance by asking ‘What harm have I ever done Him?’ There is the real rub. The worst we have done to God is to leave Him alone—why can’t He return the compliment? Why not live and let live? What call has He, of all beings, to be ‘angry’? It’s easy for Him to be good!

Now at the moment when a man feels real guilt— moments too rare in our lives—all these blasphemies vanish away. Much, we may feel, can be excused to human infirmities: but not this—this incredibly mean and ugly action which none of our friends would have done, which even such a thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of, which we would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment we really do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above man, to them. A God who did not regard this with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God—it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abol­ished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath hap­pens to stink.

When we merely say that we are bad, the ‘wrath’ of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness. To keep ever before us the insight derived from such a moment as I have been describing, to learn to detect the same real inexcusable corruption under more and more of its complex disguises, is therefore indis­pensable to a real understanding of the Christian faith. This is not, of course, a new doctrine. I am attempting nothing very splendid in this chapter. I am merely trying to get my reader (and, still more, myself) over a pons asi-norum—to take the first step out of fools’ paradise and utter illusion. But the illusion has grown, in modern times, so strong, that I must add a few considerations tending to make the reality less incredible.

  1. We are deceived by looking on the outside of things. We suppose ourselves to be roughly not much worse than Y, whom all acknowledge for a decent sort of person, and certainly (though we should not claim it out loud) better than the abominable X. Even on the superficial level we are probably deceived about this. Don’t be too sure that your friends think you as good as Y. The very fact that you selected him for the comparison is suspicious: he is prob­ably head and shoulders above you and your circle. But let us suppose that Y and yourself both appear ‘not bad’. How far Y’s appearance is deceptive, is between Y and God. His may not be deceptive: you know that yours is.

Does this seem to you a mere trick, because I could say the same to Y and so to every man in turn? But that is just the point. Every man, not very holy or very arrogant, has to ‘live up to’ the outward appearance of other men: he knows there is that within him which falls far below even his most careless public behaviour, even his loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things pass through your mind? We have never told the whole truth. We may confess ugly facts— the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the tone is false. The very act of confess-ing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are excep­tional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his nor­mal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the  important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.

  1. A reaction—in itself wholesome—is now going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of moral­ity, a reawakening of the social We feel our­selves to be involved in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with ‘the system’ and which can be dealt with without waiting for the mil­lennium. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and cer­tainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. But we must learn to walk before we run.
  2. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it fur­nished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eter­nal moment St Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong— forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, ‘an acquired taste’—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind.
  3. We must guard against the feeling that there is ‘safety in numbers’. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excus­able. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety per cent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human soci-ety—some particular school, college, regiment or profes­sion where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (‘Every­one does it’) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad soci­ety we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our ‘normal’ was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our ‘Quixotic’ was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the ‘pocket’ now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. But is there any evidence—except Christian doctrine itself—that this is so? I am afraid there is. In the first place, there are those odd people among us who do not accept the local stan­dard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite dif­ferent behaviour is, in fact, possible. Worse still, there is the fact that these people, even when separated widely in space and time, have a suspicious knack of agreeing with one another in the main—almost as if they were in touch with some larger public opinion outside the pocket. What is common to Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gautama, Christ1 and Marcus Aurelius, is something pretty sub­stantial. Thirdly, we find in ourselves even now a theoret­ical approval of this behaviour which no one practises. Even inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger world—and that when the term ends we might find ourselves facing the public opin­ion of that larger world. But the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the ‘pocket’ from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease, and that nothing else will. It may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but even now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life. It is then that we shall envy the ‘morbid’ person, the ‘pedant’ or ‘enthusiast’ who really has taught his company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles.

[….]

This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature. Nor am I recommending universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his ‘faith in human nature’, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.

CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 4)

Needless to say I have been privy to this debate since the 80’s.

I like to say I am a Baptist except for dress and drink… but a Baptist nonetheless. I am not a 1689 Confession type Baptist. I have always joked that I am a 3.5 Calvinist when I read Norman Geisler, and a 4.5 Calvinist when I read James White.

No more.

This next part comes from a post about preaching the Gospel to ourselves. And in the middle of this post I have the following. And THE REASON I put that there was to note that a majority of Calvinists give lip play to a distinction between “total” and “utter” depravity, but many use language and ideas to the “utter” end of the spectrum.

A TEACHING BREAK

A spiritually dead person, then, is in need of spiritual life from God. But he does exist, and he can know and choose. His faculties that make up the image of God are not absent; they are simply incapable of initiating or attaining their own salvation. Like a drowning person, a fallen person can reach out and accept the lifeline even though he cannot make it to safety on his own.

The below is from Geisler’s book, Chosen but Free:

Sproul has a wonderful ministry, and he [Sproul] has asked ~ rhetorically ~ how: anyone could be involved in believing in the value of human worth and at the same time believing in TOTAL depravity? He responds:

The very fact that Calvinists take sin so seriously is because they take the value of human beings so seriously. It is because man was made in the image of God, called to mirror and reflect God’s holiness, that we have the distinction of being the image-bearers of God.

But what does ‘total depravity’ mean? Total depravity means simply this: that sin affects every aspect of our human existence: our minds, our wills and our bodies are affected by sin. Every dimension of our personality suffers at some point from the weight of sin that has infected the human race.

So the argument is nuanced and deep.

Thus I split the horns and end up tweaking some of the 5-points, and getting rid of others.

Again:

  • Let him, therefore, who would beware of such unbelief, always bear in mind, that there is no random power, or agency, or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed. – John Calvin

I do not take that as Gospel Truth, in other words. The following graph serves as a good comparison between the two (larger here):