The calvinist God created most of mankind for torment in hell
Calvinists deny God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will.
Calvinists love to boast that calvinism is the gospel, because, they say, their God has chosen some people unconditionally for eternal life in heaven, when all they deserved, along with all other mankind, was to be condemned to hell. This somehow makes them feel special, as if their God has singled them out for some special privilege that other (perhaps lesser beings?) do not get. This is a type of elitism! So often we hear of the positive aspects of God’s election, yet most of mankind will not go to calvinist heaven. Instead they will spend eternity in calvinist hell! This is anything but positive for those people! (Both “elite” and “elect” derive from the same Greek term, as is also “eligible.)
Those who are chosen by the calvinist God for eternity in heaven are the elect ones, also known as the election. But, most of the world are not chosen (non-elect – that is, they will not go to heaven, but instead have no other option than to go to hell). The calvinist God has chosen some for eternal life and therefore he has chosen the majority of mankind for eternal condemnation (in hell). Whichever group you are in has been pre-programmed by the calvinist God from the start of time, without any condition at all, other than by the “kindness” or “kind intentions” of his will. It is your destiny! The calvinist God is sovereign; argument is useless! That is, it was the calvinist God’s pleasure to choose who would be saved, regardless of their goodness, faith, merit, or lack thereof. The calvinist election is unconditional. And it was the calvinist God’s pleasure to send most of the world to hell!
On the other hand, true Biblical election does exist but is conditional upon God’s foreknowledge determining who would call upon the name of the Lord to be saved (1 Peter 1:2 – Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father; Romans 10:13 – For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.).
However, this is based upon God’s perfect knowledge of the future free will decisions of mankind, and calvinism absolutely denies any possibility of man having free will to choose between good and evil, nor that God may use His foreknowledge to determine such free will decisions (that they say don’t exist anyway!).
Piper says: God does not foreknow the free decisions of people to believe in him because there aren’t any such free decisions to know. (What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism, 1998)
If man has no free will to choose between good and evil, and if God is not to be permitted to use His foreknowledge to determine such decisions, then, of course, calvinism might have some truth. In order to avoid free will and the use of foreknowledge, the calvinist God writes the complete script of every man’s life on earth before the beginning of the world. If it’s not in the script, it won’t happen! Calvin wrote: “it is vain to debate about prescience (= foreknowledge), while it is clear that all events take place by his sovereign appointment.” (Institutes Bk 3, Ch.23, Section 6) Thus, calvinism cannot afford to accept God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will as such, for this would totally destroy calvinism!
Without any free will of man, God has to have created all evil committed by man.
This raises some serious problems with the creation of man who could not be permitted to choose good. Adam was commanded by God not to eat of the forbidden fruit, yet calvinism denies Adam any free will to be able to choose other than the sin that God ordained for him. Thus, if Adam sinned by disobeying God’s command not to eat that fruit, it was because the calvinist God gave Adam no ability to choose to do good (that is, to obey God). Calvinism clearly teaches that God ordained sin (MacArthur, Piper, Boettner, Hodge), created sin (Sproul), decreed sin (MacArthur), authored sin (Calvin, Cheung) all sin (evil) (Calvin). Even permitting sin is the same as ordaining sin, for permitting something implies another will that desires such permission. If God’s will is ultimately the only will in the universe (which is what calvinists teach!), then ultimately he is permitting himself to ordain sin! Those who teach the permitting of sin include Jonathan Edwards and A W Pink.
If Adam’s sin is ordained (created) by the calvinist God, and Adam has no free will to oppose such ordaining of sin, then all mankind descended from Adam must also be ordained to have no free will to oppose sin. Adam was created perfect in the beginning, yet fell because the calvinist God decreed he should fall, so how may we, the rest of mankind (Adam’s descendants), being born under the curse of Adam’s sin, be able to escape such a decree? Man was created by the calvinist God with absolutely no option to choose good. The script of the calvinist play says so!
The calvinist God ordains that man is totally unable to seek God in any way.
According to calvinism, all mankind is ordained (or decreed, etc) to sin from the start of their lives. They are born sinful with no option for being able to choose any good. This is written into the script for all of man from start to finish! And, unless a man is chosen before the start of time to become one of the elect one day, he will go to hell because of that sin which he was ordered (scripted) to commit! On the other hand, while the Bible teaches that all mankind is born under the curse of Adam’s sin, and that all mankind is totally depraved (there is none that does good, no not one; they will not seek after God), it does not teach that man cannot under any circumstance choose to seek God. The Bible says that man will not seek after God (an act of the will) and it is certainly true that without God’s intervention, man will never choose to seek after God.
However, God has provided an intervention that challenges man to call upon the name of the Lord and be saved (as per the gospel – Romans 10:13). That intervention was foretold in Genesis 3 and in many places since then. It is the plan of redemption, the buying back from satan of all mankind which had been enslaved to satan when Adam chose (by his free will!) to do what satan wanted, namely, to eat the forbidden fruit. That intervention is summed up in the following verse:
John 19:30 – When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.
Yes, it was indeed finished. That which was required to buy back God’s special possession, mankind, had been paid in full. God’s possession, mankind, had been bought back from enslavement (= redeemed). Satan no longer had any right to bind man to his (satan’s) rule. Mankind had been bought back from satan, that is, redeemed. Now man had a choice!
That sacrifice set in place the gospel of reconciliation between God and man (who needed to call upon the name of the Lord to be saved – Romans 10:13). This was God’s intervention, the only intervention allowable according to the Bible (John 14:6). Man could be saved through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, but absolutely nothing else. The word of the preached gospel brings the light of understanding of God’s intervention on behalf of mankind; thus, mankind is afforded a window of opportunity to see and understand the only way to the Father (through Jesus Christ). Total depravity may be overridden by such an intervention of God; but total inability (as taught by calvinists) cannot allow man even this opportunity to call upon the name of the Lord to be saved (unless, of course, the calvinist God has firstly chosen to “regenerate” that person as one of his unconditional elect).
One has to wonder at why satan (the god of this world) would find it useful to blind the minds of the lost, if they can never be saved! Or, on the other hand, how can satan’s blinding of the elect of God ever prevent them from being “regenerated”?
2 Corinthians 4:4 – In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
The calvinist God creates sin, then blames mankind for such sin.
Calvinists teach that it is God’s will (or pleasure!) that man should do only evil, for if their God is so absolutely sovereign, how can any other will exist independently in the universe. Every decision can only be made by God! No-one may choose other than that which God has already chosen! Thus, according to calvinism, man can only choose that which God has ordained that he should choose, whether it be good or evil. (This is the definition of a “free agent”.)
If God created the universe and everything in it, then he created all mankind (that’s logical!). If man is permitted no free will to choose between good and evil (= total inability), then the calvinist God has to be the cause of Adam choosing evil. And, therefore, the calvinist God is to blame for all Adam’s descendants likewise being totally unable to respond favourably toward God. God wrote it into the script, and all must totally obey that sovereign will of the calvinist God. The script must be obeyed!
Therefore, man is pre-programmed by the calvinist God to do only evil; this is known as the total inability of man to do good. It is impossible for man to do good. Some of mankind (the elect, or chosen of the calvinist God) will then be re-programmed to do good; this happens in the process known as regeneration (= born again). This occurs when God makes them alive again, gives them new hearts, basically causing them to be born again (which is what “regeneration” means). From this time on, the elect of God will be programmed to do good. But the non-elect remain programmed for only evil from start to finish. (It does seem incongruous that many “lost” people may choose to do many good deeds when they are totally unable to do so. … there is none that doeth good, no, not one – Romans 3:12, something the calvinists often like to quote to justify the doctrine of total inability. Probably the calvinist God has different standards for what is good or evil than the standards he has given to mankind?)
The ones the calvinist God has chosen for salvation will be forgiven for all their sin (through no merit or worth of their own) and made righteous; they will not be punished for any of their sin. Yet the non-elect (the lost ones) started off being programmed able to do only evil; they will die in the same state. The non-elect will face God in judgement, and will be punished for all their sin which the calvinist God decreed that they should commit. It is illogical that the elect should be chosen through no merit or works of their own, yet the non-elect will be eternally punished for their works which the calvinist God has decreed that they should do!
If the elect are saved through no merit of their own, then why are the lost condemned to hell solely because of what they call the justice of their calvinist God in repaying them what they deserve (their merits!)? The God that decrees such may be sovereign indeed, but he is surely not just!
Many calvinists are ashamed to have to admit that their God actually chooses the non-elect for hell.
Some calvinists are seemingly ashamed to admit that their God delights in tormenting all but his own elect. They don’t like to admit that if their God has chosen only a few for eternity in heaven, then, being totally sovereign, he has also chosen the vast majority to be tormented in hell for eternity! So, to soften the reality of their doctrines, they say that their God takes responsibility only for his elect, and that the non-elect are just left to themselves to find their own way through life (although, being non-elect, they will all end up in hell, regardless).
R C Sproul says: To understand the Reformed view of the matter we must pay close attention to the crucial distinction between positive and negative decrees of God. Positive has to do with God’s active intervention in the hearts of the elect. Negative has to do with God’s passing over the non-elect.
The Reformed view teaches that God positively or actively intervenes in the life of the elect to insure their salvation. The rest of mankind God leaves to themselves. He does not create unbelief in their hearts. That unbelief is already there. He does not coerce them to sin. They sin by their own choices. In the Calvinist view the decree of election is positive; the decree of reprobation is negative.
(Is Predestination Double, Chosen by God R C Sproul)
But if we read just a few pages before this, Sproul appears to teach the opposite!
From all eternity, without any prior view of our human behaviour, God has chosen some unto election and others unto reprobation. (P136)
So here Sproul teaches that the calvinist God chooses the non-elect to reprobation (condemnation in hell), yet only 6 pages later he says that his God just leaves them to themselves! This is a very common feature of calvinist teaching, where so-called “teachers” blatantly contradict themselves in an effort to side-step the inconsistencies of their false doctrines.
Similarly, MacArthur teaches – “Judas was not created by God to occupy hell. ….. Judas went there because Judas chose to betray Christ, chose to reject the truth, chose to pay a sad, sad price.”
(https://www.gty.org/resources/print/questions/QA183)
Yet Judas didn’t have any other option; MacArthur also teaches that “Jesus didn’t pay for the sins of Judas because when Judas died, he went to his own place to pay for his own sins.”
https://www.gty.org/resources/print/sermons/62-10
So, what option did Judas have? By not dying for his sins, God has effectively condemned Judas to hell for eternity! This is illogical and inconsistent!
We have to ask: Why, if the calvinist God is so totally sovereign, does he only dictate choices for the elect? (Although Sproul doesn’t seem to know what he really thinks!) Is the calvinist God only sovereign over the elect? And by what will, if not their own free will, do the non-elect “sin by their own choices” (Sproul) or choose “to reject the trut” like Judas (MacArthur)? MacArthur even teaches that the lost can choose their own poison! But within the framework of our sinfulness we could pick our poison. When you talk about free will, we’re talking about the freedom that the sinner has to choose his iniquity. (https://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/GTY106/answering-the-key-questions-about-the-doctrine-of-election) And how can the non-elect have a free will when the calvinist God has written the total script from the beginning? There can be no free will for the calvinist!
This wishy-washy teaching merely opens a Pandora’s box of troubles that increases their doctrinal heresies. Not only are Sproul’s and MacArthur’s teachings non-Biblical, they are also inconsistent with the calvinist doctrine that teaches that their God is sovereign over all. Apparently, their calvinist God is only sovereign over his elect; the rest are no longer his problem! And they have the temerity to call themselves teachers?
For calvinists to be consistent, they must accept that if God chooses some for life, then God also chooses the others for condemnation. And, if they teach that God does not predestine most of mankind to go to hell, they are going to have to declare Calvin to be a liar!
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 these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.
(Calvin’s Institutes Book 3 Chapter 21 Section 5)
We say, then, that Scripture clearly proves this much, that God by his eternal and immutable counsel determined once for all those whom it was his pleasure one day to admit to salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, it was his pleasure to doom to destruction. We maintain that this counsel, as regards the elect, is founded on his free mercy, without any respect to human worth, while those whom he dooms to destruction are excluded from access to life by a just and blameless, but at the same time incomprehensible judgment.
(Calvin’s Institutes Book 3 Chapter 21 Section 7)
Calvinists teach that calling upon the name of the Lord is actually a work of that salvation!
Calvinists are seriously intent on denying any free will of mankind, especially regarding the choice between good and evil, even to the extent of claiming that calling upon the name of the Lord to be saved is a work of that salvation, and therefore is not all of God. They claim that calling on the name of the Lord to be saved makes man a co-Saviour along with Christ. Thus, they say, if man has even 1% input into his salvation, then that is a work of salvation, therefore denying the effectiveness of that salvation! How absolutely ludicrous! Since when can such teaching from the Bible (Romans 10:13 – For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.) actually negate that salvation when properly carried out?
Salvation is a gift of God. Eternal life is a gift of God. Since when has receiving a gift added anything to the value of that gift? Not one calvinist has ever been able to answer that question. They just go back to their same old worn-out rhetoric that a decision to accept that gift is a work and, because salvation is not of works (Ephesians 2:9), it is not genuine! But they side step the issue of how it can add value to that gift in any way!
There are requirements for something to be established as a gift.
(a) The donor must have the legal capacity and the intent to make the gift.
(b) The gift must be given over freely to the donee (the person receiving the gift).
(c) The donee must willingly receive the gift.
If there is any requirement from the donee to add to that gift before receiving it, then it is not a gift at all, for a gift is a thing willingly given to someone without payment. If any work is required before a person may receive that gift, then it is no longer a gift but payment for services rendered.
The Bible says that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved (Romans 10:13). If salvation is a gift of God, and we are required to call upon the name of the Lord in order to receive that gift of salvation, and if that salvation is not of works lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:9), then logic dictates clearly that calling upon the name of the Lord to be saved can not be a work of, or payment in any way, for that gift. (Even Calvin recognised this simple fact – see further down.) A cry for help from the sinner to God cannot be a work! And, if we, convinced by the gospel that we are sinners in desperate need of help from God, cry out to be saved, then is that a work of our salvation? And if God doesn’t answer our cry for help, then are we not in exactly the same lost situation that we were in before we cried out for help? When did crying out for help on its own ever make anything better?
Consider this. A person is in a boat that’s drifting out to sea in a strong rip tide. Soon he’ll be way out to sea. It’s foggy and he cannot see clearly if there’s any way of escape, nor can he see anyone else around that might help him. Effectively, he’s on his own. It is apparent, though, that unless someone helps him, he’s out of chances. He tries crying out for help, but no-one seems to be hearing him, or if they are, they’re not listening to him. He just cannot see what’s happening. So, he just keeps crying out for help in case someone is listening and is able to help.
If no-one comes, can his crying out for help actually help him in any way? Would he be worse off if he didn’t cry out for help? Is he better off in any way because he is crying out for help? The simple answer is that unless someone who is willing and able to help actually hears him, then his crying out for help is, in itself, useless.
Then he hears someone call back from nearby. He continues to cry for help from this nearby person. But no-one comes to help. Finally, he asks the other person why he doesn’t come to help, and the other person says that he is unable to help. Maybe his boat is leaky, or perhaps he cannot swim, or perhaps even some other reason. So, the one needing help continues to cry out for help.
Has anything changed yet? Has the situation of the one crying for help improved in any way? The simple answer is, “No!” He is still drifting out to sea, and is exactly where he would have been if he hadn’t cried out for help! Do you get the picture? Crying out to be saved cannot help you to be saved, even just a little bit! He’s not even 1% closer to being saved. Like the sinner crying out to God to be saved, unless God responds and saves him, the sinner just cannot improve his situation the slightest bit at all.
The Bible says that we must call upon the name of the Lord to be saved. But this calling out cannot add one iota of assistance to our salvation. Unless God should answer, we are no better off than before we started to call upon the name of the Lord. But, what if God should answer? Can our cry for help add to what God will do for us? Consider the person adrift in that boat. Even if someone does hear and respond, it is the rescuer who will get all the credit for saving you. You just cannot do anything effective toward your salvation unless someone comes along and does it all for you! (The only thing you’ll get is a rebuke for being stupid enough to get yourself into this situation in the first place!)
How can crying out for help ever help save anyone unless (a) someone is there to hear that cry, (b) that someone is able to help, and (c) that someone is also willing to help? And how may calling upon the name of the Lord to be saved ever add anything at all to that full and free salvation, a gift of God? Yet calvinists are forced to deny that calling upon the name of the Lord to be saved is going to save anyone. For if they accept that calling upon the name of the Lord can save you, they then have to admit that, upon the intervention of God through the gospel, man may make a free will decision to want to be saved. But they cannot admit to that because their calvinist God will not permit man to make any free will decision concerning his salvation. Thus, the calvinists are forced to teach that whoever calls upon the name of the Lord just cannot be saved, unless God has made that decision first. God alone must save or they remain lost, they cry! So why do calvinists deny the truth of the gospel, that man must cry out to be saved in order for God to hear and respond according to His promises?
To sum it up, the calvinists have re-written Romans 10:13 to read: For whosoever is regenerated (born again) by God will then call upon the name of the Lord to be saved.
Calvinists deny that God desires people to call upon Him and be saved.
Terry Arnold (of TA Ministries) in “Arminianism-Calvinism debate” says
You say we are ‘blaspheming Jesus Christ by making him a liar and false advertiser… when he offers salvation to ‘whosoever will may come”.
This phrase ‘whosoever will may come’ is simply not in the Bible! The closest is Rev.22:17 – referring to the New Jerusalem and to God’s ‘servants’ (vs.6) taking ‘the waters of life freely’.
And yet, I can’t understand how they don’t seem to be aware of Romans 10:13 – For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.
He is actually denying that whosoever will may come for salvation just isn’t in the Bible?
Even Calvin taught that a sinners’ prayer justified the one praying.
You see that after remission of sins justification is set down by way of explanation; you see plainly that it is used for acquittal; you see how it cannot be obtained by the works of the law; you see that it is entirely through the interposition of Christ; you see that it is obtained by faith; you see, in fine, that satisfaction intervenes, since it is said that we are justified from our sins by Christ. Thus, when the publican is said to have gone down to his house “justified,” (Luke 18:14), it cannot be held that he obtained this justification by any merit of works. All that is said is, that after obtaining the pardon of sins he was regarded in the sight of God as righteous. He was justified, therefore, not by any approval of works, but by gratuitous acquittal on the part of God. Hence Ambrose elegantly terms confession of sins “legal justification,” (Ambrose on Psalm 118 Serm. 10).
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 3 Chap 11 Section 3
Luke 18:13-14a – 13And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as [his] eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. 14I tell you, this man went down to his house justified [rather] than the other:
Calvin says clearly that the publican has gone down to his house justified from his sins by Christ, while the obvious and necessary implication is that the Pharisee was not justified from his sins by Christ. Why was one justified and the other not justified? The passage is very clear: the publican cried out for God to have mercy upon him (that is, propitiate him) because he was a sinner; the other didn’t. Put simply, the publican is praying a prayer acknowledging his sins (we may assume here that repentance has to be included), and asking God to propitiate him.
Did not the publican cry out to the Lord to save him from his sins (that is, propitiate him)? Was not the publican a “whosoever” who called upon the name of the Lord to be saved? Therefore, whosoever who denies that whosoever may cry out to God to be saved has to also deny that the publican was justified. That would bring them into direct conflict with Jesus Christ who said that the publican was justified! Who is right, Terry Arnold, or Christ? Even Calvin agrees with Christ. Is Terry Arnold, a calvinist, going to argue with Calvin? Or with Christ?
Yet calvinists are forced to teach that we cannot make any decision to call upon the name of the Lord to be saved because we have no free will to do so!
Todd Friel says: People who ask Jesus into their hearts are not saved and they will perish on the Day of Judgment. (Ten Reasons not to ask Jesus into your Heart)
Paul Washer says: The question is not whether you would like to pray this prayer and ask Jesus to come into your heart — after all, you know, the handle to your heart is on the inside and if you do not open it Jesus cannot come in. ………
My friend, Jesus is Lord of your heart and if He wants to come in, He will kick the door down. (https://www.triviumpursuit.com/blog/2010/10/13/paul-washer-quotes/)
On the other hand, a Ligonier Ministries (calvinist) document, under the unlikely title of “Stop Asking Jesus into your Heart) says: In Scripture, those who call on God’s name will be saved. I’m not even categorically opposed to the language of asking Jesus into your heart, because—if understood correctly—it is a biblical concept.
(https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/stop-asking-jesus-your-heart/)
It is true that many people do pray the sinners’ prayer merely as a formula to ward off evil, but does this in any way deny that, done Biblically, people can and do call upon the name of the Lord to be saved. And it is difficult to understand calling upon the name of the Lord to be saved as anything but a prayer of some sort. Clearly this involves some sort of communication with God, and this is commonly termed “prayer”. Yet the calvinists teach that the calvinist God causes you to be regenerated (born again) before the calvinist God is then able to give you the gifts of repentance and faith so that you can believe the gospel of Christ, call unto Him, and be saved. They twist of scriptural truths in an effort to deny the free will of man to be able to call upon the name of the Lord to be saved, yet they present an alternative that is clearly in direct conflict with the Bible! They just don’t want to serve a God who actually desires that people call upon Him to be saved!
Thus, calvinists teach that you must be regenerated (born again) by the Holy Spirit before you are able to hear the gospel, believe in Christ and be saved. (See John 3:3.) To them, there is no actual gospel of salvation for the non-elect, and it is irrelevant to the elect until after they have been born again. A major teaching of many reform churches is that the gospel may only be preached inside the church. This is based upon the assumption that most of the general population at large is non-elect and therefore cannot respond to the gospel. They assume that those attending church are there because God has drawn them, and therefore they will probably be ones chosen by God for salvation, the elect; thus they may respond to the gospel. They reason that if they weren’t firstly drawn by God, they wouldn’t be in church!
Of course, Calvin decided that some of those attending church were not elect, because they didn’t persevere in the faith. Calvin then reasoned that God had given such people a temporary faith, an inferior operation of the Spirit. They weren’t genuine elect, they weren’t on the list of elect, and therefore wouldn’t be permitted to enter heaven. The calvinist God just gave them a taste of the real thing so that they would know what they had missed out on during their long stay of eternity in hell! (Institutes Bk 3, Ch.2, Section 11)
So, when calvinists say that they are evangelical, they mean that they preach the gospel to those who have already been drawn to the church. Until a person comes to church, they assume that such a person is not one of the elect, and therefore cannot respond to the gospel. As Calvin said Moreover, beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for (Calvin’s Institutes Book 4, Chapter 1, Section 4) (“Church” here was the Catholic church of Calvin’s day; he never actually left to Catholic church!)
Calvinist doctrine is controlling, lacking any serious incentive to obey their God.
Calvinist doctrine is evil because it seeks subtly (and often not so subtly) to place restrictive controls on mankind that force man to accept that what happens to him is nothing to do with him personally. That is, no personal decision or consideration can improve or impair any options man might have for the future, especially with respect to where he will spend eternity. No matter what man does, if he is chosen for eternal life in heaven, nothing he does, no disobedience or rebellion, can ever prevent that. He can literally do what he wants to do and still go to heaven, for if his name is on that list of elect, he will go to heaven! There is no incentive to be obedient, only a decree from the calvinist God that the elect man will be made to go to heaven whether he likes it or not.
And whether or not he likes it is not an issue, either, for the calvinist God will re-programme him so that he will like it. It is his destiny! He will like it because God has decreed that he should. Conformity is required, and enforced!
As seen earlier, if the calvinist God elects some for eternal life in heaven, and if he has created all mankind, and if mankind does not have a free will of his own to choose between good and evil, then the calvinist God has created the majority of mankind for eternal condemnation. The calvinist God cannot just wash his hands of the whole sorry mess, as did Pontius Pilate; what the calvinist God created is his responsibility and under his sovereign rule. If he denies that he is responsible for what the lost do, then he is no longer sovereign over the lost. As Sproul and MacArthur taught above, the lost go to hell because of their sin which they have chosen to commit; the calvinist God refuses to be blamed for such a mess! “It’s not my fault all those people were so disobedient!” But that makes the calvinist God somewhat less than sovereign, something the calvinists won’t accept either. So, either their God accepts responsibility for the sin he has forced the lost to commit, or else he accepts that he just wasn’t sovereign enough in the first place to take on a task of such magnitude. That is, their God is to blame for the sin of the lost, or else he is incapable of running the world, let alone the universe!
The conclusion of the matter is this: that the true God of the Bible is indeed sovereign and infinitely capable of ruling the whole universe with justice and righteousness. Because He is truly sovereign over all, then He may choose, if He desires, to give to mankind some measure of free will according to His will and purposes. He remains sovereign over all in spite of having given such free will to man because He has also required a full and thorough judgment for every free will decision that every man will ever make for all time.
Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 – 13Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this [is] the whole [duty] of man. 14For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether [it be] good, or whether [it be] evil.
2 Corinthians 5:10 – For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things [done] in [his] body, according to that he hath done, whether [it be] good or bad.
A W Tozer wrote some wise words concerning the free will of man in the following:
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?” 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.
(P 76, Knowledge of the Holy, A W Tozer)
Clearly, then, the calvinist God is another god, a false god, for he is not the God of the Bible. They are two separate entities indeed! The true God of the Bible did not create most of mankind solely for the purpose of condemning them in hell for eternity. The calvinist God did! You may believe in one or the other, but never both at the same time. One (the God of the Bible) is truly a God of love; the other (the calvinist God) is incapable of loving any but his own elect. Which one you choose will determine for you your eternal destiny, heaven or hell!
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