Posted on 11/21/2010 7:43:56 PM PST by bibletruth
Praise God for 5 point Calvinism
Jesus Christ affirms TULIP in the Scriptures. Hey, Catholics, these are all in your Old Testament Scriptures (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- History is full of Gnostic's who had “secret” knowledge of God, who knew the "truth".
So what is your point? To just ignore the Bible and act in a WWJD mode 24/7? Wouldn't that be insulting to God that because some heretics decided to pervert the Word that all of Christondom just abandoned knowing anything?
Some day folks will realize how profound that one simple passage in 1 Corinthians is (2:14). It says that the Holy Spirit will teach us Truth - but one must first be regenerated. Your gnostics weren't regenerated, they were reprobate and easy to spot, and thus easy to ignore. Trust me, I never fell for anything Joseph Smith uttered either.
Good to see you reveal so early your contempt for the work of the Paraclete.
That's not fair when you consider that He will turn around and judge these people
Wow that takes hutzpah to judge God's ethics and morality. I hope there is no lightning storm nearby.
So how uncomfortable are you regarding Israel, who also was chosen by God according to His own Pleasure, not by anything meritorious of Abraham's seed. Explain God's Fairness in choosing them but not the other nations.
Jacob I loved, Esau I hated.
The Gospels aren’t in any Old Testament I’ve ever read.
Mt 7:1-6.
Well, get out the ‘white out’ and look through the gospels, and the epistles (you remember, those letters written to souls that were ALREADY born again), and blot out the little word ‘if’ where it happens to kill the tulips like 2-4-D herbicide.
I don't want to be labeled Calvinist or Arminian. Rather, I want to be biblical through and through and give every text its due proportion, no matter where it falls.I think I agree with that more than anything else I read on the issue.
Rational process requires the ability to apply the law of non-contradiction. God has not asked us to abandon rationality, but to honor the limits to speculation set by Scripture. Unlike the Trinity, The election question is framed as an either-or proposition, similar to Jesus’ formulation “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” Some have postulated a mutual choosing, using foreknowledge as God’s tool for figuring out who to choose, but that actually ends up negating God’s active role in choosing, subjugating it to man’s free will. So, it acts like a binary exclusion, even when you try to hold it in suspense.
The difference with the Trinity is that the tensions between the Three and the One are created by passages which explicitly set up those symmetrical tensions. Whereas the election passages tend to be asymmetrical, focusing strongly on God’s role as the independent initiator and man’s role as the dependent responder.
As for whether we should be concerned with the fine points of the doctrine of salvation, I would say that would depend on 1) whether God included it in Scripture for our instruction (he did), and 2) whether we can keep the right perspective about all that he gave us to know (we have a hard time with that, I agree). So yes, justice, mercy, and truth are key, and the pinnacle is brotherly love. But what accomplishes that? All that God gave us to know, including those hard humiliating doctrines like election and depravity that make us realize God’s great mercy toward us. Once rightly understood, such truth is hardly the basis for wasting time with trite argumentation, but rather becomes the compulsion of love to accept our brothers and love our enemies because we have nothing on them in the eyes of God.
Please don’t use John 10 to support limited atonement. That is NOT what the context is saying.
The text in Mark and Matthew do not know that one is born or conceived depraved.
That is another advantage of being a Calvinist. We have the whole Bible at our disposal:
Ps 58:3 "The wicked are estranged from the womb; They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies."
If you knew this, would you then make the following statement?
Total depravity implies complete inability to respond to God or to His Truth in any positive way.
Which I applaud you for getting this somewhat correct. But then you go off the rails by condemning that which is obviously true - but lying about why it happened.
"God would be condemning the majority to hell for what they didn't commit and for not repenting which they couldn't do."
But that is exactly what God has done. Adam was mankind's representative in the Garden. He was warned, yet he rebelled and incurred the penalty that God promised. This wasn't a surprise, it was willfull, informed disobedience, and since our God is Holy and Just He followed through with the Penalty. Yet because He is also Merciful, at the time He implemented the Curse, He also gave us Hope through the Promise of Grace.
It seems to me that you are angry that God doesn't have as lack a standard as you. It sounds like you want a God that isn't Just nor Holy and will mingle with the Profane and Perverse. You want a God that will overlook all of your sin and wickedness yet condemn that other guy. Maybe I am wrong and you want to share a heavenly room with Hitler and Nero left in their wicked state, or even moderately cleaned up - but then He would be interfering in their free will to be wicked. To me, your thinking is wildly warped and deranged by creating a Hell in Heaven.
In the same way that we all inherited the Curse from Adam through representation, that is how many will be saved through the representation of the second Adam. To want to be exempt from this is to ensure your damnation since "All have sinned and have fallen short of the Glory of God". Inheriting Adam's sin in a way doesn't cheat you of anything since you will pile up the grievances quite easily on your own, and had an impressive stack of sin before you even reached three years old. So be glad that God recognizes the mechanism of representation, or you would not be able to receive justification through the atoning work of the second Adam.
You conclude that "Jesus died for all". You have generated a problem where one did not exist. If in your statement you believe that sins were paid for, then (1) God would be unjust to condemn anyone who is without sin which means that no one but Satan and his minions will be in Hell (yet the Scriptures say that Satan will have quite a bit of human company) or (2) that Christ's death didn't actually do anything, but the atonement was merely hypothetical, it was just sort of hanging out there waiting for someone to grab it and run with it, and if no one grabbed it, then no one would be saved. Thus he or she who grabs it is the one who actually activates salvation, and since salvation is allegedly achievable by all for all, then salvation is completely out of God's hands and in the hands of the corrupt, profane and fallen.
Of course, we still have the twisted moral explanations of all those who existed prior to the Cross. You are freaked out that since the Cross there may be people who die in their sins, yet how do you deal with the thousands of years of accumulated civilizations, totalling in the billions those who didn't even have the concept of the Church of a Savior? Those souls are perfectly acceptable to condemn to hell without any knowledge or even a hypothetical salvation just sitting there waiting for them to activate it?
Free Will Theory creates a death spiral of misery compounding and making worse everything that Free Will theory was invented to fix. For the thinking individual, I don't see how one can possibly say that it is from anywhere but Hell.
I Timothy 2
1 I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— 2 for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 3 This is good, and pleases God our Savior, 4 who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed to at the proper time. 7 And for this purpose I was appointed a herald and an apostle—I am telling the truth, I am not lying—and a true and faithful teacher of the Gentiles.
Please don’t use John 10 to support limited atonement. That is NOT what the context is saying.
Then how about John 3:16? The atonement in that passage clearly is limited to only those who believe.
Really? Then I suppose you have a good response to:
Joshua 24:15
But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
If you are going to post this nonsense on the internet, at least learn the correct words. Armenians are just people from Armenia.
whose writing?
“What did our LORD teach that was overriden or contradicted by Luther, Calvin or Zwingley?”
Here is your answer, google Luther + Jews or Calvin + Jews. You will find much that these men said that contradicted our Lord.
In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul’s self-discipline comes in the context of reward for ministry, not basic salvation. Paul in many other places expresses a complete confidence that his departure from this life would be followed by life with Christ. He knew of his special calling ever since the Damascus experience, but he knew, as most Christians do, that God ordains the means as well as the ends, and if he was to fulfill his special mission and receive the reward of his ministry, he could not succumb to the temptations presented by his body.
The specific context of the section of Romans 11 you quote is speaking to the issue of God sending the Gospel to the Gentiles versus Israel. Paul is not speaking of elected individuals becoming unelected; he is only saying that just as God is sovereignly free to graft in the Gentiles to the ministry of the Gospel upon the failure of Israel to accept Messiah Jesus, just as well God could once again sovereignly choose Israel as the primary focus of election and leave the Gentiles out. The point is that Gentiles, as a class, have no right to think of themselves as anything special, just because God decided to show them mercy. Mercy is no basis for pride, and God’s election of many among the Gentiles and calling them to himself through the Gospel ministry could just as easily come to an end in some future day. “Don’t get cocky.”
As for Philippians 2:12, I only ask that you quote the passage more fully:
“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.” Philippians 2:12-13.
Once again, this is just the ordination of both ends and means, and no Calvinist worth his or her salt would have a problem with this passage, because it really expresses what Calvinism believes, that God saves the whole person, not just his future state. That’s what the perseverance of your Matthean passages is all about. The perseverance is there, not because sinful, carnal humans can persevere of their own power, but because being saved entails becoming one who perseveres because of God working in them both to will and to do what pleases God.
Please justify limited atonement in light of: I Timothy 2
This is a peculiar hermeneutic you Free Willers like to use. Misinterpret a difficult passage so that you may disregard and ignore the clear passages regarding a particular doctrine.
What you WANT to do is make Scripture contradict itself.
Isa 46:9-11 I am God, and there is none like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things that are not yet done, Saying, 'My counsel shall stand, And I will do all My pleasure,' Calling a bird of prey from the east, The man who executes My counsel, from a far country. Indeed I have spoken it; I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it; I will also do it.
Plus we know that all kinds of men have died in their sins and are not saved. So we have a problem with the interpretation that you have eisegeted, or have imposed on the passage. Isaiah says that God will accomplish all of His Will, yet you want this passage to contradict that declaration and make God appear impotent and a failure because the vast majority will have died in their sins.
Calvinists like to have Scripture interpret Scripture, and so we must assume that God indeed does all of His pleasure, and with an abundance of other passages that speak of the Father giving to His Son the Elect, and the Son dying for and saving each and every without exception, then we must try to harmonize 1 Timothy 2 with all else that we have been taught.
The most direct and common route would be to look at context, particularly the first verse in this chapter where Paul is exorting Timothy to pray for all kinds of men, from kings to the commoners. Verse four gives reason to pray, make supplications and intercessions for all kinds of men - because that is God's plan that all kinds of men, from kings to commoners, Jews, Gentiles, women, poor, wealthy, people of all nations to be saved.
What you want to do is say that God wants everyone, head for head to be saved. No where in Scripture is this ever taught, and so eisegeting that meaning here, when the context really doesn't support it, and plenty of Scripture plainly contradicts it, is therefore unjustified. For if God wanted everyone head-for-head to be saved, then there wouldn't be all of this hypothetical talk of Hell and damnation since God, according to the prophet Isaiah, does everything in His Pleasure and thus all would receive His salvation and in the process would trash His attribute of Grace since Grace means "unmerited favor" and since ther would be no one favored and the whole process would be compulsory on God.....well, you get the point.
Then there are some reformed theologians who make a distinction between God's nature expressed in his will and a decree. They argue, that by making a provision for all, it removes the charge that the condemned are not to blame for their damnation because the ransom was arbitrarily kept from them. I know that this has the aroma of Universal Atonement, but a universal viewpoint assumes that God is surprised by man's choices. The debate goes downhill from there because the Free Willer won't allow the Calvinist to bring in clarifying passages since it will destroy the Free Willer's argument. So I know and fully understand why you are throwing down your Ace card here.
Simply, if you want to force Universal Atonement, when the Scriptures teach otherwise, then you apparently are comfortable with doctrinal contradictions, and have no problems with theological dead-ends and an overall diminunitive view of God and His Glory.
Its a different road we take
Here is your answer, google Luther + Jews or Calvin + Jews. You will find much that these men said that contradicted our Lord.
In other words, you can't defend your accusation. I understand.
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