If there is one thing five-point Calvinists hold with vigorous tenacity, it is the belief that there can be no human free will at all. None. The Calvinist will state it this way: God can't be sovereign if man is granted any degree of free will.
But this view of God actually lessens the greatness of His sovereign power. For if God can't control a universe in which there is genuine free will, and is reduced to the creation of robots, then such a God is of truly limited power.
The opposite is true. The God of the
Bible is great enough to create creatures with genuine powers of
choice. Yet so perfect is His omniscience of all choices, possible and
actual, that He can devise an almost infinitely complex scenario for
mankind in which His sovereign purposes are all worked out perfectly
through—and even in spite of—the free choices made by His creatures.
If man has no free will at all, none, then there's no place for human responsibility.
It is a logical, though unadmitted, result that if man has no choice to make, there can be no true concept of human responsibility. If man has no free will, he can make no other choices than those for which he has been programmed by God. Man cannot be held truly responsible for “choices” which were mere illusions of choice and which are really the inevitable outworking of a predetermined program to which he is unconsciously subjected.
If the word “responsible” is assigned to
such “choices,” the word loses any real significance at all. It becomes a word-game. We might as well
say that the chair in which I'm sitting is responsible for holding me up.
It is a vital part of the belief system of the Calvinist that the unsaved man cannot really be called upon to believe the gospel, since he has no capacity to do so. He, according to their system, can't make any choice at all. All "choices" were programmed into him in eternity past. It follows, then, that faith must be a divinely imparted gift which man receives only as a part of his conversion.
According to the system, God regenerates the unbeliever and then gives him faith. So, faith is a consequence of regeneration, not regeneration the consequence of faith. According to the system, things have to be turned upside. (Whereas the Bible says, "Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God." The Bible does not say, "Faith comes by regeneration.")
This results in a conclusion according to their system: The non-elect are faced with the horrible reality that God has chosen not to regenerate them and that, therefore, they cannot believe even if they want to.
One young man was a dedicated evangelist whose heart beat for the lost to the extent that it led him to being a zealous street preacher. But then a friend led him into Calvinism. He said that after a while, he was beginning to change; his zeal for the lost began to dry up; his evangelism lessened. He made the following statement: "Calvinism damaged me psychologically. If I did any evangelism all, it was a have-to, not want-to and that was also damaging to me.The joy was gone." He admitted that Calvinism led both him and his wife into a serious case of depression.
He finally renounced his Calvinism after coming across II Peter 2:1 which destroyed the vaunted third point of Calvinism. When he would take his questions to his pastor and other friends, he finally tired of hearing their stock answer about troubling texts: it's a mystery.
In contrast to all of this, what was it Joshua said? "If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve." Choose? Yes, choose.
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