"Now...he [God] arranges all things by his sovereign counsel, in such a way that individuals are born, who are doomed from the womb to certain death, and are to glorify him by their destruction." So wrote John Calvin.
In the above quote from Calvin, we find the hand grenade he threw into church history. It's the explosive declaration, "Individuals are born, who are doomed from the womb."
No mental gymnastics, no sophistry can undo the emotional and spiritual destruction that explosion has done. To unpack the statement, we come across the unthinkable: God created and continues to create babies who, for His good pleasure and will, will spend eternity being tortured in hell forever. That picture is too horrible to contemplate.
These uncountable trillions will have had no choice in the matter; God chose them for that fate before they were ever born. But Calvinism lobs another grenade: according to many Calvinists, "God hates wicked people from his soul, from the very depth of his being. . . Clearly, God hates the thoughts, deeds, and desires of evil people. But further, in some way he hates the evil people themselves. His soul reacts to them with righteous revulsion as his arm extends toward them in holy fury." (Such an interpretation does not take into account that THE Hebrew lexicon of the Old Testament (Brown, Driver, and Briggs) gives the meaning of the Hebrew word as "reject.")
In order to say that God hates the unbeliever, the Calvinist has to perform plastic surgery on John 3:16 to change it from clarity to, “For God so loved people from all over the world who believe in Christ…”
An educated guess of the number of Christians in the world ranges from 5%-10% of the world's population. Therefore, according to the mathematics of the Calvinist, 90%-95% of all the unborn have 0% chance of being with God forever. To look at the math a bit more, God chose that most of those 5%-10% would be Americans, not many Indians, Iraqis, or Japanese.
Does this jive with "[God] is not willing for any to perish, but for all to come
to repentance"? (Again, the Calvinist has many hours of surgery to do on this verse, so he says that there are two wills of God: The first will is His revealed will, God declares His
desire to save all men. But in His second and unrevealed or secret will, He
desires that only some individuals will be given faith and saved. Therefore, what the Calvinist declares is that one will of God contradicts another will of God. (We want to say with Alice, this is getting "Curiouser and couriouser.")
Let's propose this scenario: a husband and wife want to have a child, but are they not taking a chance God hates their baby, even while she is expecting his birth, because as Calvin said, "He is doomed from the womb." And aren't they taking a chance that the deck is stacked against their unborn child because he'll have only a 5%-10% chance of being loved by God? It's highly more likely that their unborn child is a member of the 90%-95% that God has created to spend eternity in hell. (One Calvinist told me about his coming child, "Chances are he'll be a believer." Chances? Chances?)
To go one step farther, when that mother or father go to heaven and find that their child isn't there, are they to love and worship forever a God who created their child for the purpose of being separated from Him and them forever in a place of torment?
This has been an exercise in thinking the unthinkable, but Augustine and Calvin did just that.
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