WHY I AM NOT A CALVINIST PART IV

 

"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. 

A lady is struggling with a problem as she sits listening to three Calvinists who have been speaking at the conference she's attending. During the question and answer period, her turn comes to ask the question of the ages, the one that's been causing her pain. You can hear it in her voice. 

As she stands before the audience and her theological heroes, two of the most well-known Calvinists, the elite experts in the field, you can tell shes craving the answer to what she's going to ask. Her voice is soft as if she's in awe of the two men. She quietly asks: "Is God's grace available to all?" What an excellent question that is. Good for her.

She goes on to give some biblical background to her query--she goes to Acts 17:30: "But now he [God] commands all people everywhere to repent.

This leads her to a follow up question: "Why would God command everyone to repent if they can't unless He causes them to repent." The reason she's asking this is because she's heard both men say that it is impossible for men to repent unless God regenerates them first and then gives them repentance and faith. So, why is God commanding all to do something that is impossible for them to do?

Let's go back to her original question: "Is the grace of God available to all?" At this point the two men, John MacArthur and R. C. Sproul could have said, "Let's all turn to Psalm 145:9 where we read, "The Lord is good to all, And His mercies are over all His works." They could have gone on to cite Titus 2:11: "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people," Or could they not have said, "Romans 11:32 speaks to the point: " "For God has shut up all in disobedience, so that He may show mercy to all." 

Then as a climactic text, they could have said, "John 12:32 answers your question: "And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.” Then, the piece de' resistance, I John 2:2: "And He Himself [Christ] is the propitiation [satisfaction] for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." (It's important not to read over the word, "whole" which means everyone and emphatically so.) 

The problem was that their system, Calvinism, made them answer her question, "No, the grace of God is not available to all."According to Calvin, there are those billions who are "doomed from the womb," so God's mercy is not available to those chosen to go to hell forever.

Now for the second question she asked: "Why does God command all to repent if it's impossible for them to do so?" The answer from MacArthur was, "We don't know the answer, but that's the way it is. you have to take it." Once again, for the Calvinist, it's 4th down and a hundred yards to to go, so he has to punt to the "It's- a- mystery-yard-line."

It was at this point that Sproul gave her an illustration which really didn't help and he asked, "Does that help?" Her answer was a weak, "Partly," as she sensed that really wasn't an answer. The audience laughed; it didn't help them either.

That's the way it is when people flock to these Calvinist conferences to hear their Hall of Fame preachers: they ask this same question and they get the same response, "We don't know, but that's the way it is. You have to take it." 

We can pray that the dear woman will find someone who will direct her to John 12:32, I John 2:2, and Romans 11:32, Titus 2:16, and Psalm 145: 9 and there she'll find the answer.

They spend their money, their time, and the travel to come to such conferences to get the answer to that ubiquitous question, but they go home with the command to swallow the red pill.*

___________________________________________________

*  "The red pill" is from the movie "The Matrix;" it means "face the hard reality instead of staying inside the comfort zone of fantasy."

---

 

WHY I'M NOT A CALVINIST PART III

 

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.

A fundamental teaching of Calvinism is God controls our decisions and we're responsible for what He makes us do. That sounds contradictory. A Calvinist will say, "It's an apparent contradiction." 

He realizes that it's 4th down and 99 yards to go, so what does he do? He does what any coach would do: he punts with three words: "It's a mystery." He will follow by saying, "I don't know the answer. There's no explanation. 

So what does the Calvinist tell us what to do? John MacArthur advises, "Just endure the pain." Those struggling with the "pain" might say a better word is "torture." 

Let's put it this way: if I said, "God can sin." Every one would say, "God can't sin because He's perfectly good; He's the absolute moral standard." 

 In reply, I said, "That's true, God is perfectly good, and He also sins." You would rightly think that I had lost my mind and you'd call the nice men in the white coats to take me to a facility for observation and eventual incarceration. Why would you do that?

You'd call them because I believe in two mutually contradictory statements, statements like"God controls our decisions but we're responsible for what He makes us do." But what if I then said to the nice men in the white coats, "What I said only looks like a contradiction to you, but not to me because I'm infinitely wiser than you." 

 That's what the Calvinist is saying, "It only looks contradictory to us, but it's not contradictory to God." That answer means, "There are two different realms of reason and yours is suspect." 

Yet in Isaiah 1, we read where God says to Israel, "Come, let us reason together." The Lord is challenging Israel to a formal trial. In the light of Israel's condition (vv. 2-17), there was only one reasonable course of action. There aren't two realities of reasoning or else man and God couldn't reason together. 

MacArthur said, "We all have little pea brains. Therefore, when you inderstand [that the statement has no logical explanation] then you understand Calvinism, you got it! There's no need to buy another book or listen to another CD, you got it!" He's saying, "If you see that the statement doesn't make sense, you understand Calvinism."

What's going on here is that Calvinism makes truth fluid. Contradictions are how we know we've come to a false conclusion. We operate that way every day. If you were to ask, "How is it possible for God to be perfectly good and sin?" and I were to reply, "I don't know, it's a mystery. Who am I to reduce God to a human level of understanding." Then I've made truth fluid. That's what truth becomes when you punt to mystery when there's a clear contradiction. This is post-modernism come into the church.  

Post modernism involves "leaving the certainty of a single, integrated, and sense-making narrative, and entering into a period cut adrift from certainty, plunged into multiple, incompatible, heterogeneous, fragmented, contradictory and ambivalent meanings." According to post modernism, Calvinism is correct even when it teaches contradictory, mutually exclusive views. Of course, in post modernism, everyone is right.

In logic, according to the law of non-contradiction, "a thing cannot be both correct and incorrect at the same time. A car can't be blue and not blue at the same time. A man cannot be running and not running at the same time. These are contradictions. 

Contradictions are two opposing statements which means they're opposites, they oppose one another. As we apply this to reality, a person cannot be both alive and dead at the same time and in the same sense." ("The Apologetic")

It's interesting that, according to the Calvinists themselves, in every single Q/A session this question always comes up: "How can God control our every decision, but we're responsible for what He makes us do?" The fact is, they admit that they all struggle with this question, a question, for which, as they admit, "There is no answer."

MacArthur went on to say, "I can't resolve this. You can't figure it out." This sounds like a plea for people to stop thinking. But as he admits, we Calvinists can't stop thinking about it. It's impossible. As he said to one questioner, "You'll struggle with it until the day you die. This question doesn't go away. You'll still have this question after I explain it to you. You're not going to get an answer. You're not going to be satisfied with what I tell you." 

Calvinism doesn't bring joy, but life-long pain; by saying there's no answer, by admitting you're not going to get satisfaction, Calvinism isn't good news.

 

WHY I'M NOT A CALVINIST PART II

 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. 

Meagan Phelps trusted Christ as her savior. She moved among a circle of Christian friends.

 That's when it happened: she came into contact with Calvinism through Romans 9:11-13: "For though the twins [Jacob and Esau] were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written: “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated.”

Those verses, as Calvinism taught her to view them, ignited a fire storm of doubt in her heart as well as an intellectual battle which was leading her to overturn her concept of God's loving the world according to John 3:16. If she didn't find some answers to the questions her racing mind was producing, the results would be catstrophic.

"How could God hate someone before they were ever born." "How could God create human beings for the purpose of torturing them in hell forever and ever?" Those questions needed answering.

Let's let Meagan relate what it was like back in those days of her spiritual crisis. She said of Calvinism, "This is why I'm not a Christian anymore. What Calvinism is telling me is that God created some people as vessels of His wrath who were made for the express purpose of destruction, being in hell forever."

She continues, "I was told that whatever you do is foreordained by God and He is the cause of it all that you do and that you can't resist His will. Therefore, whatever you do that's wrong, God is the cause of it and then He turns around and punishes you for doing what He's foreordained for you to do. This is evil."

Another author echoed the same sentiments: "Calvinists say that God punishes man for what man can’t help and that God supposedly commands men to do something men can’t do and then turns around and judges those men for what they can’t do."

She relates that she was in a desperate situation and that she began to ask questions. Then, in amazement and disappointment, she said, "I was told, 'You can't ask that question. Who are you to question God?'" 

That's one of the stock answers of the Calvinists when they run into a Meagan Phelps--"You can't question God." But Meagan wasn't questioning God; she was questioning Calvinism's viewpoint on Romans 9.

She said, "There was no explanation that made any sense to me. My questions and how I felt didn't matter to them."

Where is Meagan today? She's left Christianity, telling people, "I'm not a Christian any more." But she goes farther, saying, "I'm an atheist." 

She's not alone in her departure. The singer, Derek Webb, who once wrote songs promoting Calvinism is now an atheist and to one who was trying to persuade him to come back into the fold, he used Calvinism against him, telling him, "I don’t need your persuasion because if God has predetermined me to be a reprobate there’s nothing that you can do to change that."

Tim Stratten states his experience in evangelism, "What I discovered was that many of the atheists I was talking to had been raised in the church and had been taught Calvinism. 

"Moreover, they held to a view called, 'theological determinism.' Simply stated it means: God causally determines and controls all things. This led so many to see God as the author of evil. If God was even slightly evil, then He was not perfectly good, and if God is not perfectly good, then He is not worthy of worship. Since God, by definition, is worthy of worship, they concluded that God does not exist at all."

One author expounded on Meagan's dilemma: "Calvin believed that God's absolute decree to predestine an individual to eternal death was not a wonderful or glorious thing, instead Calvin confessed that it was a dreadful and horrible decree. Is it not a horrible decree that God would create something for eternal perdition? And it is dreadful and horrible indeed! How could we respond in any other way than to say such a final ends (sic) is horrible and dreadful! The possibility that God would create any person for eternal death calls into question the goodness of God. The best Calvinists scholars who affirm Calvin's doctrine of double predestination admit that is a "mystery" how God may make such an absolute decree and predestine anyone to hell." Is it a mystery or a contradiction? It's no mystery once we see that God created man with free will.

Calvinism doesn't necessarily lead to atheism for everyone, but it presents a dreadful and horrible picture of God, a picture that has led many a Meagan into making shipwreck of the faith. 

WHY I'M NOT A CALVINIST PART I

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. 

If there ever was a statement that would give a couple second thoughts about having a family, that would would rank near the top. That declaration is one reason the historian Will Durant wrote, "We shall always find it hard to love the man, John Calvin, who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of nonsense." 

In this first article on the subject of why I'm not a Calvinist, I would start, not by picking the TULIP, but by taking a look at a text that's  the sign-off of Luke's second volume, Acts, chapter 28 and verses 23-31.

 Paul's in Rome awaiting his trial and while he's there, he's under house arrest living in "his own rented quarters." He'll stay in that situation for two years. During those 24 months, Paul is active with a capital "A." His daily routine consists of "welcoming the large numbers who came to him," (vss. 23, 30) engaging in "explaining," "testifying," trying to persuade," "preaching" and "teaching the Lord Jesus Christ."

The reaction to this hurricane of activity was that "some were being persuaded but others would not believe." What Paul is doing is what we call apologetics, a defense of the faith. Persuasion involves apologetics. The text points out that Paul did this "from morning until evening." That's as active as you can get.

With apologetics and persuasion come disagreements and arguments as verse 25 records. The problem with the word "arguments" is that it's a pejorative term, bringing to mind name-calling, yelling, and rudeness. But Christian persuasion and argumentation is not like that as Peter points out in I Peter 3:15 where he says that making a defense of the faith is to be done "with gentleness and reverence."  

Be that as it may, Acts 28:24 is of import for the title of this essay. Luke writes "others would not believe." Luke doesn't write, "others could not believe," but that "others would not believe."

According to the introductory statement by Calvin, there have been billions and billions of people born into the world for whom it was impossible for them to believe. As he said, "They were doomed from the womb." Therefore, they couldn't believe.

This idea has led into a cul-de-sac of despair. One example would be Calvinist John Piper's counsel to a defeated and discouraged letter writer who asked, "I have wanted to believe in Jesus and I've tried and tried to believe, but I just can't. What am I to do?" 

 Pastor Piper's answer wasn't encouraging. He paused with his head down and then said, "You can't believe because God hasn't given you the ability to believe."

To put this in the framework of Calvin's statement, Piper was saying that this letter writer could be one of that innumerable host who have been "doomed from the womb."

Piper, Calvinist that he is, blamed God for the questioner's problem. He had to; the system of Calvinism, imposed on the Bible, made him give that answer. 

The fact that they would not believe puts the blame squarely on them, not God, and is reminiscent of what Jesus said about Jerusalem, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, . . . how often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen  gathers her young under her wings, and you were unwilling!" 

Calvinism, having God as the cause of everything, leads to difficult problems such as one author has written, "Did God cause Moses to argue with Him in Exodus 4, to the point that God's anger burned against him?  Did God cause the Israelites, when they were being led by Moses out of Egypt, to complain about His care for them, to worship the golden calf, to anger Him so much that He punished them with death in the desert?  So God, for His pleasure, causes people to argue and rebel, and then He gets angry about it and punishes them!?!  Interesting!  Sounds more like the actions of an irrational mythological Greek god than the God of the Bible."

 This reminds us of another text, this one in Romans 1: "They are without excuse." But if God created them doomed from the womb, they would have an excuse. 

In the Old Testament we read of Joshua's drawing a line in the sand by saying, "Choose you this day whom you will serve." They had a genuine choice. According to Calvin, they didn't have a choice, so was Joshua teasing them?

As we look at Acts 28, we also see another facet of New Testament evangelism: what Paul's doing puts a dagger through the heart of that trite and tough-sounding expression, "I just give them the gospel and let the chips fall where they may." Paul's methodology was a far cry from that. We read that he explained, testified, tried to persuade, preached, and taught the Lord Jesus Christ. That's not letting the chips fall where they may, that's using apologetics morning and night to persuade. He would never quit until a person said, "Leave me alone."

When the problems of Calvinism arise, such as "How can God create billions of people for whom it is impossible for them to receive Christ, myriads who are doomed from the womb and yet hold all of them responsible and punish them forever for their rejection?" Calvinists have a stock answer, as John MacArthur says: "I don't know; I'm not God; it's a mystery."

Like so many other aspects of Calvinism, it isn't a mystery; it's a contradiction. There's a simple way to solve the problem: the greatest gift God gave man is free will.

YOU HAVEN'T WHAT?

 Vincent Bugliosi (bool-YO-see) became world-famous for his prosecution and conviction of Charles Mason and his demonic "family" of killers who butchered movie star Sharon Tate, her unborn baby, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, and hair stylist Jay Sebring on August 9, 1969. 

Bugliosi was also an author who produced a massive 1,632 page tome titled, "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy." In the book, he delivers a thorough and pains- taking examination showing all the conspiracy theories which cite the guilty parties as being the Mafia, Castro, Vice President Johnson, Texas oil men, the CIA, and the FBI to be nonsense by folks out to make a buck or two. His conclusion is that the communist Lee Harvey Oswald committed the murder of the President all by himself as the evidence shows.

In his travels here and abroad to speak about his book, he would open his presentation by asking for a show of hands as to how many in his audience believed that there was a conspiracy and that the Warren Report is filled with errors. Many a hand would grab the air. Then he would ask, "How many of you think Oswald acted alone?" Fewer folks would raise their hands. 

By the time he started asking the question, the Oliver Stone movie, "JFK," had come out which portrayed the assassination as being carried out by a whole host of conspirators and it had a tremendous influence on people around the world. Bugliosi said of the movie, "It's one lie after another."

Then Bugliosi would deliver the coups de grace to those who'd raised their hands indicating that the Warren Report was filled with errors and the report got it all wrong. He asked that group for one more show of hands, "How many of you have read the Warren Report?" Crickets. Nobody. 

Wait. They said, conditioned by the movie, "The Warren Commission report is full of errors and is a cover-up." But they hadn't read it. What?

We see the same thing when people consider the Bible: "It's full of errors." The Bible is THE BOOK which is the foundation of our Western civilization. Western Civilization was built on two verses from which all our blessings and rights flow. Only two verses: Genesis 1:26-27: "Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."

The Bible is our foundational book for our civilization and fewer and fewer have read it? If the Bible goes, so does the underpinning of western civilization. There's been a 60-year movement to bring about its demise, a movement which started on January 15, 1987, when Jesse Jackson and around 500 protesters marched down Palm Drive, Stanford University’s grand main entrance, chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

One of America's founding documents declares that the human being is not here by chance but as a special creation by a Creator; as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "We [not just Jefferson but "we," the Founding Fathers] hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . ."

Contrast Genesis 1:26-27 with those cultures and political beliefs built on rejecting the Genesis account and we find that such philosophies and cultures have slain their millions: from Lenin to Stalin, from Mao to Castro, they have lined up and executed millions, millions, and more millions of their own people. From Hitler's Youth to Mao's Red Guards we see that human life is held to be, not dirt cheap, but less than dirt cheap. Wherever such a rejection of Genesis 1 goes, it erects the monuments of mass graves, starving masses, political prisoners, torture chambers, and concentration camps. 

Audiences admitted to Bugliosi they'd never read the Warren Report and now generations have never read Genesis 1, the Gospel of John, or THE BOOK itself; yet they say, "It's full of errors."

I WAS NOT A GOOD FATHER

Back in the 1950s, Steve Allen was a household name. He was a multi-talented television personality, radio personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, and writer. In 1954, he achieved national fame as the co-creator and host of The Tonight Show, which was the first late night television talk show. 

Mr. Allen was a television pioneer who invented the format of what we take for granted today as late night television, minus the acidic political diatribes. He came up with the concept of an introductory monologue followed by music and celebrity interviews. 

He was different from what we see today in another respect: he was intellectually oriented also originating a TV program called, "Meeting of the Minds,"which aired on PBS from 1977 to 1981. The show featured actors playing guests (Socrates, Plato, etc.) who had significant roles in world history. The guests would interact with each other, playing their parts and with Steve Allen as the moderator, discussing philosophy, religion, history, science, and many other topics. (That sounds like TV from another planet today. (Cerebral)

Before his death on October 30, 2000, Steve Allen talked about his role as a father, confessing, "I was not a good father." But before we get into that, we need to hear his explanation of his earlier life. Steve was a youth during the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time so difficult that it's unimaginable to our pampered lives today. He characterized it as a time when "everybody was poor." 

Steve's father died when Allen was an infant, so he never knew nor had a father. He left home during his teenage years and began roaming around the western United States. He said that he left with $7 and spent $1 a day on food, running out of money in a week. He said that having no food makes a person do unthinkable things--he became a beggar, asking strangers for a dime or a quarter. 

The national anthem of the Great Depression was the 1932 song, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" which is on YouTube. The song spoke the truth as Allen's life demonstrated. 

Some gave, others had empty pockets too. He said that he was reduced to eating garbage and was grateful when he found some, such as the time the found an empty can with a few beans in it. Brushing and blowing away the ants, it was with joy he ate the meager contents.

He said that the depression did something to his generation: they swore that their children would never have to live like they did, so they went about encouraging their children to have savings accounts and giving them things that they themselves weren't able to have which was a natural reaction to their lives in the "Dirty Thirties" as those terrible times were called. 

Mr. Allen said that his generation received all kinds of training, but no instruction in two things: how to be a good husband and a good father. He said that a man should take a wife and be married to her for the rest of his life and that was a good thing. (He didn't.) But other than that, being a husband and being a father--there was no training whatsoever. He compared it to being pushed into the deep waters of marital and family life without knowing how to swim and being told, "Good luck."

He said that his idea of being a good father was to tell your kids you love them, give them a hug, and that was it. Later, he came to realize that was not sufficient, although good in and of itself, but woefully lacking. 

This where Steve Allen and the Bible come into play. The Bible gives the believer the instruction he needs to be both a good husband and a good father: it begins in Ephesians 5:18: "And do not get drunk with wine, in which there is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit." 

This filling is letting the Holy Spirit, who indwells the believer, control him. We do this by trusting and obeying the Lord as His Word directs. That is the filling of the Holy Spirit. From that foundational premise, the believer has access to Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and the book of Proverbs with its instructions to fathers.

But here's the problem, one of Mr. Allen's own making: when it came to the Bible, he "drew on the expertise of biblical scholars, theologians, and philosophers to demonstrate that fundamentalist assumptions about the reliability and authenticity of the Bible as the inviolable Word of God simply have no rational or factual basis." 

 He believed that the Bible "contained errors, inconsistencies, and self-contradictions." One might take a guess that "the expertise of the biblical scholars" he consulted was that of those of the higher critical liberal persuasion, not the expertise of Walvoord, Ryrie, Chafer, or Geisler, each one available to him. This is normally the case when experts are sought and quoted; fallen man chooses the wrong ones. 

It's sad that Steve Allen lived with the fact that he was not a good father.

SUFFERING WITH THE KING JAMES BIBLE

 There's a text in the King James Bible that has provided fodder for the critics of Scripture and needlessly so. The verse concerns an incident in the life of the great prophet Elisha just after the translation of his mentor Elijah to heaven without seeing our ancient enemy physical death. 

We read in II Kings 2 these words: "And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go

up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them." (KJV)

Wait. What? "Little children" being cursed by the prophet for a harmless teasing and they get ripped apart by bears for that? Did not the translators see something wrong with that scenario? Did they not connect any dots back to the Exodus and realize that God did not hold anyone under the age of 20 responsible for the rebellion on the way to the land of promise. That text alone would have told them that something was amiss with the translation, "little children."

Had they only turned back to Genesis 37:2, they would have figured it out. In that text, they would have found the same Hebrew word that they translated "little children" and found that it specifically referred to a young adult of 17. Hardly a "little child." It was a word used of those young men in Israel who were qualified for the draft, again, hardly a "little child." 

Elisha was confronted with young adults, pagans, who were threatening him, mocking the translation of God's prophet by chanting, "Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” They were a pagan, idol-worshiping mob, outnumbering him and capable of killing him. This incident occurred in Bethel, a center of idolatry in Israel; it was one of the places where the golden calf was. 

Elisha's approach triggered a mass demonstration against him by many young men.  "Baldhead" is a term of disrespect. The idolaters challenged Elisha to "go up" to heaven as Elijah had done—if Elisha could!

These youths were typical of a nation that mocked the messengers of God, hated God's Word, and belittled His prophets. Elisha wasn't motivated by personal pride but by a desire for God's glory, He pronounced God's curse on them for their disrespect of His prophet and Himself. 

They had been warned that God is not to be mocked and that warning came in Leviticus 26:21-22: "Yet if you show hostility toward Me and are unwilling to obey Me, I will increase the plague on you seven times according to your sins. I will also let loose among you the animals of the field, which will deprive you of your children and eliminate your cattle, and reduce your number so that your roads become deserted."

The translators of the King James unwitting wrote a disastrous translation, that has caused a misunderstanding for hundreds of years.