Scripture further reveals that God saves His people according to His sovereign purpose, a decision He made even before He created the world Rom. However, our State of Theology survey suggests that this teaching, which tends to humble man and exalt God, is rejected by most Christians in America today.
Stephen Nichols to ask him what this response reveals about the church in America. If God were not absolutely sovereign over the redemption of His people, another precious truth of the gospel would be destroyed—that we are saved by grace alone and not by our works Eph. Let us now consider some of the merits and flaws of Calvinism. As Carla mentioned, there are verses that seem to indicate predestination. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.
And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. But Carla also notices that there are verses indicating that we must choose to accept God and that this salvation is available to all people.
So while Jesus is the savior for all people in the sense that anyone can accept the salvation He offers, it is only believers who will ultimately be saved. As further evidence that God offers salvation to all people, consider the fact that God wants all people to be saved 1 Timothy ; 2 Peter So Calvinism seems to recognize correctly that there is a sense in which those who will be saved have been predestined by God from all of eternity, but Calvinism seems incorrect in denying that salvation is freely available to all people and that all have the opportunity to accept this salvation through what Jesus did for us on the cross.
How then should one best make sense of both of these biblical truths? More than that, from all of eternity God has determined to place each person He will create into a unique circumstance in history e.
For each person that God could create, God eternally knows in which circumstances that person would freely choose to accept His grace and be saved and in which circumstances that person would freely choose to reject His grace and be lost. When he finished making it, he proceeded to rest in it. He even calls on us to join him in his rest. He is a God who freely makes things and then sets out to use and enjoy what he has made. It seems to me, and you may disagree, that such a God is in far more control, and has far more power than the sort of God described by the TULIP.
He is in control, but of what? Of what amounts to an enormous cosmic screenplay. He has set up the universe and is now letting it play itself out in the way that he determined, and it goes like clockwork.
But the God of the Bible—who in his divine freedom has created a universe that is free, with truly free people—exercises his awesome creativity and genius continually, because, in spite of sinning and rebellious humans, he brings about his purpose for them.
He allows choices because he is able to handle all the possible outcomes. God is neither threatened by, nor overcome by, human free will and the time and chance he built into his universe. Rather, he works within them to bring about a human redemption that is purified in the midst of authentic relationships. He is constantly bringing good out of evil and light out of darkness through his indescribable grace freely demonstrated most supremely in Jesus Christ.
The God of the Bible does not force anyone to trust him. Yet, he is infinitely creative in his means of knocking on the doors of our human castles, inviting, even urging, us to invite him in. This is the God who became one of us in Jesus Christ. This is the God who is united with us and in communion with us through Christ. This is the God who loves us and who calls on us to love one another as he loves us.
God is free to be who he is. He is free to create the universe and humanity and interact with them in whatever way pleases him, and what pleases him is to be faithful to and with his creations.
God is able to create a windup, predetermined universe, but that does not mean that he had to. It demands that a proper, logical, totally sovereign God could have done things no other way. Our freedom to be who we are in Christ is not a freedom that we have simply by virtue of existing. People can reject God, but in rejecting God they are also rejecting themselves, because their freedom is upheld only by the God they are rejecting. In our efforts to discuss and describe God, we have no choice but to use analogies and comparisons to created things we know about.
But we must keep in mind that in all our analogies and comparisons, God is not even on the same plane as any of the created things objects, roles or passions we might use in describing him.
God—Father, Son and Spirit—is the source and cause of all being and existence. He brings everything into being without anything bringing him into being. All things depend on him for their existence, and he depends on nothing for his existence. We mean that God cannot be changed by anything outside himself, as though he were a created being. Within that unchanging faithfulness to his beloved people, there are many ups and downs, twists in the tale, disappointments and surprises.
God declares that despite all your trials of faith and doubt, he will not change his mind about loving you and saving you. God made promises to Abraham, and those promises included the salvation of the whole world through the seed of Abraham Galatians , We mean, rather, that God cannot be hurt against his will by anything outside himself.
In his divine freedom, God can, and does, of himself, change and feel. God cannot be acted on against his will, but in his divine freedom, he acts.
When God created the universe, he freely in grace and love became something new—Creator—and he did so in the freedom of his grace and love. Likewise, when the Son became flesh in the Incarnation, God became something new—human like us and for our sakes. God did not have to create, nor did he have to become flesh, but he did so in his divine freedom out of the abundance of his grace and love.
In his eternal serenity and tranquility, God is not depressed, confused, worried, or bowled over by human sin, tragedy and disaster. He knows his power and purpose and what he is bringing out of it all. As Michael Jinkins put it,. God the Creator is intimately, passionately involved in creation continuously from beginning to end and at every nanosecond in between…. Invitation to Theology, InterVarsity Press, , p. He haggled with Abraham over the fate of Sodom, agreeing to change his plan under certain conditions Genesis God is sovereign, but God, who is Father, Son and Spirit, is sovereign the way he chooses to be, not the way the greatest human thinkers conclude the ultimate cause of all things must logically be.
God will be who God will be, and he has revealed himself to be, for us and with us, the Father of Jesus Christ, the Sender of the Holy Spirit, the Forgiver of sins, the Lover of souls, our Savior, our Deliverer, our Comforter, our Advocate, our Helper, our Strengthener, our Righteousness, our Peace, our Hope, our Life, our Light, our Friend and many other good and wonderful things.
We cannot package him to make him more appealing. We cannot mold him into our imagined idea of what a proper and respectable, board-certified God ought to be like. God is not an unmoved mover who created a windup world of preprogrammed automatons. The idea that God orders and controls everything is simply not acceptable to man.
The fact remains that if God chose some before the foundation of the world Eph. It must be noted that Scripture clearly affirms both divine sovereignty and human responsibility. All good theology has tension. We must accept both sides; though we may not understand how they correspond to one another. Somewhere in eternity, gathering up the past and the future, the two cross and make absolute sense in the mind of God.
However, the church with fallible minds has always found it difficult to stay balanced on difficult or complicated doctrines. If one approaches Scripture without preconceived notions and human bias, then the conclusion will be that God is sovereign over everything, including salvation.
Because God is in the drivers seat, the one who receives Christ as personal Savior has nothing to boast about Eph. The doctrine of election is taught throughout the entire Bible. God divinely chose great men of the Old Testament: such as Isaac Gen. Jesus Himself was the elect of the Father Is.
He chose the church before the foundation of the world. The idea that God sovereignly chooses who will be saved is nowhere clearer than in the ninth chapter of Romans. Scripture claims that God has foreknowledge.
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