God’s Sovereignty
Now before I get into the meat of this piece, I think I need to define a term: heresy. Heresy is, in short, the taking of a stance outside that of orthodoxy. These folks, and many in the Arminian camp, would happily throw Calvinists out of the Kingdom of Heaven over our views, as we can see by their name alone. However this is not the same in reverse. Calvinists may believe our Arminian brothers and sisters are in error, and that the logical conclusion of their theology is shallow and could lead someone into a heretical view, but we do not throw them from the roles of the saved for it. In looking at the Facebook page of our friends at CAHCT, we see this image as their header:
Let’s break this down for a moment. On the one hand I could point out that in today’s terms “red pilling” is actually a reference back to the movie “The Matrix” in which the main character takes the red pill to wake up from a false view of the world forced upon him by an outside force. To place the idea of God’s Sovereignty onto a “red pill” is inadvertently admitting that one must “wake up” from the shallow dream like state of the other option. In the movie, the main character has the choice of taking a blue pill and returning to the false world, and pretending nothing is wrong. Again, in a seeming epic lack of self awareness, they’ve placed the “human free will” on the blue pill. The Bible itself never once points to an idea of autonomous human free will. It does however make many multiple references to our wills being enslaved, but that’s for a later installment of this series.
For now, let us focus on God’s Sovereignty. The Bible makes very clear that God’s sovereignty is absolute. Most people go straight to Isaiah 46:10: “Declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things which have not been done, Saying, 'My purpose will be established, And I will accomplish all My good pleasure';” or the dreaded (for the Arminian) Potter’s passage of Romans 9:19-21: “You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?" On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it? Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for common use?”
Now if these were all we had, we could still see a very good picture of God being in control. We see that what happens is exactly as He wants them. However we are not limited to these two verses. We could also go to Psalm 135:6, Psalm 115:3, Daniel 4:35, Job 9:12, 42:2, 2 Chronicles 20:6, Isaiah 43:13, 45:9-10, and there are many more but you get the picture. One of my favorites however, is Genesis 50:20 where we read: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.” The context here is that Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery years before, but God had guided Joseph’s path so that he would be placed in the service of the Pharaoh, and had averted a major famine among the people of Egypt. In this passage, Joseph’s father had passed, and while making the trek to bury him in the land of Canaan, his brothers worried that Joseph would hold a grudge and have them killed. Instead, as Joseph pronounces, that though their hearts were wicked, and though they meant to do an evil thing, God had been in control the entire time, guiding what was to happen, because it was His plan to save many in Egypt through this evil act. I also go here because of the recent events in Florida, which I posted an article about here: Terrorism in Florida and the Depravity of Man http://etchedinsteel.blogspot.com/2016/06/terrorism-in-florida-and-depravity-of.html
We see through these passages, (and logic) the outcomes of each theology. First, in the Arminian view, God is made a bystander, a helpless watcher of evil, that we hope He can make some good come from. This is an utterly unbiblical view, and cannot be defended from Scripture. Nowhere in the pages of the Bible do we read where God was impotent to stop something from happening, or was powerless to avert it. The text just doesn’t exist. From this position, it is a fairly short step to the heresy of open theism, in which God has no knowledge of what’s going to happen in the next moment, and only has exhaustive knowledge of the present. Many have begun to turn to this in a misguided attempt to “deflect the blame” from God when it comes to evil. As Dr. James White has been quoted as saying “The only consistent Arminian is an open theist.” In this, people can claim to unbelievers, “God had nothing to do with this evil!” but what they don’t realize is that they are undercutting the power and omniscience of God.
However let’s contrast that with the Calvinist view. We can point to verses like Genesis 50:20 and say “Yes this act is evil, no question, but God is in control, and there is a purpose to it. A greater good will come from it, even if we can’t we what that is right now.” The Arminian position has a problem of the existence of evil, the Calvinist does not.
Now, going back to the Facebook group and their fundamental ignorance of Calvinism which we can see encapsulated in this screenshot:
Considering the above and the verses mentioned, it is impossible to hold this position in anything other than ignorance.
Unfortunately since they do not allow those who know or can enlighten them, they seem quite happy having taken the blue pill and slipped back into their false world.
In this image we can see a stark contrast between what I’ve already laid out above, and the thinking (or lack thereof) by some in this group. Note what’s being said here. Their opening line says that Calvinism is designed to destroy God’s Sovereignty? Yet what I’ve laid out above is a clear refutation of this. In their next line, we see another glaring lack of self awareness. He claims that Limited Atonement and Unconditional Election, somehow diminish God’s Sovereignty. That is quite literally impossible. I will go into greater depth on these two points of the TULIP as this series progresses, but let me touch on them briefly here. Unconditional Election, is the belief that God chooses those whom He wishes for salvation, and that it is in no way any part of man that leads to that choosing. It is 100% God’s Sovereign Choice! How it is limiting to God’s Sovereignty to have Him the only arbiter of His own choice is baffling, but based solely on this error, I can already tell you the rest of their essay is in error. When you build upon an incorrect assertion, then nothing you posit afterward can be correct. As for Limited Atonement, this is the belief that Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross was for those of the elect. Those God had chosen before the foundation of the world. (Eph. 1:4) Otherwise we have Jesus making an atonement for those in hell. We have Him trying to intercede on the behalf of those who are already in the lake of fire, and being eternally disappointed and frustrated. THAT is an affront to God’s Sovereignty, and THAT is a severe limiting of His ability to save. It again makes God impotent and incapable of doing that which He wants most to do, and places man’s will above that of God’s. That is the ultimate placing of man as sovereign over God! That quite literally, the will of those damned to hell and burning in the lake of fire, are still sovereign over God!
There are a plethora of other images I could go into, but I think the point has been hammered home. God’s Sovereignty, in the Calvinist belief, is held to its highest, while those of the Arminian view subordinate His Sovereignty to their own. I placed the link to the group in my introduction to this series, so adding it again would be redundant. I urge those who read this to go to the page, read what they have to say, and then subject it to the light of Scripture. I'm confident they will find it wanting. Until next time, God bless!
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