It is an illusion to the man. He thinks he is free, but he's gone and put shackles on his own wrists and in his perversions parades them around as bracelets. His freedom is a god in his life. No "God" will tell him what to do, or he is free to choose to worship the god of his own choice. I make that small g god because, what he always chooses with his "freedom" is a god that looks just like the god he wants rather than the true God. He wants a god who is permissive, gushy with love, never angry, and thinks he's a swell person. He has bound himself up with a delusion that he is exercising free will. In reality, he is very unfree.
Can we who have been chosen go against God in the matter of salvation? Well, since God gives us the faith, I don't see how we can - but again, it isn't God saying "you can't turn back." It is more that we won't once we have been quickened by the Holy Spirit and graced with faith to believe. ALL that the Father giveth me SHALL COME - and of He who comes I will in no wise cast out.
There are some tensions in Scripture, but not insurmountable. I know that there is a balance between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility so that lost man dying and going to Hell is truly responsible for his own condition. He isn't going to Hell because God didn't choose him. He's going to Hell because he wants nothing to do with God and His revelation.
Evangelistically, I believe we should make no distinctions. I have no idea who God elected. For all I know, everyone living today has been elected. God called me to teach. God called us all to tell. I do my job and leave the salvation business up to God.
What the doctrine of election does for me is really a blessing. 1) I know that ALL credit goes to God. 2) I know that He will never cast me out. 3)I am humbled that I was chosen and awed by God.
Just a thought. Maybe not a great one here, but something I was thinking of. I'm sure you believe in the basic concept of our judicial system. You have someone guilty of a crime, the evidence of the guilt is made apparent and then they are found guilty. The judge then makes a choice. What should the guilty party's sentence be? For many, a righteous judge will give the most just punishment the law allows. For others, he gives a suspended sentence with no punishment.
That is like what God did in this way. All of us were guilty as charged. If given a choice, we would always turn back at some point to sin. It is just our nature.
We violated God's righteous standards. His law. But He being the chief legislature had two requirements 1)The crime must be punished; 2)The price was death.
Yet, out of His mercy and love, the judge chose to send His son to pay the penalty by dying on the cross.
Well, here we are, still as sin bound as ever. Loving every moment of it. Blind. Worthless. Miserable. And we defiantly will not even acknowledge the gift.
But God has a desire that we know Him. The only way he can do this is by electing some to salvation. From this, they can see his mercy and grace as well as justice and wrath.
I don't know the mechanics of it all. But it is what the Bible teaches that God did.
He paid my sentence and then changed my heart. Others were not so blessed - as he didn't change their hearts. He didn't say they couldnt come. They just never would. And so, they remain guilty and the crime ends up being paid for in their own spiritual death rather than the substitutionary atonement of our Lord's own life.
I agree with almost all of this post. It's just when you arrive at the C&C God that I cannot agree. This is just not the God I see Jesus teaching, the God that I recognize when I read scripture, the God that the Apostles speak of, that the Church has always taught.
And most importantly, it's not the God that I know in my heart and in my life.
Really truly excellent post, Blogger.
I may swipe from it considerably. 8~)
It is in your view of God allowing eternal hell to serve as an example and/or:
But God has a desire that we know Him. The only way he can do this is by electing some to salvation. From this, they can see his mercy and grace as well as justice and wrath.
An example implies, no requires, the possibility of learning something, of changing based on experience gained from the example. Absent this, it's is not an really an example.
If I take two identical twin brothers and kill one in front of the other randomly, what have they learned from this example? No matter what their crime, one has learned I killed him, the other that I did not kill him. This is not a lesson or learning experience in the normal sense. It's not a textbook example.
The spared twin may be grateful, may even have a Stockholm conversion, but viewing me as 'merciful' is not a reasonable conclusion. I certainly wasn't merciful to his brother, and he is identical in all respects. In fact, the very forceful point, I tell him, is that there is no reason at all I chose to spare him and there's nothing his brother could possibly have done to stop me from killing him - they both deserved killing and still do.
Except under psychological breakdown he wouldn't be grateful, nor loving towards his brother's killer and his tormentor.
Morever, your view is that there is nothing that he can change based on this example; I'll change him into exactly what I want him to be, no matter what. It is this lack of free will or of any discernable rhyme or reason that I see as the major flaw in your description of God. YOU may not see it as cruel, to kill one in front of the other arbitrarily - as an example - but it is the only intelligent conclusion that I can see.
I accept that you don't see this God as cruel. The main thing I object to is people teaching this view of God to others with the possible result that they will believe this is what Jesus taught, what Christianity truly is. I think this is harmful and the first rule of religious teaching should be do no harm.
There is a classic clinical psychology experiment. In it they take test dogs and deliver small shocks to them. For some the shocks follow a pattern - either they are in one specific location or after some particular behaviour.
The subjects in these cases stay alert and learn what to do or what to avoid.
For another set of subjects, they apply the shocks without any pattern or possibly discernable reason. The dogs in these experiments at first are alert and jump away from the shocks. But before long they stop jumping away. What they "learn" there is nothing they can do; they stay put and get shocked, then give up and become helpless whimpering puddles of pooch.
Now we are not animals, and religion is not solely about reward and punishment; however, to be an example, to teach something, anything, requires the possibility of learning or choosing, and cannot violate reason or some discernable cause and effect.
Because of this, I believe your underpinning - 'example' in your theology - fails.
Now, with my thanks for your time and patience, I leave the floor to you..