Posted on 08/27/2012 9:24:23 PM PDT by Alex Murphy
That’s the title of an interesting and thought-provoking post by Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition. Justin embedded a video interview left on the cutting-room-floor of the forthcoming documentary Hellbound. In the video (embedded below), Justin grapples with a question I often receive — is a God who only saves some of His children a moral monster?
I’m not going to pretend to be a theologian and wholeheartedly recommend watching Justin’s response (as well as reading his blog), but I will make an observation or two through the prism of my legal training. First, much of what we believe is right or fair for a sovereign is derived from legal, moral, and political systems created precisely because we are not God and then imputing from that system moral laws that should govern God’s conduct towards man. In other words, reverence for individual liberty, equality of opportunity, blind justice, the moral autonomy of the individual, and many other concepts that have widespread (indeed, overwhelming) support in our culture are born out of distrust for the sovereign. In other words, man — after thousands of years of experience with despotism — understands that power corrupts, concentrated power creates terrible consequences for that corruption, and that fallen men must always be accountable to someone.
Second, the cultural and legal constructs created to keep our earthly sovereign honest simply do not apply to our Heavenly Sovereign. To take a controversial example — just war theories I endorse and have lived are incompatible with the conquest of Canaan. The Israelites were not acting in self-defense but as conquerors, and their God-directed methods were extreme. This analysis applies to any number of Old Testament conflicts, where God directed His people to carry out His will through extreme violence. In other cases, God himself acted violently on the world — killing even children — from the Flood to Sodom. His actions in the Book of Job can seem inexplicable — and the only answer He gave to Job’s repeated entreaties was a lengthy, vivid version of “Who do you think you are to question Me?”
For generations many Christians have struggled to reconcile Christ’s commands to love our enemies with God’s quite frequent smiting of His enemies. But given the vast and impenetrable gulf in our own understanding and God’s understanding, is this alleged inconsistency really so hard to comprehend? After all, if we are fallen (and we are) and limited in our understanding, how can we even be sure that our “enemies” are wrong? How can we know what God has purposed for them? And let’s not forget that even as we love our enemies God has created and established agents of His own wrath in our earthly governments, providing a means for executing even violent judgments agains wrongdoers on this earth. Simply put, God’s judgment is perfect. Ours is often ridiculous.
We love ourselves and our own reasoning so much that it’s easy to forget:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
If this sounds like a bit of a punt, well . . . it is. After all, we see through a glass darkly and will never achieve full understanding during our time in this fallen, groaning world. But it is God who defines virtue, His Word hardly indicates that he’s an egalitarian as we understand the term, and I’m a sinner — depraved in every aspect of my being. Thanks be to God for His gracious and inexplicable rescue of my lost soul.
....the cultural and legal constructs created to keep our earthly sovereign honest simply do not apply to our Heavenly Sovereign. To take a controversial example — just war theories I endorse and have lived are incompatible with the conquest of Canaan. The Israelites were not acting in self-defense but as conquerors, and their God-directed methods were extreme. This analysis applies to any number of Old Testament conflicts, where God directed His people to carry out His will through extreme violence. In other cases, God himself acted violently on the world — killing even children — from the Flood to Sodom. His actions in the Book of Job can seem inexplicable — and the only answer He gave to Job’s repeated entreaties was a lengthy, vivid version of “Who do you think you are to question Me?”....
....if we are fallen (and we are) and limited in our understanding, how can we even be sure that our “enemies” are wrong? How can we know what God has purposed for them? ...Simply put, God’s judgment is perfect. Ours is often ridiculous.
Knowing that evil creatures such as Osama bin Laden, Joseph Stalin and Ted Kennedy are suffering endless torment serves to reveal that God is Eternally Just. That’s not a characteristic of a moral monster but of a Virtuous Creator.
Nicely stated
This Religion Forum thread is labeled “Calvinist Caucus” meaning if you are not currently, actively Calvinist then do not post on this thread.
It’s too late for me to get into a discussion about this, so I’ll just say you don’t understand Calvinism. Calvinists believe man is 100% responsible for his actions.
This Religion Forum thread is labeled “Calvinist Caucus” meaning if you are not currently, actively Calvinist then do not post on this thread.
Amen! In the ways of God, I believe we are not supposed to understand it all - if we did, where would faith fit in? Without faith, Scripture says, it is IMPOSSIBLE to please God.
“is a God who only saves some of His children a moral monster”
He saves ALL of His children. The rest have rejected Him and are not His children.
Mathew 7: 13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.
Only a FEW are saved. MANY are not.
John 10:25 Jesus answered, “I did tell you, but you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. 27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all[c]; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”
Luke 20: 35 But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, 36 and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.
John 1: 11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.
Romans 8:14
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.
Galatians 3:25 Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. 26 So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
1 John 3:1
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Revelation 21:6 He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. 7 Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. 8 But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars —they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
ALL are NOT God’s children.
I’m sorry, but you don’t know what you are talking about. I’m a Calvinist. I promise I thoroughly understand what I believe.
Responsibility and voluntary choice are not the same thing as free will. Calvinists affirm that man is indeed responsible for the choices he makes, yet we deny that the Bible teaches that man has a free will since it is no where taught in the pages of Scripture. The Bible teaches, rather, that God ordains ALL THINGS that come to pass according to the counsel of His own will (Eph 1:11) but it also teaches that man is responsible for his choices (Ezek 18:20, Matt 12:37, John 9:41).
Our choices are not coerced ...i.e. we do not choose against what we want or desire, yet we never make choices contrary to God’s sovereign decree. What God determines will always come to pass (Eph 1:11). Theologians refer to this tension between man’s culpability for his actions and God’s sovereignty as “compatibilism.”
“All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” (John 6:37)
He will indeed save every single one of His children. Those given Him by the Father will be saved. They hear His voice and follow Him. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27)
But consider the stunning implications of the passage immediately preceding verse 27: “Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him, How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believed not: the works that I do in my Father’s name, they bear witness of me. BUT YE, BELIEVE NOT BECAUSE YE ARE NOT OF MY SHEEP, as I said unto you. (John 10:24-26)
In and of ourselves we cannot please God, but we have placed our faith in One who does. When God the Father looks upon a saved man He doesn’t see a sin-ravaged wretch whose righteousness is like filthy rags, He sees perfection, He sees Christ, in whom He is well-pleased. What amazing grace!
Ping for later.
I love this verse:
“Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like like crimson they shall be as wool.” (Isaiah 1:18)
Another I love:
“For He[God] hath made Him[Jesus] to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
May we remember “Calvin was not a Calvinist, Luther was not a Luthern, Wesley was not a Methodist” we named and called them by those titles long after they were gone.
Why don’t you go back and read the Bible in the Hebrew and understand the Jewish roots and it might make a lot more sense..just saying. I, for one, can not understand the Bible unless I use a Jewish prism, but that is just me. And am not Jewish.
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