I said no such thing. What I did say in post #3548 was that "God created and uses all things". This could fairly be misconstrued as God creating evil which was not the intent and I apologize. God did not create evil. However there is no mistaken that He ordained it since He did nothing to prevent the fall. Since it exists God uses it to His advantage.
We have discussed this many times. You either 1) know this isn't what I meant and still chose to misrepresent the statement or 2) you still have not been enlightened by God to understand what I'm saying; God is sovereign and ordains everything. If the latter is true I would suggest praying for knowledge and understanding.
Which is whay your cult professes...
My, we are getting nasty now. I don't know of any of us that would lay claim to the Orthodox or Catholic Church as being a "cult". And what are you so upset about; simply because we say God is sovereign over His creation? This is what you deny? I would personally rethink my position.
Here is the confusion. Ordain means to predestine, to prearrange unalterably, to decree. You are saying that God orders evil to exit, but he doesn't create it. It seems to me that ordering something to come into existence that didn't exit before the order is very close to creating it, if not an equivalence.
Ok, for the sake of fairness, let me quote the whole sentence. In #3548 you wrote:
"What precisely are you defining as evil? A war? Fire raining from heaven? A great flood? Demons spreading lies? God has created and used all of these things to accomplish His purpose."
To me is sure sounds like evil things, HD. To me it surely sounds like you are saying that God "created and used all these things" that are evil as far as I know.
Perhaps you didn't mean that, but that's the message that came accross. I take accept your retraction, but I keep constantly running into this with you (and not just you personally, I mean collectively you the Reformed Christians), saying one thing and meaning something else.
You either 1) know this isn't what I meant and still chose to misrepresent the statement or 2) you still have not been enlightened by God to understand what I'm saying;
Thruth be, I don't know what you mean since you (both personally and collectively) say that God ordains but doesn't create evil; that God uses evil for His purpose but is not the author of it; that everything exists because He willed it, save for evil...and so on.
As stripes1776 (#3570) aptly says to you "You are saying that God orders evil to exit, but he doesn't create it." We (other Christians) see God's will and creation as one and the same thing; for, if God wills something, God creates it! "Let there be light. And it was light," HD.
And when Dr. Eckleberg says that man's "free will is an oxymoron," she means that we have none, and such a concept is nonsense in Reformed theology. Which means we are robots who can conform only to God's will. So where is our sin then? Isn't our sinfullness, then, obedience to God's will and therefore not sin at all?
You say that perhaps we "still have not been enlightened by God to understand what" you are saying. Then, again, perhaps annalex is right when he says (#3561) "Calvinist theology is an extrabiblical superstition invented by second-rate theologians with poor reading and comprehension skills."
I would say that stripes1776 is spot on when he says that perhaps your theology is simply a "source of confusion" to most of us for one reason or the other. But the fact remains that unless evil came into this world through the free will of God's creatures, it is God's creature as well. There is no third possibility.
I do sincerely apologize for using the word 'cult.' It was meant to impress upon you how un-Christian the idea of God ordaining evil into this world is. I didn't say unbiblical; I specifically said un-Christian. In fact, perhaps the best word for it would be "alien."