August 2016

Almost without exception when I present John 6:37 (and 6:63, 65) to a professing Arminian they simply ignore it and change the subject, but the other day I encountered one of those rare exceptions. As you know in the passage Jesus declares, "All those the Father gives to me will come to me." The Arminian claimed the meaning was that all those the Father FORESAW would come to faith in Jesus, the Father gave to Jesus that they might come to faith in him. Ummm! Not only is this meaning not there and arbitrarily imported into the text but you can, perhaps, find no better example of circular reasoning.

How is this circular reasoning? All those the Father gives to Jesus will infallibly come to faith in him . God's giving them to Jesus precedes their coming to faith in him and yet the Arminian says it is based on something that happens after God gives them to Jesus. God is giving them to Jesus now based on something that will infallibly happen in the future? Consider that if election is based on foreseen faith then he already knew who would and would not believe even before God created us and it could not be otherwise. Why would God create people he knew with certainty would go to hell? Contradicts the Arminian teaching on free will ... So if the future is certain before it happens then isn't based on foreseen faith at all but something more like fate.

Two great errors in the church today are 1) moralism and 2) no - lordship antinomianism. One has pride in his own goodness, and puts his hope (at least partly) in his own self-righteousness, not realizing he is spiritually bankrupt, saved by the free grace and righteousness of Christ alone. The other error acknowledges the imputation of Christ's righteousness but ignores the impartation of the Holy Spirit in regeneration, thus rejecting the fullness of God's grace to us in salvation. The tragic result is they see no need to yield in allegiance to Christ alone as LORD and sovereign. They end up presuming on God's grace in justification often allowing sin to go unchecked, as if God no longer required a holy life from us as believers. But the Scriptures unambiguously declare that we are to obey, not in order to be saved or to somehow maintain our salvation ... no, we are to obey BECAUSE we are saved and are the children of God. Those who are born again love God by obeying His commands and His commands are not burdensome because they have been born again.(1 John 3:9, 5:1-4)

I received an email to my to Monergism.com account from a visitor named Shawn. He asked some important questions on on Calvinism, Evil and God's Holiness. I have reproduced his email in full with my response (with a couple paragraphs on Job that quote liberally from John Piper)

Dear Mr. Hendryx,

I've been reading your website with interest and find it to be one of the very best Calvinistic resources I've seen on the net. I am not a Calvinist, though I can't say I'm decisively against Calvinism either. I still have lingering questions which I hope you might be able to answer, or point me to resources that would help.

Perhaps my main objection to accepting Calvinism involves the problem of evil. I've read several of the articles you have on the subject (by Piper, Bahnsen, [Cheung] and two others by authors whose names I can't recall), but none seemed to offer any new or helpful answers to my objections/doubts/questions.

This is what I understand the Calvinistic claim to be: God is sovereign over everything, having decreed before the foundation of the world everything that will come to pass. This would include, I should think, all moral evil, whether realized in word, thought or deed, or merely imagined in man's heart. In other words, before there was a devil, man, or sin, God 'imagined' (for lack of a better word) all of the horrific, sinful and debased things that have ever and will ever come to pass, and then chose to actualize them. God was not coerced into allowing evil to exist as if it was outside of his power. Rather, God chose to actualize sin and evil where before there was none. Would that be an accurate conception so far?