Which all seems great unless of course you are not one of the elect. If you are not one of the elect you are born with no hope of going to heaven. Your destiny is determined through God's decree an eternity ago and there is nothing you can do about it. Jesus love and forgiveness is forever out of reach.
Knight,
Yes, our destiny is determined. It is the
execution of the decree that determines your destiny. The decree determines the certainty of all future existence of all
things. But, as I noted in my earlier post, these
things are comprehended in their causes, conditions, successions, and relations.
This includes free actions of moral agents. God has decreed to
move or to permit free moral agents to act in the exercise of their free moral agency. This is important and might be getting lost in the discussion.
With that, let’s get two things on the table concerning the Calvinist view of the elect and the non-elect:
1. God has graciously chosen His people, the elect, out of a mass of already fallen humanity. Those He has chosen,
will be saved, for the elect will respond to both the outward call, via the proclamation of the gospel, and the efficacious inward call (via the Holy Spirit). The elect, using their free moral agency,
will so respond because God
will actively work to bring them to their regeneration,
a quickening from spiritual death to life by the Holy Spirit, and subsequently to their free moral choice of faith.
2. God has left the remainder of the fallen mass of humanity to their own means and their justly deserved ends. These are the
reprobate. From the
total inability of their sinful natures, the very efficient cause of reprobation, the reprobate will reject this outward call, all the while using the very same free moral agency that the elect possessed. In short,
God is not forcing people who want to go to Heaven to go to Hell!
With respect to your comment about hope and love, we may never fully understand
how God reconciles reprobation with love. And we do not have a warrant, using merely our own counsel, to declare that God
should work this way or that way. Instead our warrant is found by examining what God tells us about Himself. Scripture often tells us the
why of things that God does, but Scripture does not always tell us the
how of what God does. Spending time speculating or even demanding to know the
how, when Scripture is virtually silent, is basically attempting to understand the secret things of God (Deuteronomy 29:29).
Nevertheless, there is much warrant from Scripture that teaches us that
God is free to not extend mercy to everyone. For example, Paul speaks to the matter in Romans, and we need only look to God speaking to Moses. God makes it plainly clear that
He is not a universally merciful God for everyone, for He retains His prerogative to distribute mercy, without any pre-conditions other than the counsel of His own will, that is, where He sees fit to do so:
I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.
I think it is quite clear that when God spoke these words, He was also claiming
being merciful does not mean He must extend mercy to everyone. A holy God confronted with fallen mankind owes it nothing but His justice of eternal damnation. God could have extended mercy to but one person, refusing all others, and yet we would still call Him merciful. This is because
there is nothing about being merciful that requires mercy to be always or universally dispensed.
Which brings us to the matter of predestination, or the unconditional selection of some from an already fallen mass of humanity, to eternal life. Note that the term
predestination is always associated with election. We see this from Scripture where the word is never used with respect to the reprobate. We also see the word used in the Scripture in the context of God’s foreknowledge, in that God had an intimate, loving, (as in the Scriptural, “he knew her”) knowledge of specific persons that He graciously decided to elect. This is why the Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter III) reads:
III. By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels (1 Timothy 5:21; Matthew 25:41) are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death (Romans 9:22-23; Ephesians 1:5; Proverbs 16:4).
V. Those of mankind that are predestinated unto life, God, before the foundation of the world was laid, according to His eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of His will, has chosen, in Christ, unto everlasting glory (Ephesians 1:4, 9, 11; Romans 8:30; 2 Timothy 1:9; 2 Timothy 5:9), out of His mere free grace and love, without any foresight of faith, or good works, or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in the creature, as conditions, or causes moving Him thereunto (Romans 9:11, 13,16; Ephesians 1:4,9); and all to the praise of His glorious grace (Ephesians 1:6, 12).
VII. The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extends or withholds mercy, as He pleases, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice (Matthew 11:25-26; Romans 9:17-18, 21-22; 2 Timothy 2:19-20, Jude 4; 1 Peter 2:8).
Also observe from the citation above, that God is glorified in both instances. His predestination glorifies His grace. His passing over of the non-elect glorifies His justice.
For the remainder of the discussion of predestination, I am going to quote from R.C. Sproul from the following source:
Double Predestination. This source is an extract from Sproul’s excellent little book,
Chosen by God. Sproul does a fine job clearing up the matter of equal ultimacy, and the notion of double predestination.
Denouncing double predestination, Sproul begins by noting that according to this view (
emphasis shown is my own):
There is a symmetry that exists between election and reprobation. God WORKS in the same way and same manner with respect to the elect and to the reprobate. That is to say, from all eternity God decreed some to election and by divine initiative works faith in their hearts and brings them actively to salvation. By the same token, from all eternity God decrees some to sin and damnation (destinare ad peccatum) and actively intervenes to work sin in their lives, bringing them to damnation by divine initiative. In the case of the elect, regeneration is the monergistic work of God. In the case of the reprobate, sin and degeneration are the monergistic work of God. Stated another way, we can establish a parallelism of foreordination and predestination by means of a positive symmetry. We can call this a positive-positive view of predestination. This is, God positively and actively intervenes in the lives of the elect to bring them to salvation. In the same way God positively and actively intervenes in the life of the reprobate to bring him to sin.
At this point, we should carefully note what Sproul has written. In other words, according to the double-predestination minority view, God works
equally well to directly and solely (monergistically) intervene in the lives of both the elect and the reprobate to bring about His ultimate ends.
Sproul continues:
This distortion of positive-positive predestination clearly makes God the author of sin who punishes a person for doing what God monergistically and irresistibly coerces man to do. Such a view is indeed a monstrous assault on the integrity of God. This is not the Reformed view of predestination, but a gross and inexcusable caricature of the doctrine. Such a view may be identified with what is often loosely described as hyper-Calvinism and involves a radical form of supralapsarianism. Such a view of predestination has been virtually universally and monolithically rejected by Reformed thinkers.
In the Reformed view God from all eternity decrees some to election and positively intervenes in their lives to work regeneration and faith by a monergistic work of grace. To the non-elect God withholds this monergistic work of grace, passing them by and leaving them to themselves. He does not monergistically work sin or unbelief in their lives. Even in the case of the "hardening" of the sinners' already recalcitrant hearts, God does not, as Luther stated, "work evil in us (for hardening is working evil) by creating fresh evil in us."
Sproul’s view represents the majority view among Calvinists. Unfortunately, we encounter the minority view in many discussion forums, and these views are assumed to represent the majority of Calvinists by the uninformed. They do not!
At this juncture, some will ask,
why did God choose to unconditionally elect some and not others? Scripture teaches us that it was solely according to the counsel of His own will. We do not know
how, but we certainly know that He did exactly this. God chose the elect from an already fallen race, all of whom were rightfully on their way to eternal condemnation. From Scripture we read that God gave some persons to Christ:
John 6:37-40
37 All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day."
John 6:44
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.
Clearly, if all that God the Father gave do indeed come, necessarily those who do not come were not given, for God is certainly not impotent. Further, outside of the Father's giving (drawing), no one is able to come.
The very reason Paul introduces the topic of predestination and reprobation in Romans was to assure the saints (the elect) that their very salvation was not begun in themselves, but in the decision of God. We do not have the same quantity of Scripture saying much about reprobation,
how God chooses the elect while passing over the reprobate. It is hidden from us. We therefore cannot speak with the same level of certainty about reprobation as we can about the elect. But Scripture gives us plenty of assurances of God’s intentions to save His elect to the very uttermost. This is why Paul introduces the topic.
Predestination guarantees the salvation of those God has called. Predestination exposes man’s true nature as rebellious and sinful. Predestination means God is in control, as He should be, and the ability of man to take credit for his own salvation is removed, as Scripture teaches. Finally, predestination permits the saved to be assured in their knowledge that God made their salvation sure.
1. Why would a loving God create beings that have no choice but to suffer eternally in hell?
He didn’t!
I would hope that we all agree from Romans 5 that man is fallen by the moral actions of one man, not God. I also hope we agree that original sin is real. And, unlike the way we choose our elected officials to represent us, that our
perfect God selected a representative for all of us to put to the test. None of us could have selected someone better than whom God selected to covenant with. Adam exercised his own liberty and failed the test. He was morally free to choose to sin or not to sin. He sinned and we all sinned in him and are under judgment for it. We are guilty before existence by the imputation of Adam's first sin, his representative, federal act. In addition to the guilt we bear with Adam's sin, we are also guilty of our many sins, as Romans 3 teaches.
God’s ordaining of the reprobate does not prohibit them from acting according their desires and intentions. They are still morally free agents, with the
liberty of spontaneity. They choose to hate God.
No one is going to hell who wants to be in Heaven.
As a refresher, the decree renders the future sinful act absolutely certain, but the decree does so in a manner in which God determines
(1) not to hinder the sinful self-determination of the finite will; and
(2) to regulate and control the result of this sinful self-determination. (See Psalm 78:29; Acts 14:16; 17:30.)
2. What's the point of evangelism if the elect and non-elect have already been chosen in advance?
If you can point them all out to me we can probably eliminate evangelism.
Seriously, we don’t know who the elect are and God commands that we preach the gospel, for it is by generally from the hearing of the gospel (one of the ordained
means of the decree) that the elect are ultimately regenerated.
Ok, those are biggies and I would be lying to you if I didn't tell you that those issues kinda sicken me a bit.
This kind of takes the joy out of the discussion we have been having and the effort spent in crafting these responses.
AMR
