Are you a Christian who puzzles over God's sovereignty and how it relates to salvation? It's easy to get lost in this labyrinth, especially as clever writers have been sharpening their pens about it for 500 years. But, even though it's a hard subject, I am convinced there are some Scriptural lines we should never cross. Below are a few of those lines.
Any system of doctrine that implies that God is untruthful, or makes God the ultimate Cause of sin, or gives us cause to doubt the reliability of God's promises in the Bible, or portrays God as play-acting in His interactions with people, is wrong. It doesn't matter if the system affirms election. The buzzer goes off, the red flag flies, and it's time to go back to the drawing-board. Hyper-Calvinism is as bad as semi-Pelagianism.
- Is God sincere when He says in various verses that He wants everyone to be saved? God does say so, in passages like 1 Timothy 2:3-4 and 2 Peter 3:9-10. God never lies, and any teaching that attributes insincerity to God is blasphemous. I reject the ingenious twists of hyper-Calvinists like the Rev. Dr. John Gill, A.W. Pink, or Herman Hoeksema, who distort verses that clearly say that God sincerely wants every person without exception to come to Him. No creed is so precious that it justifies attributing misleading intentions or language to the Lord.
- Does God love the world (John 3:16)? The Bible is clear that, even though God is righteously angry toward the world because of its willful sins, He also loves the world and sent His Son to save it. This is why His love is merciful -- we deserve to be condemned, but God sent His Son. Any denial of God's love for the non-elect is the heresy of "hyper-Calvinism". Christ in Matthew 5 said that the Father shows daily love even to His enemies. The idea that God only loves the elect is hogwash.
- Can God be trusted, if He has a "secret will" which is the exact opposite of what He says in the Bible He wants? It is no easy task to explain how God's actions in history harmonize with what He planned in eternity. But theories that empty out what God in the Bible says He wants are poisonous to faith. If God's stated wishes in Scripture about the lost can't be trusted, then God's stated wishes in Scripture toward believers can't be trusted either. The "secret will" theory breeds doubt. We need a better harmonization.
- Christ died for everyone in some sense (Isaiah 53:4). There is no question that the Bible clearly teaches Christ died for everyone without exception, regardless of the fact that everyone is not saved. The cross does not work unilaterally. Limited atonement is, at best, a sincere attempt to interpret the substitutionary nature of Christ's death. But it produces a confused construct of special pleading, semi-truths, and logic fallacies. John Owens' syllogisms about "double jeopardy" cannot change the plain meanings of plain verses.
- God dislikes judging sinners (Ezekiel 18:32). The fact that Ezekiel 18 deals with earthly judgments is irrelevant to the question of how God feels about it. Hyper-Calvinism teaches that it pleased God to preordain most of humanity to become sinners, walk in unbelief, and thus inherit eternal damnation. Except that God Himself said it doesn't please Him. This is why there must be an element of permission in God's decree.
- Is wickedness God's fault? One of Calvinism's problems is that it usually descends into determinism (not fatalism, because God isn't Fate and we aren't just leaves in the stream). If free-will doesn't exist at all, then God caused Adam to sin, and then every sin of every person that sprouted from that one original decreed sin, is caused by God. (The existence of secondary causes is irrelevant to this knotty problem, since the secondary causes are passive). This is an unacceptable theodicy. If there's no free will, even in some limited sense, then God causes all sin. John Calvin and Martin Luther both clearly and strongly denied the existence of free-will (Luther more brutally, in his classic book, The Bondage of the Will). This denial entangled them in many logical, ethical, and theological knots.
- Is God lying, if He had Christ only die for the elect, and then has His preachers tell everyone He wants the listeners to be saved? God, being truthful, cannot lie, and being holy, cannot hand-wave sin. God by His nature requires a blood basis for offering a grace forgiveness. Otherwise, God, when he offers forgiveness to everyone, is like a grocer who advertises something which He not only doesn't have in stock, but which he intentionally did not order. This is a problem.
Any system of doctrine that implies that God is untruthful, or makes God the ultimate Cause of sin, or gives us cause to doubt the reliability of God's promises in the Bible, or portrays God as play-acting in His interactions with people, is wrong. It doesn't matter if the system affirms election. The buzzer goes off, the red flag flies, and it's time to go back to the drawing-board. Hyper-Calvinism is as bad as semi-Pelagianism.