The short question he has taken up to answer is this: God could have created all men with free moral agency and ordained it that they never have sinned because He is sovereign? (Think men being like the elect angels.) Therefore God wanted men to be sinners. As I see it, there are only three ways to answer the mail on this question:
1. God wants to save but can't.
2. God doesn't want to save everyone for another reason
3. God in reality saves everyone and nobody perishes - love wins.
Take a look at this wonderful Arminian response:
Ah, the light breaks through the clouds! God desperately wants to save, but is really only powerless. He stands on the corner watching the house burn down, wanting to save, but being totally unable to.God is not an unwilling observer but a willing participant. God, according to Arminianism, doesn’t just stand there and watch, with the casual indifference of the priest and Levite according to Luke 10:30-37... God is willing to rescue. But if someone should be unwilling to call upon Him, and perish, then that is their own fault, and something for which they may have increased condemnation. So how does God escape responsibility in this scenario? Because God is willing to intervene. But in Shelton’s analogy, the person outside the burning building is unwilling.
It's nice to have a god who in every sense of the word wills the salvation of all men, until you need to pray to that god to save you and find out he can't. Either God is sovereign, in which case all that to say is He's God, or He is not and is a nice safe idol we can prostrate ourselves before.
And that response breaks the first commandment.
1 comment:
I propose that there are only four possible ways of dealing with the Arminian proposal:
1. He can’t do what he wants to do; or
2. He won’t do what he wants to do; or
3. He doesn’t want to do what he wants to do; or
4. He has no intention of desiring to save every single individual when Scripture says He desires to save all men because Scripture uses all in many different
ways, one of which means “some only.” And it seems quite clear that what God desires to
do, and does do, is to save “all kinds of men.”
a. If we say God cannot do what He genuinely wants to do, then what kind of a God are we left with?
Does the Bible teach that we have an omnipotent, sovereign
God, who supposedly cannot do what He wants to do? Why would God want
to do something that He knows He can’t do? What is the benefit
to that predicament for God? Surely this can’t be a rational way to understand theology.
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