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In this episode, Trent reveals the one basic Christian good work that Calvinists, because of their theology, just can’t do.
Transcript:
Imagine you have to tell a total stranger about the gospel of Jesus Christ. What’s the first thing you would say to him or her? How about, God loves you and he sent his son to die for you so that you could be saved from sin and have eternal life? It’s one reason people hold up posters that say, John 3:16 at football games and Heisman Trophy winner, Tim Tebow wore the verse on his face during games. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Whoever is watching this episode, I can confidently tell you that your existence is not an accident. God planned for all eternity that you would be alive because he loves you and wants you to have eternal happiness in him. If you are a Christian, you should be able to tell anyone you meet that same basic truth, unless you’re a Calvinist.
If you are an honest, consistent Calvinist then you cannot tell a complete stranger, God loves you. Because Calvinism teaches that God does not love everyone. Under Calvinism, God alone decides who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. The people God loves go to heaven and the people God does not love go to hell. People go to hell, not because they reject God, but because God rejects them. However, if your theology prevents you from sharing a basic part of the Christian message to someone, IE, that God loves them, then maybe your theology is the problem and it’s the thing that needs to go.
So let’s dive deeper into this depressing aspect of Calvinism. One way to do that is with an acronym called TULIP developed in the 20th century that summarizes the decisions of the 17th century Calvinist, Synod of Dort. It goes like this, T total depravity, U unconditional election, L limited atonement, I irresistible grace, P perseverance or preservation of the saints. Total depravity means humans are so damaged by sin that they can’t even say yes to God’s gift of grace. Instead, God alone chooses who will be saved based solely on his own decree, unconditional election. And because God doesn’t choose everyone to be saved, Jesus only died on the cross for the people God chose, which is called limited atonement. The grace God gave to those who are saved, the elect, is irresistible. They cannot say no to God’s offer of salvation, and the elect can never say no to God’s grace after they have received it. The elect or the saints will always persevere. They can never lose their salvation. T-U-L-I-P, TULIP.
So under Calvinism, the reason someone does not go to heaven is because God chose to not save them. This means God does not want everyone to be saved. Because if God did want that, then God would’ve chosen to save everyone. But the Bible tells a different story than what Calvinists will tell you. First Timothy 2:4 says, “God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” And first John 2:2 says, “Christ is the expiation for our sins and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” Also, see my video that shows Christ died for every person and not just for those who are going to heaven. The only thing that could keep you or I from being saved is our own decision to reject God. Now, one objection to my argument would be that God doesn’t love everyone equally. In John 17:9, Jesus says, “I’m not praying for the world, but for those whom thou hast given me for they are thine.”
God is not bound by any law or authority to treat everyone equally. He shows some people more love than others. St. Augustine said “God loves all things that he has made and amongst them rational creatures more and of these, especially those who are members of his only begotten son himself.” And St. Thomas Aquinas said, “God’s love is the cause of goodness and things. No one thing would be better than another if God did not will greater good for one than for another.” God loves people who are his adopted children through baptism more than those who do not have sanctifying grace, but God still loves the unsaved enough to give them sufficient grace to respond to his call of salvation, because God wants all people to be saved. He just won’t force anyone to be saved who doesn’t desire his salvation due to their greater love for sin.
Calvinists dismiss passages like first Timothy 2:4 by saying they only mean that God wants to save all kinds of people, not every single person, but these passages can have both meanings. If I’m captain of a rescue ship and I see a sinking passenger liner, I may say we desire to save all passengers. This can mean all kinds of passengers from budget to premium, we show no favoritism. And it can mean we want to save every individual passenger as well. Calvinists can’t just show these passages mean God wants to save all kinds of people, they certainly can also mean that. Calvinists have to show these passages only mean that, and they simply can’t do that based on the sound decks of Jesus of the text.
In fact, it’s very instructive to watch Calvinist try to answer the question, does God love everyone? Because you can see them trying to reconcile our common sense intuition, that God loves all people and if he loves them, he’d want them to be saved, with a Calvinist theology that only allows God to love the people he chose to save, not the people he predestined to damnation. Here’s John MacArthur.
I think if you say what the old campus crusade, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. That’s not accurate. Actually, there is currently a terrible plan for your life and destiny, so-
MacArthur must have misspoke because for the elect or those going to heaven currently, there is no terrible plan for them, there never has been God. Planned from eternity past the elect would go to heaven. The problem for Calvinist is that we do not know which people belong to the elect and which people belong to the damned. So we cannot indiscriminately tell a stranger, God loves you, since we don’t know which group they belong to.
He actually is the savior. Paul says he’s the savior of all men, especially those who believe. There’s a sense in which he puts his saving grace on display in common grace. Sinners don’t die when they deserve to die so that sin should die. We should all have been dead before we ever came to the cross. So we see the love of God in the survival of sinners.
Here’s RC Sproul making a similar point.
He displays that goodness universally, the rain falls upon the just as well as on the unjust, and so that universal dimension of the love of God is manifest.
So a Calvinist can say, God loves you, to anyone. Because they say, well God at least loved that person to give him the gift of life, but does God really love that person? Here’s an example adapted from the Protestant philosopher Jerry Walls. Imagine a scientist adopts 10 children and injects all of them with a slow acting cancer. During childhood he gives the children everything a child could ever want to be happy along with medicine that keeps the cancer in remission until they’re adults. Then when they’re all 18, he cures the cancer in five of the children to show how good his medicine is. But he allows the other five children to die a painful death because he wants to show how awful life is without his medicine. Could we really say this doctor loved those five children, simply because he was kind to them when they were children?
Did he love them because, well he could have withheld the medicine during childhood and not let them have any life at all? Of course not. The doctor used those children for his own ends, when the only thing keeping them from being saved was the doctor’s decision to not save them. Likewise, the God of Calvinism does not love the damned just because he gave them some life on earth. He uses the damned for his own ends, specifically for glorifying himself. When the only thing keeping the damned from being saved was God’s own decision to not save them. Now, a Calvinist might say, this is not a fair comparison because the scientist gives the children cancer, but God did not give us our sinful condition. You might say a better analogy would be a governor granting a prisoner a pardon from the death penalty or life imprisonment.
The Governor might love all the inmates by making sure they have a good standard of living in prison, but he’s not unfair for pardoning some inmates but not others, since all the prisoners deserve their punishment. Likewise, God loves everyone by letting them have life, but God loves some people more by pardoning their sins, even though no one deserves to be pardoned. But the analogy breaks down because the reason we say the prisoner deserves to be punished is because he could have done otherwise. The prisoner could have chosen not to commit his crime. As a result, we blame him for committing it and consider his punishment just, even if he is later mercifully pardoned. Likewise, the traditional Christian view is that a damned person deserves hell because at some point he could have responded to God’s grace, or at least the minimal awareness he has of God and his conscience. He could have made a different choice, but he did not.
However, under Calvinism, everything that happens is because God decreed it to happen from eternity past. It could have never been other than what God decreed. So it’s more like the scientist who decreed that the children would all have cancer. That’s why some Calvinists like Arthur Pink bite the bullet. He writes, “When we say that God is sovereign in the exercise of his love, we mean that he loves whom he chooses. God does not love everybody.” Another way Calvinists answer the question, can you tell anyone you meet, God loves them? Is to claim that we can say God loves anyone, even the damned, because he offers them salvation even though they will never respond to it. Here’s how John Piper frames that.
Therefore, we may say to every human being, God loves you and this is how he loves you. He gave his son to die so that if you would believe your sins would be forgiven.
Now, Piper’s view sounds a lot like the traditional view, but he makes the meaning completely different. In fact, the difference can be seen in a punctuation mark and some conditional words. Piper is basically saying that you can say the following to anyone you meet. “God loves you, comma, if you believe his son died on the cross for you and will spend eternity with him.” It’s a conditional love, but the real God unconditionally loves every human being. He offers salvation to all of them and loves them enough to allow some of them to reject him if they choose. That’s why second Peter 3:9 says, “God is not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”
So Piper essentially says this, God loves you, if you believe his son died on the cross for you and spend eternity with him. But if you don’t believe that now and you aren’t sure if you’ll believe it in the future, then you can’t be sure now if God loves you or if he decreed from all eternity that you would be damned. However you get the gospel if you just change a few words and one punctuation mark, God loves you, period. Believe his son died on the cross for you and spend eternity with him. Thanks for watching today’s episode. If you want more great content, be sure to check out these other great episodes and don’t forget to like and subscribe to help our channel grow. Finally, if you want to help us create more content like this, please support us at trenthornpodcast.com.