John Calvin said this....

Clete

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So, according to you, God blasphemes himself in Isaiah 45:7, Amos 3:6, Lamentations 3:38, Micah 1:12 and the like?
No, it's you who do the blaspheming.

You really do believe that you god could do anything at all and still be considered just. The word justice is entirely meaningless to you, isn't it?

Acts 2:22-24
Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.

The worst sin there ever was or will be; the only innocent perfectly righteous and even holy human there ever was, Incarnate god, Jesus, was murdered... according to God's plan. God even makes this a part of the Gospel proper:
I remember this post now and remember intentionally letting it go because it was one blasphemous piece if nonsense after another. I'm going to try to wade through this but don't make any promises to complete the task. You're not interested in hearing any explanations anyway and so this is going to be mostly a waste of time.

When you make plans and then proceed to carry those plans out and accomplish something. Do you have to take over the will of the other people involved in order to do it?

People accomplish all sort of things that they've had in mind to accomplish for years and years. They do so by working with, through, around and in opposition to various people, policies and other various obstacles all along the way. And they do it without having to see the future, without having to read anyone's mind, without having any ability to preordain anything or to force anyone to do anything they don't choose to do of their own volition. And that's just us mere human beings!

God is infinitely wise, infinitely powerful and omni-compitent! And you think that because the bible proclaims that the death of Christ was planned in advance that God had to force people to sin? You're a fool!

Not only did God not force anyone to kill Jesus, Jesus FORGAVE the sin! How does that make any sense in your preplanned, everything is meticulously controled worldview?

What is there to fogive if those people were only doing what God was making them do?

I Corinthians 15:3
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,...

You claim God is unjust for planning sin and using it to the greatest end, giving himself glory; and yet God has clearly done such. Does that make God an unjust bully to himself? Do you possess all the knowledge necessary to stand in judgement over God?
God isn't stupid. He didn't have to preordain sin to plan for it. And once sin entered the world, He knew for a fact that people would sin and could easily use even men to accomplish His desired goals in spite of them.

It is not ungodly or unjust in any way to use one's enemies to accomplish a righteous goal.

And I am not staning in judment over God but over you and the god you worship. There's a big whopping difference!

I worship God because He is just (amoung other reasons).
Because I know that the one true God is just, I know that the god you worship does not exist.

The "god can't do what I don't want him to do and still be good" box, regardless of what God has said in his revelation to us in scripture.
If the scripture actually taught that the just God did unjust things it would prove itself to be a fairy-tale.

Of course, the bible does no such thing, it is your doctrine that does that.

What do you do with passages like Isaiah 10:5-15, Where God clearly indicates that he sent the Assyrians to punish Israel; to literally run the Israelites down in the street like mud under the hooves of a horse? The same invading nation who God than punishes for doing exactly what he planned for them to do?
It is just so simple. It only becomes difficult when you take leave of reason and abondon wisdom thinking that God forces men to do evil.

The text itself states, "Yet he does not mean so, Nor does his heart think so; But it is in his heart to destroy, And cut off not a few nations."

God did not force them to detroy Israel. They wanted to destroy all kinds of places and Israel needed punishing and so God used an evil nation to do the punishing and did so without having to force anyone to do anything.

How do you handle things like:

Romans 11:36
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
So you actually believe that the homosexual rape and murder of toddlers is from, through and to your god and that such things bring him glory?

Is that what you meant to suggest by this question?

(IT IS PRECISELY WHAT HE MEANT TO SUGGEST! If he denies it - he's a liar.)

"All" almost never means "every single thing"

and Genesis 50:20, where it's clearly taught that God intended the evil act of selling joseph into slavery for Good ends?
Once again, God doesn't have to force evil people to do evil things. He knows the hearts of men and can plan and accomplish what He wills in spite of their evil actions, often turning their evil back upon them.

Ah, the lazy man's way out. Cry, "OUT OF CONTEXT," (I wonder if you even know what the phrase means), use it as your central argument against God's own revelation, *and don't even bother* to show everyone how your opponent has "taken things out of context."
Text of any kind only has meaning because of it's context and I feel no obligation to explain every passage of scripture to you.

The bible means what it says - in context! There are passages that are figurative, others that are poetic and full of symbolism, others that are straight historical naratives and still others that parables and they all mean what they say - IN CONTEXT!

The context will be altogether different for you though. You haven't any hope to understand the bible at all. Or at least large portions of it because part of the context is who God is. Your theology proper (theology of God) informs the way you will understand nearly every other aspect of your doctrine, including your hermaneutics. Your understanding of who God is and what He is like is the foundational corner stone of all doctrine.

I've proposed these texts to you, yet you handwave them away, instead of demonstrating that they really do mean what you say they do.
Do you understand that there is a difference between what they say and what you say they say? You have Calvinist colored glasses on and are kicking your feet and pounding your fists because I don't see the Calvinists tint that isn't there without the glasses.

Non-sequiter. What I posted doesn't have the necessary implication that creation is sufficient for evil to exist. If not necessary in the text you quoted, the idea came from you, not me. You can't get something out of a thing that's not in it.
I laughed outloud when I read this line. Calvinism is built from the bottom up by taking something out of the text that is not there. If you practiced this principle with any consistency at all, your entire worldview would crumble to dust.

I did not say that God forced lucifer to be evil or that evil is a necessary result of the act of creation. To reiterate what I've already said; I only said that without creation, evil would not be possible. Further, without lucifer and adam, the evils they did and spawned would not have been possible either.

You can't make a hole with a shovel if you don't have the shovel.

God created. He created lucifer. He created adam. How do you *biblically* handle this, knowing what has happened afterwards?
What's there to handle?

God created being that rebelled. How is that difficult to understand?

How could god have expected it to happen when he, according to what you've posted here, didn't actually know it would happen?
Same way you expect to make it to your next birthday but don't know that it will actually happen.

By this standard, he should have expected all possible results, thus making it impossible to know *which* would obtain.
First of all there are only two possible results. They would either obey or rebell. It's not too complex an issue.

Second, but more important, Got biblical backing for your specific claims here?
What claims? The claim that God created good and people did things He didn't want them to do? Is that what you want biblical backing for?

Insult and avoid, one of the more common ways to avoid serious discussion.
Insuts are what you deserve but I avoided nothing and in fact asked a very serious question that you very efficiently avoided answering

Again, how (by what means) could God have been right (morally) to have created if he did not know what would obtain as the result of his act of creating?
By the same means that you act morally by doing things without knowing in advance what the outcome will be.

If you can do it, what makes you think God can't? Why does God have to know everything in advance to act morally and you don't?

If you give a homeless man a meal so that he doesn't starve to death and then a year later, having not starved a year ago, murders another homeless man for his sandwich, does that turn your moral act into sin?

If there is an actual moral right and a moral wrong based upon the standard of God's nature , and God's act of creation COULD lead to these moral standards being broken, how could God have been morally right to have created WITHOUT this beforehand, sure, immutable knowledge? Open theism does not avoid this problem.
There is no need to avoid no existent problems.

He did know that people could rebel and planned accordingly. Non-existent problem solved.

... and yet all you've done so far is to cry "out of context." You haven't bothered to show how any of the cited texts are taken out of context (and again, I doubt you know what that phrase means). If the distortion and twisting that you claim to exist is real than you should be able to actually point out the twisting and distorting... if you have any truth to back up your claims... and if you care enough about people who aren't like you to try. At a minimum, even if you don't care about reformed people, you could at least be selfish enough to want to really win, which requires you to back up what you say.
Every Calvinist proof text - every single one of them - is an example of what I am talking about.

But I'll give a couple of examples of a texts that you don't use. In fact, these are texts that Calvinists avoid like the plague and insist when pressed that they mean anything other that what they say...

Genesis 18: 20 And the Lord said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grave, 21 I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry against it that has come to Me; and if not, I will know.”

Genesis 22:12 And He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”

Jeremiah 19:5 (they have also built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or speak, nor did it come into My mind),​

Really? I actually said that God does thing for no reason? :think:

Golly, I thought I was just saying that God is the definer of the reasons themselves.
You deny being a Calvinist then?

You have stated in this very post that God can do evil and remain just (in so many words).

You believe that you god "saves" for no reason at all other than it simply pleased him to do so and the rest it please him to not do so and one or the other has nothing to do with anything that he foresaw, nothing that the person did or didn't do, nothing that they did or didn't believe.

What other word is there for it other than 'arbitrary'?



Okay, that's more than you'll read and all that I can take.


Resting in Him,
Clete
 

Clete

Truth Smacker
Silver Subscriber
Here's a new quote from John Calvin!...

"I admit that in this miserable condition wherein men are now bound, all of Adam's children have fallen by God's will...

...Nor ought it to seem absurd when I say, that God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at his own pleasure arranged it. (John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 23)​
 
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