Recap: Last week I concluded a series of posts where we went back to the basics - God, Jesus, man, and the cross - to establish a firm foundation for sound Christian doctrine.
God's Elect - The Chosen Generation
This week I'd like to offer a short excerpt from my book, God's Elect - The Chosen Generation (due out in the Fall).
Chapter 2
What’s Wrong with This Picture?
… for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. (John 12:47)
My brother and I still laugh about the time the welders in his large manufacturing company decided to go on a work-slowdown strike. After some discussion, all the workers agreed to abide by management’s directive to ramp up production - all except one, a man named Robert. After a couple of weeks went by, my brother called Robert into his office where he showed him a large, colorful graph illustrating the production of each individual welder in the plant for the past two weeks. The upswing of each line next to the welders’ names showed a dramatic increase in production for everyone except Robert. The disparity on the graph between those whose production had increased and the one whose didn’t was so painfully obvious that all my brother had to do was ask Robert one simple question, “What’s wrong with this picture?”
In the last chapter, I concluded that the god of Calvinism is not the God of the Christian Bible. It seems the Reformed doctrine of election unwittingly transformed the Almighty God into a compassionless, sinister god who creates human beings whom he has rendered hopelessly doomed to eternity in hell, a destiny he predetermined for them before they even came into existence. I found it impossible to reconcile the Reformers’ god with the God of Scripture, who takes no pleasure in the death of anyone (Ezekiel 18:32), who seeks the lost (Luke 15:4), who shows compassion for those who suffer (Luke 10:33), who comforts those who mourn (Matthew 5:4), and yes, who judges the wicked with righteous judgment (Psalm 9:4). We learned that the Reformers themselves could not reconcile those conflicting natures of their god either. They seemed content to just shrug their shoulders and chalk the contradictions up to tension, mystery, or paradox.
I could not ignore the fact that these human beings, damned by God, were just people – flawed people, for sure - but people with beating hearts and viable lives, quickened by God, who are loved and cared for and cherished by other human beings – mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, neighbors, friends. It seemed that while I was struggling to put together my doctrine-of-election jigsaw puzzle so that the picture of the gospel looked like the one on the cover of the box, someone had slipped in some pieces from another puzzle altogether. The cruel thing was, the pieces almost fit. It wasn’t until the puzzle was nearly complete that I could tell that the picture that was created was a grotesque distortion of the beautiful image of the gospel of grace.
But It Seems So Right
That’s the subtle, yet insidious danger of Calvinism. It seems so right, so logical, so rational. Everything seems to connect together like a string of pearls. All the signposts along the way seem to point in the right direction.
Man is dead in trespasses and sins, and
a dead man cannot bring himself to life, so
God steps in to quicken those he has chosen.
Jesus dies to efficaciously make atonement, but only for the elect,
not losing any but raising them up on the last day.
It’s the gospel, they say. It’s the “unbreakable golden chain of redemption.”[i] God elects, he predestines, he calls, he justifies, he glorifies. It’s all God. He gets all the glory.
[i] “The (Unbreakable) Golden Chain of Redemption/Salvation is a common term for the sequence described by the apostle Paul in Romans 8:29-30.
A Fatal Flaw
As I continued to seek the true biblical understanding of the doctrine of divine election, I came to the conclusion that the distortion of the true God of the Bible offered by Calvinism is the result of a fatal flaw in the Reformed version of the gospel. And I believe that the flaw in their understanding of the gospel is partly the result of losing sight of the big picture, the purpose for Jesus’ incarnation and the reason for the cross.
The Reformed doctrine of election is like a seductive siren whose beckoning lure keeps a person from looking back to see if he can still see the cross and God’s true plan of redemption. A wise Christian scholar will want to constantly check his bearings against the true north of Jesus on the cross to be sure his doctrine hasn’t led him down the wrong road. If you can’t see the face of God’s love for the world on the cross – the face of an unfathomable love for all mankind – you’ve lost sight of the big picture.
So where did Calvinism take such a wrong turn? I believe the misstep occurs in the very beginning of their doctrine. The belief that God, from before the foundation of the word, divided all people into two groups, the elect and the non-elect, is not supported anywhere in Scripture, and worse, it radically contradicts the revealed nature of God. The result of this initial misstep in the Calvinistic understanding of the doctrine of election is that when you reach the road’s end, not only do you suddenly realize that the god you have been worshipping is indistinguishable from Satan, but the Reformed doctrine of election fails to recognize and celebrate the very nature and purpose of the cross. Jesus says, “I did not come to judge the world but to save the world” (John 12:47).
The salvation of the world, that’s the big picture. If any model of the gospel doesn’t include an opportunity for all of humankind to be saved, we must ask ourselves, “What’s wrong with this picture?”
Next Post: We'll begin to examine the doctrine of election in the Gospel of John.
Here's a link to the next post:
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