Is this not astonishing?
Imagine this: For reasons we're not permitted to wonder at God decides to glorify himself by creating billions of humans and predestinating them to sin and to become so morally corrupt that as The Westminster Confession puts it, they become entirely inclined to all that is evil and completely adverse to all that is good—they're incapable of desiring God's will much less doing it. That is what God wants and what Godirresistibly brings about.
Then in light of what he has purposed and accomplished God regards every human being of all the ages as rebels, as spiritually dead and alienated from him as the result of Adam's sin (they use Romans 5:17, 19 to "prove" this).
Out of those teeming millions he chose a certain number and consciously—because he wanted to—bypassed the vast majority of those he fathered by creation; leaving them as he foreordained them to be, unchangeably corrupted by sin.
He chooses to work a moral miracle on his chosen group so that they are morally transformed. That group is no longer incapable of desiring and obeying God—in fact they are given a new heart so that they would be incapable of rejecting the will of God until they die. This chosen group cannot permanently walk away from God; they cannot be lost even if for many years they actively rebel against God. God cannot be thwarted, you see.
This chosen group must be reconciled to God, of course, so God provides the means and grounds for their reconciliation—Jesus Christ. He deliberately refuses to reconcile the vast majority of the human family and he does it because it pleases him to refuse to do it. This is called "glorifying himself".
So when Jesus came he did not come to bring salvation through reconciliation with God to the entire human family. He came to provide all that for this chosen group. For this, the chosen ones sing his praise and tell him how generous he is for saving them. After all, this chosen group tells us, he could have damned us the way he has damned the majority of the human family.
There we have it: God creates billions, arranges it so that they are born morally paralysed, damns the bulk of them to eternal fire, rescues a minority and calls himself generous and gracious.
That's Calvinism as offered by people like Gill, Clark, Steele, Piper, Sproul, Pink, Geivett, W.G Phillips, Calvin and others.
Is it not as astonishing as it is ugly?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.