Featured Romans 9 and Reformed Error

Au contraire. I was blind, but now I see.

And was beyond help, but not beyond God's power to save.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.

Only a Calvinist can sing that verse with any real pathos. Not you. Because you must always assert some level of goodness...some merit...something not quite so wretched and depraved within yourself that made you good enough so that in the free exercise of your carnal will, you could choose Jesus.

All I can say is praise you! To you be the glory. Great things you have done.

 

Hate? No no no. The Calvinist preaches for the only real reason to preach...love. Love for God. Love for the Gospel. Love for his fellow man. But mostly for the love of God and His Gospel.

Knowing that all his labor is in vain if God's grace does not work in the hearer both to will and to do of God's good pleasure, what other reason is there to preach?

It is the noncal who continually wrests the Gospel to be palatable to the carnal mind, which is the reason you always appeal to some carnal sense of justice to argue with God. "Why doth He yet find fault? For who hath resisted His will?" The Gospel is constantly wrested by the noncal to appeal to the hearer's pride, and his appetites.

Not the Calvinist. The Calvinist is free to preach the unvarnished truth from a pure motive of love for God and His Gospel.

And it's the Calvinist who has any real reason to pray for others, knowing that God can, and will, prevail for those He has chosen to be conformed into the image of His Son.

You are the bitter one.

And you have yet to actually engage the question.

What does it mean to be a child of God? Romans 9 is all about God's true children. Answer that question honestly, and you will have to confess your errors. I think you sense that, and so you resort to aspersions .

 

The verse tells you.
1) To show God's wrath
2) To make known His power

We read in Exodus that God sends the Angel of death upon Egypt. We read that the Judas was selected as the son of perdition. We see that God hardened Pharaohs heart.

God does this according to His will. You have one of two choices when God chooses to allow evil to happen.
1) Curse God and die.
2) Praise God in the evil as well as the good.

sbw, your question is between you and God. Either you accept the paradox of God's word or you turn from God and declare yourself king.

 

SBG,
I know from some P.M.s that we've exchanged that you are really a very nice chap.
You don't need to make false accusations against your brothers in Christ. Indeed, as a Brit, you should be setting an example of moderation to all the colonial types here. So have a read of 2 Timothy 2:24 and cool down a bit.

 

And here is your error, thinking that the Reformed position relies on these verses in isolation. We don't. In fact, when we are talking about Romans 9, we take it within the whole context of the entire letter to the Romans. Specifically, in this instance, we would not isolate these verses from chapters 8-11.

I understand you like to take verses out of their context and isolate them to "prove" a position. I don't do that. Nor do I take comments of commentaries and articles out of context to try and twist their meaning. That is what you repeatedly do in your dishonest deceptions.

 

" [What[ if God, willing to shew [his] wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:
23 and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory,
24 even us, whom he hath called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?" ( Romans 9:22-24 ).

There's your answer, SBG, right in the text.
He endures with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath, that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy...

Which He had before prepared to that glory.

 

Reformed Theology = Saved by God's grace apart from man's efforts

Non-reformed theology = saved by human choice which causes God to react and save

Now...which of those two is expressed by God in the Bible and which is a teaching of man?

sbw, you have spent nearly all your time complaining about God being the cause agent of salvation, rather than show how your choice caused God to save you.
It is observable to see you are fighting against God as He demands your humble acknowledgement that you had no capacity to save yourself.

Matthew 5:3
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

 

Gentlemen,

Should we not be patient with our answers?
He's only asking the questions because he wants to know why some of us see it the way that we do.

Let's not accuse him of anything untowards,
as to me, it just shouldn't be done.

Rather, respect and civility should prevail, should it not?

 

Agreed. sbw is wrestling with this, which is exactly what I did. I went to an Arminian college in Grand Rapids Michigan while interacting with Calvinists from Calvin College and Grace College. I would argue against the seeming horrific idea that God refused to let me choose, yet never really looking at the fact that apart from God making me alive, I would never choose God...I would always choose me.
Choosing me is easy. It requires no faith. I have control. I can either glory in my capacity to be good or I can drown in my incapacity to be good, which is what I did. I was like a bi-polar person who would have these great highs of experience and then suffer these debilitating lows of depression. I was constantly checking myself as I fought and either won or lost the battle against sin. Jesus was my redeemer, but I was solely responsible to become holy by my works. I was responsible for my own sanctification. It was exhausting.
Then, I read the book of Hebrews while hiding from kids at a Bible camp in a game of "find the counselor." All I could see was "but Jesus is greater." I was overwhelmed with joy that Jesus both authored and finished my faith. He was my everything.
Then I read Galatians and came upon chapter 2 verse 20 and my eyes saw that it was no longer I who lived, but Christ lived in me. God brought me to the end of myself and to the beginning of resting in Christ for everything. Then I started seeing the vast number of passages where God tells me I was chosen out of my wretchedness. Boom! Amazing Grace, how can it be???

 

And here we go again with the anti-KJV refrain (#2 in signature). Cue the yawn.
The word election is not mistranslated, and just because the Calvinist brethren have developed the Pavlovian reflex of hearing "salvation" whenever they read "election", doesn't mean I'm gonna change the word of God to counter that reflex; in which case they would anyway simply react similarly to any new word chosen, and we would be back to square 1.
That the election there (in relation to Jacob and Esau) is unto blessing, not salvation, is clear from the text.

 

Of course it's not, but that's because Paul is drawing from Jacob and Esau's example that election (whether unto blessing, as in their case, or salvation, as he now extends the principle of not-by-works to salvation) is not by works, but by faith. There is nothing there about an eternal decree.
God chooses to save those who believe, not those who work, and he hardens those who refuse to believe on Christ, as instanced in Israel being hardened and blinded. It's simple. Really.

 

False dichotomy. Both Calvinism and Arminianism are in error.

 

I didn't miss it. But it's the lightning rod and the only mentioned by name. It's a spiritual hiccup.