Here is God's justice and his mercy.
(John 10:24-30)
The people surrounded him and asked, “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” Jesus replied, “I have already told you, and you don’t believe me. The proof is the work I do in my Father’s name. But you don’t believe me because you are not my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them away from me, for my Father has given them to me, and he is more powerful than anyone else. No one can snatch them from the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”
Above, we see that God is the determining cause of belief.
(For the sake of brevity (there's 10,000 character limit on this web forum), I've ignored two thirds of the passages that Taisto has cited. The response to one is almost identical in essence to the others. - Also, I will not be responding to anything Taisto says in any detail at all, if he finds it impossible to write posts in one or two colors where I'm not having to spend a bunch of time undoing his formatting in order to write my responses. I've been doing this long enough to know that this is at tactic that people use to be an intentional pain in the backside of anyone who disagrees with them and to discourage detailed responses. - In short, the tactic will work. I don't really care AT ALL about Taisto or anything he has to say and am not writing this post for his benefit. If he wants to participate with some decorum and consideration to the way he effects the people around him, fine. If not, he'll get from me what he deserves, which is nothing at all but ridicule.)
Taisto's use of scripture is a classic Calvinistic
example of not only removing the passage from its context but their incessant reading their doctrine into the text. Calvinists have to bring their doctrine to this text and ignore not only the context but whole swaths of scripture not only in the very book these sentences are pulled from but throughout the bible to make these few sentences spoken by Christ to mean anything close to what Taisto is suggesting here. There is a term for this kind of theology. It's called Eisegesis. It's the sort of thing that people like David Koresh did and that others like Benny Hinn do to this day.
Jesus was not teaching predestination here. He was claiming to be God. Practically the entire book of John up to this point shows Jesus saying over and over again that it is those who believe who are His - because they believe!. Here's just one example...
John 5:31 “If I bear witness of Myself, My witness is not true. 32 There is another who bears witness of Me, and I know that the witness which He witnesses of Me is true. 33 You have sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth. 34 Yet I do not receive testimony from man, but I say these things that you may be saved. 35 He was the burning and shining lamp, and you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light. 36 But I have a greater witness than John’s; for the works which the Father has given Me to finish—the very works that I do—bear witness of Me, that the Father has sent Me. 37 And the Father Himself, who sent Me, has testified of Me. You have neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His form. 38 But you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe. 39 You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. 40 But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.
41 “I do not receive honor from men. 42 But I know you, that you do not have the love of God in you. 43 I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive. 44 How can you believe, who receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God? 45 Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; there is one who accuses you—Moses, in whom you trust. 46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me. 47 But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”
Now, isn't that so simple? I don't have to bring any doctrine with me when I read that. I just read it and take it at face value and believe it to be the truth that it is.
One might try to argue that I'm doing the same thing that Taisto is doing only in reverse. I reject that because I don't just have isolated sentences but quote large passages to get the context but let's just entertain the accusation for the sake of argument. Let's say that we are just doing the same thing but from opposite sides of the coin. Let's look at the coin...
On the one side we have Taisto who along with Calvin who believe and base, not only the Soteriology but much of their whole theology on the idea that God is arbitrary....
- “God is moved to mercy for no other reason but that he wills to be merciful.” (John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 22, Paragraph 8)
- “… predestination to glory is the cause of predestination to grace, rather than the converse.” (John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 22, Paragraph 9)
- “Therefore, those whom God passes over, he condemns; and this he does for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines for his own children.” (John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 23, Paragraph 1)
- “We cannot assign any reason for his bestowing mercy on his people, but just as it so pleases him, neither can we have any reason for his reprobating others but his will.” (John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 3, Chapter 22, Paragraph 11)
I and others like me who reject the immutable stone idol of Calvinism, base our understanding of scripture and formulate our doctrine based on the
quality of God's character. We base our soteriology, not on God's arbitrary whim that the Calvinists call mercy but on the fact that the loving God of mercy that we worship is also righteous and just and can neither condone nor delete sin by fiat and remain either righteous or just but instead had to endure the searing pain of watching His only Son die a painful death in order to pay the full sticker price for the mercy He desired to show to those whom He created and loves so much.
As it turns out, one is actually FORCED to choose one side or the other of this particular philosophical coin. One will accept the God is arbitrary as the Augustinian doctrine of immutability logically demands or you will accept the God is just. If you choose the former, the best you can do is give lip service to the later because they are mutually exclusive opposites. Arbitrary justice is no more real than round squares or yellow darkness.
it is clear that
@CJP69, @Silverhair,and
@MrW will mock these passages and talk around them, or they will revert to quoting a sentence from here or a sentence from there as their proof text without the slightest concern for the context.
That's a laugh! Hypocrite!
Do you actually think that we're all so stupid as to not notice that you are here accusing us of the very thing that you've done ON PURPOSE? You sound like Nancy Pelosi accusing Trump of being a threat to democracy. Literally laughable!
For the readers who haven't yet thought through how God saved you, I hope you can see through the bluster of my opponents.
Once again, painting us with the color of paint you're swimming in. There is no bluster, its just us quoting passages of scripture and asking people to take them at face value. That and coming to the scripture with the understanding that God is just and the the terms "arbitrary" and "just" are opposites not synonyms.
Notice that they create a caricature of a man who lived 500 years ago and claim that my faith in Christ is not based on the Bible, but instead upon a man whom few of us have ever read.
You don't have to have read a word Calvin wrote to believe the things he wrote because you learned them from someone who has read them, agreed with them and taught you to agree with them. I bet I can't find five syllables from Calvin's Institutes that you'd admit disagree with.
They cannot accept that my faith is based entirely in God's word.
That's because it isn't. God is just. Your god is arbitrary and capricious in the extreme. Either your god is false or the bible is (or both).
Since they cannot accept it, they argue against a strawman of their own creation and then wonder why no one responds to their foolish comments.
If you had a rational response, all the wild horses on earth could not pull you away from your computer long or far enough to prevent you from posting it here. The fact that you don't do it, even after been chided and even practically begged to do so just means that you do not because you cannot.
May God bless the reading of His Word.
But only if he predestined such a blessing, right?