Just because
I and literally hundreds of thousands of other Christians don't espouse your
non-Biblical extreme application of
Daniel 4:35 to the point at which God foreordains the being and motion of every physical and volitional event doesn't mean we "struggle to accept/believe that God ordains the affairs of men". We argue that you don't understand what those verses mean because of your
Calvinistically coloured philosophical lenses which mine the Bible for language that sounds correlative to your gnostic fatalistic deterministic view of God and his work.
George,
Sometimes reading through posts on this forum and on others, I find amazing and even somewhat bizarre statements from those who profess Christ...
For example,
I find myself amazed at the language contained in this quote, even knowing that in my own flesh dwells no good thing and that I myself have been caught up in making statements similar to this in the recent past.
But when push comes to shove, it seems that no matter who we are as human beings, sometimes the real feelings on a given matter come out under the pressure of the back-and-forth, wouldn't you agree?
As the underlined clearly shows ( to me ), your opinion of all things "Calvinistic"...( which I sense isn't so much a hatred of William Tyndale, John Bunyan, John Newton, Isaac Watts, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, George Mueller or many others who believed similarly to John Calvin, but what those that you cannot find another label to pin on them
actually believe from the Scriptures )...Is not one of
patiently trying to convince them of what you see in the Bible, but rather in
denouncing what they believe and teach.
In other words and from where I'm sitting,
You appear to spend more time stating what a passage
doesn't mean, than you do stating what it
does mean.
If I'm in error about this, then I offer my apologies and ask your forgiveness for unintentionally insulting you.
What I'd like to offer in the best interests of remedying my misunderstanding of the whole issue ( if my observation of it is, indeed, in error ) is this:
Instead of telling people what passages like Romans 8:28-30, Acts of the Apostles 13:48, 2 Thessalonians 2:13, Ephesians 1:4-11, Ephesians 2:10, Psalms 65:4 and Romans 9
do not mean, we both go through them line by line, word by word and tell the readers of this forum what they state in our own words and how we arrive at our understanding of them.
Some might call this "exhaustive exegesis", and I figure that as a teacher of God's word ( and a pastor, if I'm not mistaken ), you should be able to sit down and do it with no trouble, especially with someone like me that has never professed or confessed to either title.
If you'd like, I can create a thread and we can do this with say, John 6:37-66, John 8:43-47, Ephesians 1:1-14, Ephesians 2:1-10, 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 or any other suitable passage that develops what you call "Calvinism".
Over and above the ones I listed, what I'd
really like to see, is whether or not you'd be willing to do it for the entire chapter of
Romans 8 or even
Romans 9...
If anything, just to see where we differ when one or the other of us reads it for themselves.
That way we can compare notes and perhaps learn where exactly we are going off track with respect to one another.
I look forward to your reply on this, sir.