I have a hard time explaining the doctrine of election, but I am thankful I don’t have to explain it as a part of the Gospel when witnessing. And yet I know from my own personal experience and upbringing, it was all God that brought me to Him. I seriously can’t and won’t take any credit for it. It makes perfect sense to me that He called me from the dead.

There are times I have spoken the Gospel to people and they have received it like fertile soil and times I have spoken it and literally had a person give me a blank face as if I’m speaking a foreign language. I remember one such instance a sister of mine looked at me after my clear explanation of the Gospel and said…”It seems as if some people get it and others don’t…I just don’t”. I was so confused! I kept trying to reword it and felt like a failure for Christ.

Now I rest in knowing that God sees each person’s heart and where they are spiritually; I still witness-because I’m commanded to..and when the word falls on someone really ready to receive it, it’s as if I found a jewel. I don’t take credit for their understanding it, but I share in God’s joy.

I find so much rest in God’s sovereignty when it comes to witnessing or living out the Christian walk, and if I’m to error, may it be on the point that God is more in control of things than not. While some have a hard time receiving it because it may make God appear mean or unloving to some, I see it as a means of comfort resting in the moving of His Spirit and not my ability. I think when we get to heaven and see the bigger picture, like Jesus communicated, we will be in awe of how much He truly loved the world..even those who believed in complete free will.

BTW this is a down to earth view…If you want more theological talk, sorry…I fall short on the big words.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GazlhAyVXPA

I sure wish he had an answer though.

My last paragraph presents the common explanation from traditional Calvinists explaining how God never intended/caused sin and isn’t responsible for sinners’ eternal punishment, but merely allowed/permitted it due to Adam’s free will rebellion. (Words like “decreed” and “pre-ordained” aren’t specific in defining intent — Arminians will agree that God pre-ordained everything … after looking down the corridors of course.)

This is where Calvinists start using Arminian ideas (but only applied to Adam) to keep God’s hands clean of people being in Hell. (God is love but He is also just. He is only giving them what they deserve because of Adam.) I don’t buy it for the reason you stated — it makes God’s eternal will and purpose contingent on Adam’s free will.

It also begs the question, “If God knew that Adam would sin, why did He make a universal system where sin would poison the nature of all of humanity — which without God’s grace leads to eternal punishment?”

I agree that God is not sinful and does not sin, but if God created knowing that sin would exist and He claims to have an eternal purpose in everything that happens then He intended sin and it’s effects — be it eternal punishment, food during a famine, or the elect’s glimpse of grace.

Yet at the same time, humanity — being creatures of space and time — is indeed responsible for its actions and intentions in the physical and spiritual existence that has been created for it.

Responsible

- having a capacity for moral decisions and therefore accountable; capable of rational thought or action

In our existence in the physical and spiritual worlds, we are responsible. But similarly to how irresistible grace works, many different external factors influence our ultimate decision and more importantly, the intention behind the decision. None of those factors are out of God’s control and are related to the ultimate cause — God Himself.

So how does God hold us responsible if He’s the ultimate cause of it all? Paul answers that. He doesn’t go into Adam’s free will and how we freely sin due to our sin nature. He specifically addresses the topic of God’s free will and purpose for His creations.

“But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?”

I think for traditional Calvinists, this messes with the firmly held analogy of God as a judge — just like Calvinism messes with the Arminians’ firmly held analogy of God as a warrior.

The way you posed your final question (“it makes the eternal will and purpose of God contingent on an external agent”) runs foul of Carson’s second pole. I think the distinction between monergistic justification and synergistic sanctification addresses whether we play any part in the matter, not whether we rise to God’s level of omnipotence.

On Sanctification, I think there is a misunderstanding of what sanctification is. The practice of becoming sanctified is confused with actually being sanctified. What I think happens is God graces some of us with a love studying his word, or being disciplined in prayer, or ministering to the poor, or what ever spiritual discipline you may like in order to show that person, personally, a piece of him. And, through this process he grows us to be more like him in the Holy Spirit. You don’t grow through effort, but by his good grace.

So in my opinion you must either be synergistic or monergistic in the whole work of God in order to be consistent. It is either you working with God through faith and repentance in justification or God is working in you through faith and repentance; the same follows in sanctification, and glorification.

On the nature of evil; I believe the nature of evil to be the not the absence of good but a perversion of good. This leads to a more satisfactory account of how God could purpose good things for us but for them to still go horribly wrong because of our rebellion and not outside his sovereignty. This also makes us wholly culpable in our sin, allows for God to preordain sin with our him sinning.

Those are my thoughts.