Calvinists teach that God predetermines who will go to heaven forever and who will go to hell forever. The matter was settled before God created humanity.
As you can imagine, it's difficult, nay, IMPOSSIBLE, for Calvinists to offer any legitimate explanation of God's love for those He chose to create and condemn to the Christian hell forever AND ever. But, the Calvinist must give it a go because the Scriptures teach clearly that God loves all people. They fail.
Hi Wes, John Piper, and many other millions who have embraced a similar doctrine currently, and through the centuries, can easily say that God loves you. How do people ultimately enter heaven or spend eternity in hell? It is by Gods divine choice. No one chooses hell, and no one truly chooses God without the Spirit's bringing them to salvation. As long as you tell people that God loves you, and that he will send some of you to hell, we probably could agree. Can a loving God send people to hell and eternal damnation, the answer is yes. So, John has no problem telling people that God loves them. Please read "the difficult doctrine of love," by DA Carson. Very helpful to me over the years.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting. It's easy to say "God loves you," because they're just words. Many have honored God with their lips, while their hearts are far from Him. A God that creates people knowing He will cause to them to suffer in hell forever does not love those people.
DeleteWe don't agree. God is the Savior of all mankind (1 Timothy 4:10). There is no such thing as "eternal damnation," but there is "eonian judgment" (Hebrews 6:2).
The doctrine of love is "difficult" if your definition of love is off. You and Piper have a distorted/untrue definition of love.
God has proven His love for all people, and shown us what His love looks like. John 3:16-17,
For thus God loves the world, so that He gives His only-begotten Son, that everyone who is believing in Him should not be perishing, but may be having life eonian.
17 For God does not dispatch His Son into the world that He should be judging the world, but that the world may be saved through Him.
God has already saved all through the death and resurrection of His Son. That's love.