We may not like what Scripture says about God or us for that matter. But we must trust in the God who reveals Himself through Scripture and reject our own inclinations. To trust our feelings, desires and wants when it is contrary to Scripture is utter foolishness. By that I mean there is no greater fool than the one who rests in his own inclinations especially when Scripture contradicts those inclinations.

If you have held Calvinistic positions on anything concerning Scripture for more than a minute, you know that the moment you voice such convictions, it will not take long for someone to make the claim that they disagree with you and “will not put God in a box.”

The irony is that the moment they say they will not put God in a box, is the moment they do. The problem with their box is that it is much worse than the box used by Calvinists because their feelings and emotions define the box they use, as opposed to the box used by Calvinists, which is scripture.

The reality is that whenever we think about God at all, we put Him in a box. We can’t help it. We are finite beings trying to think and describe that which is infinite. We are sinful and fallen trying to grasp that which is sinless, holy, perfect and blameless. Therefore it behooves us to think about Him with the guidance of Scripture. It is the only way we can think about Him properly and without error. What the Bible tells us about God is what we are to believe about Him. What our hearts tell us about Him, should be highly suspect, especially when our hearts are telling us that He is love in the sense that we want Him to be, and not love as defined in Scripture. This debate really is another form of the Calvinist/Arminian debate that started so many years ago.

Just a side note before we go on: please realize that Calvinists do not follow Calvin. What we are saying when we say we are Calvinist is that we are in agreement with what Calvin wrote about salvation, God, and man, and what Augustine wrote about salvation, God, and man, because both men held to what Paul and the New Testament wrote about salvation, God, and man. Don’t expect us to quote Calvin when we are teaching theology or (heaven forbid) debating theology. You can expect Lutherans to quote Luther, but Calvinists quote Scripture, not Calvin. This is why Calvinism won’t go away. It’s rooted in Scripture and the truth found therein. I also concede that the antithesis of Calvinism, Arminianism won’t go away either because it’s rooted in fallen human nature and the desire of man to be “like God” (Genesis 3:5). But this truth is for another blog post.

The reason I point out that we are quoting Scripture as Calvinists is because we make our case using God’s word about Him, about us, and about salvation for our understanding of how things are. We don’t rely on man’s opinion. We rely on what God’s word says about who He is, and who we are. This is really important when it comes to understanding what we believe because these issues we debate are of an eternal nature.

Let’s play Pascal’s wager on this one. If the Calvinist is wrong in his view of God and the fallen nature of man, and the Rob Bell’s of the world are right, then what difference does it make? If God, who according to Bell & Company, is just a big Teddy Bear in the sky, loving us with a gooey elixir of love, then it matters not. Why do people get so upset with Calvinists if this is the case?

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