Saturday, May 5, 2012

God's Sovereignty and Human Responsibility

I think the problem that lies behind the average thinking Arminian as to the ordo salutis, is that they give little credence to the tension between God’s Sovereignty and human responsibility. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t even enter the equation for them. How many Arminians have you heard say, “Well, we believe that God IS sovereign, but we believe that in his sovereignty he allows or gives man the right/permission to exercise his free will.”

This deception IS the underpinning of their soteriology, which simply blinds them to any real truth concerning a monergistic approach to salvation. Arminians simply enact the right to make a choice they feel was granted to them by God. In other words, their autonomy gives them the right to make choices that God never endowed them with in the first place. Human responsibility to them is in the exercising of their **right** to believe, and by extension of that right, they exercise their **faith** accordingly.

When you discuss faith as being a gift from God (Eph 2:8), as any good Calvinist worth his salt believes, Arminians will flatly deny it AS a gift. So from that point forward they cannot properly exegete any passages from Scripture that admits of election. Man’s autonomous nature has trumped God’s divine right to choose whom He so chooses to.

I firmly believe unless someone can build a bridge between God’s Sovereignty and human responsibility for Arminians, which is impossible for us this side of heaven, we may never be able to, by way of reason, convert them to these precious truths. Yes, I know, we plant and God gives the increase. Knowing that as we do, we can all rest and let God be glorified in the work that He first started. After all, God tells us: “He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus (Phl 1:6).”

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