What About God's Love?

[Scriptur]

It is simply impossible to maintain that a God who damns those He could save (much less who takes pleasure in doing so!) is merciful and full of love. How then can the Calvinist escape the charge that he misrepresents the God of the Bible? Sovereignty can't excuse or justify callous neglect on God's part to rescue those He could save. That God has the right to damn everyone does not make it loving and merciful.

Our disagreement with Calvinism is not over God's sovereignty, which is biblical. But Christians do disagree with Calvinists over their misrepresentation of God's sovereignty. The issue is whether God loves all without partiality and desires all to be saved. Unquestionably, Calvinism denies such love, no matter how the "moderate" Calvinists try to explain that fact away. Yet the Bible repeatedly declares God's love to all and His desire that all should be saved and none should be lost.

The God of the Bible is surely even more loving than He expects Christians to be. We may be certain, as Spurgeon said (contradicting himself with irresistible grace, unconditional election, total depravity), that just as we desire the salvation of all, so that is God's desire--as Scripture so often and plainly declares. God does not have multiple wills that contradict each other--He is not bipolar! To say that the God who is not willing for any to perish provides salvation for only a limited number of elect does violence to Scripture and maligns God's character. There is no way around this heresy! Though many have tried.

If grace is irresistible, why doesn't God, who is love and full of compassion, impose it upon everyone? But grace cannot be irresistible. God cannot force anyone to believe in Christ, much less to love Him. All who would be in God's presence for eternity must love Him sincerely, and love requires genuine choice. Most Calvinists do not love God sincerely, never have and probably never will, for it requires true repentance, and not just any kind of repentance, but repentance from Calvinism. True remorse and detestability!

The Bible declares that multitudes will spend eternity in the Lake of Fire. Why? There are only two possible reasons: either God causes multitudes of men to go to hell because he doesn't love and has no desire to save them (as in calvinism)--or they willfully reject the salvation He offers. Nor can it be both (for that is contradictory), or God's will coincides with that of rebels who would wish the salvation of everyone.

[Scriptur]

James White says that Irresistible Grace is absolutely necessary:

Unregenerate man is fully capable of understanding the facts of the gospel: he is simply incapable, due to his corruption and enmity, to submit himself to that gospel...
Who says? James White. What about the Bible?

"Dead in sin" is misunderstood by Calvinists by erroneously ascribing the symptoms of physical death to spiritual death.

Once sovereignly regenerated, the person is presumably able, under the influence of Irresistible Grace, to believe the gospel and thereafter to serve Christ from the heart. Yet grace is evidently no longer possible irresistibly upon the elect once they are regenerated, since they do not always behave as they should, much less to perfection.

Scripture does describe in very clear terms the Christlike life that believers are to live:

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things have passed away; behold, all things are become new. Christ liveth in me.... For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.... Every one that doeth righteousness is born of him.... Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not...greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world...." (2 Cor. 5.17; Gal. 2.20; Eph. 2.10; Phil. 2.13; 1 John 2.29; 3.6; 4.4)
The Calvinist cannot point to any passage in the Bible that clearly states that grace is irresistible or that God imposes it upon the elect who otherwise could not believe the gospel. Yet many passages such as the above clearly state that God intends Christ-likeness for those who are regenerated. Then why don't Christians perfectly perform the "good works, which God hath before ordained" for them (Eph. 2.10)?

If God irresistibly imposes His grace upon the "totally depraved" to regenerate them, why doesn't He impose it upon the regenerated unto perfection in Christian living? There is no biblical answer to this question if we deny free will and accept theory of Irresistible Grace.

How could God's sovereignty completely override human moral responsibility and choice, as the Calvinist insists, to the extent that man has no choice when it comes to salvation--and yet the elect are able to resist God's grace and His will and thus often fail to do the good works that God has ordained for them?

I can imagine a cult that could exist that would teach just these things to the extent that the person could lose salvation after being regenerated calvinistically. That god would be no less twisted that the twisted god of calvinism.