For those who take offense at calling unbelief "irrational"

According to Jesus, no. John 3:16 covers all who would believe. Not all, except a few. This theme repeats itself a number of times where Salvation is meant for all. Not a select few.


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but how does one balance this with verses like John 15:16 and 1Peter 1:1-2


For the record, I want to be proven wrong as I have struggled with this for some time now.
 
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but how does one balance this with verses like John 15:16 and 1Peter 1:1-2


For the record, I want to be proven wrong as I have struggled with this for some time now.

Simple: context. Peter was writing a letter to the scattered Christians throughout the Roman Empire. The first believers were Jews, when they became Christians they didn't stop being Jews just as we don't give up who we are when we become Christians. He refers to them as the "elect" because at one time only Jews could claim that they were the chosen people of God, but after Christ all were declared as chosen.

That does not imply that the elect were singled out based on predestination or that any else were barred from God prior.

An analogy would be me starting a post here claiming the elect few of us members that started this forum who came from the old forum. No one was barred from joining the old forum, but an elect few here today can claim that they are a direct result of the crash that took place there. The old site still gets members, we get new members, but only a select few can claim that they were the old guard of CSC who are now CFF.


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OK. I am going to try this It will, of necessity, be somewhat wordy, as it is not abstract, but deeply personal.

The problem, as @fuelpiper states, is how to reconcile the sovereignty of God with the eternal state of those who reject him. It really does no good to push it back to “ God is all knowing" and not "responsible." Somewhere back there, the roots of those two are so entangled so as to make it a distinction without a difference. If God knows all then He knows the creature he makes will rebel, even if we fob it off on "free will."

My problem was that of CS Lewis when he wrote "A Grief Observed" after the death of his wife. He said (this is not a quote directly) that he had come too far in both the intellectual possibilities and logical necessities of God to deny His existence. Moreover, as every true believer he had known the personal and "spiritual" realities of fellowship with His creator and true knowledge of him.... he could not simply discount that either. He was, as I was, unable to simply pitch a tantrum and act as most atheists do with a "there is no God and I hate him" kind of attitude. What he had was worse.

When he experienced true grief and pain, he realized that pain was in fact the fumes of hell wafting up into his life. All the talk and promises and comforts of being reunited in heaven did NOT dispell the bone crushing pain of death, which is the cosmic penalty for sin. This was, in some sense, attributable to God, if only in His decree.
The real temptation is to picture God as a kind of fiendish cosmic monster, a twisted diabolical type being who creates sentient feeling beings for the sole purpose of roasting them in hell forever. In my opinion, this is most ghastly, and the most logically powerful of problems with the faith. God, if he exists, is the devil.


I went through a period of time in 1980 where this bothered me intensely. I could not pray, as it seemed a mockery to pray to some cackling deformity, and all the stuff in the bible mocked me. I was really considering going back to smoking some dope just to dull the awful feelings, which ran from "you can't go on believing this stuff" to "how can you then explain what you already know" to "but that is WORSE than living in skepticism and the idiocy of atheism." My poor wife thought I was cracking up, and maybe I was. I won't go thru all the symptoms of this "night of the soul" but for the first time, I felt like my mind was simply dealing with issues too big for me. That, weirdly enough, was the beginning of relief for me, though at the time, I just thought I would wind up in the looney bin. What was so frightening to me was that I had always considered an ability to think through stuff and arrive at a logical conclusion to be a bedrock, a port in a storm, a sort of safe place. Now it led to me realizing I could not rely on it as a foundation stone myself. I had argued with a number of aggressive atheists in college and pointed out THEIR epistemological failures (and felt pretty good about both my argument and their failure to have a coherent response), but now that it faced me, I was in a bit of a panic. No options looked good.

All this went on for about a bit of time. My studies (I was in grad school) suffered. I was in that "honeymoon phase" of marriage (mine lasted about 3 years, till kids came along!) and I snapped at Carole. I HATED the surface, trite, sugary evangelical pabulum responses when I would bring this stuff up... which I did not do often. My MO is to sit down and think through stuff myself anyway. One night, I had been on a walk and then sat down and read some, and things just sort of came to a crisis. I thought "the only real option here is to just bail on all this stuff... go get a job as a chemist somewhere and try to make what you can of life and forget God.... He is making you miserable." I don't think I have been any more miserable at any time in my life. It was then that God "showed up." I am not a big believer in God "speaking" to people like I hear some Christians say. I have never heard a voice -celestial or otherwise- speak words to me. I frankly believe I would think it a hallucination or something if I did. But there is no question in my mind that this was God. I just felt sort of an internal impression on my mind. Not forceful, hateful, threatening, or anything. Just sort of gentle and kind. It was more of a feeling, I guess, but it had verbal content. That is the best I can do at explaining it. It was "why don't you ask me about it?" I almost laughed, as my thought was "hell, that is all I have been asking about for some time now" and the other more bothersome objection is that I was asking the cosmic master criminal to exculpate himself. He was much smarter than me if he existed, so I should be prepared for a little intellectual dipsy doo, and leave myself flummoxed and disarmed but still feeling something out of sync? Nevertheless, almost as though I did not have a choice -and yet I did, and wholeheartedly whispered "You have to help me here! I am going to walk away from this straight into hell myself because I cannot follow a monster" or something to that effect.


It was almost like a polaroid picture in my head...with no image, of the words of Jesus from the gospel came. As He was on the cross he screamed out in Aramaic "ELOI ELOI LLAMA SABACHTHANI" which is translated "MY GOD MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?" and it hit me like a freight train. My whole accusation of God was based on the idea that he was a cosmic monster arbitrarily creating a world where sin, death, pain and an eternal hell were apart from Him, and he was up there apart, lolling around, pulling puppet strings, abstractly musing on the fate of his creation and dispassionately recording the results. This phrase, uttered while Jesus suffered the concentrated, distilled essence of all of the pains of sin death and hell, was God's way of telling me "whatever conclusion you come to, do not imagine that I am untouched by this. In fact, I have suffered more than the most horrible pains one can imagine. I sucked it in, died under its weight, fell the despair and the horrible emptiness and pain and isolation you are imagining I am 'toying' with humanity about."

I began climbing out of the hole after that. It is like my whole perspective on pain, death, suffering and evil was shifted and I could walk around to the other side of the picture and see a side I had been blind to before. The "problem" was not resolved... but I could live with it.

A few observations:
1) the "problem of evil" has been replaced by the "problem of God in the gospel" The REAL problem is how a God who is unutterably pure and divorced from evil, full of complete joy and happiness, the source of all that is good and right, could himself become vile, rotten, corrupt, wicked, hateful vicious and spitting evil, and then die (as a man) under the sentence for that. For some reason this does not bother infidels, but the problem of God himself BECOMING evil and suffering damnation for it is the most huge problem of the gospel. All the other logical stuff is trite bullshit in my opinion. This is the mystery of the universe. If you want to have a problem, this is the place to pitch your tent. It is the claim of the gospel and it is breathtaking in its audacity. It is either blasphemy or a truth that staggers us and makes us think "our minds are too small."

2) I said upstream that I felt like I was boxed in with a tiny brain and unable to think my way out of the problem. This is still true. I am less threatened by this in light of point 1) above. I freely acknowledge this is an emotional, and not logical, response. No apologies, either.

3) Now when I read the apostle Paul (who, by the way, dealt with this very problem in Romans 9), I can take it. He raises the question "why does God still find fault, for who can resist His will?" This is a cogent and reasonable question. Paul's response is weird, but when I look at it, I realize the guy was VERY bright. He simply says that if man is going to judge God then everything is upside down, and God is bigger than you in both goodness and intellect, so sit down and shut up. I confess I was deeply offended at this, until I saw it in the context of 1) the fact that God himself is not unaffected but in fact MORE affected by evil than any man, damned or saved and 4) (below) the gospel itself

4) The shift in my thinking was more complete when I realized that all the major objections to Xty have to be answered IN THE CONTEXT OF THE GOSPEL MESSAGE ITSELF. That is, the "problem of evil" can be addressed in a set of rational and abstract intellectual propositions, but this is never how God himself responds. The message that the mighty God laid aside his glory and entered a shit stall of animals and grew up as a peasant, willingly suffered indignity, scorn, ridicule and mockery and then died under the weight of guilt and evil that utterly broke him then rose again to demonstrate that this message is TRUE.... all "answers" to questions must be presented with that as the heartbeat. Men must be forced to see EVERY TIME that their objections are not abstractions, to be held at arms length and dispassionately analyzed as though THEY were the true judges and all reality depends on their decisions. Rejection of the gospel is a rejection of rationality because it is a rejection of the God of reason himself. Embrace of the God of reason is not a promise that all rational difficulties will be resolved. It is rather a claim that ONLY in the gospel message in its broad form do we have an explanation of why the universe is as it is, why man is as he is, and why there is a nagging feeling that things "should" be different... and why we seek that difference.

Sorry for the long post, but most folks in here are used to em by now.
 
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