Revelation of Grace
Posted by Vincent Cheung on July 19, 2005(The following is an edited email correspondence.)
I am reading your Systematic Theology right now, and I must say that my entire thinking has been shaken.
In the past month, I have come to accept the Calvinistic doctrines, and your web site has taught me so much more from Scripture in the past few days.
It is incredibly refreshing to hear a pastor preach from JUST the Bible and make strong cases.
I am so grateful to God that He has chosen me, and your teachings on election and reprobation prove to me more and more just how blessed I am that God has had mercy on me, not because of anything in me, but so that He may glorify himself.
I still have much of your work to read, but I just wanted to say thank you and let you know how God has used you to change my thinking.
Thanks for your comments.
What we call Calvinism, of course, is the Bible’s own teaching concerning the nature of God, man, and salvation. It teaches that God is sovereign, just, and gracious, that man is depraved, helpless, and hopeless, and that the only way for sinful man to be saved is for the sovereign God to save him, actively and powerfully, and then also permanently.
If not for the numerous deviations from this biblical teaching, there would be no need to identify it with any person’s name, except that of Jesus Christ. But as it is, Calvinism is nothing more than a systematic expression of the biblical revelation of grace. It is the gospel, and it is what we must believe and preach. The elect will respond with gratitude and reverence; the reprobate will respond with disgust and scorn.
The Bible also teaches us about God’s power, wrath, and justice in reprobation. But even the reprobates can do nothing except by God’s active power, as Luther says, energizing and even compelling them to sin, in accordance with the evil nature that God has also placed in them after the pattern of Adam. Thus nothing is free in any sense from God’s active power and control.
Just as the potteries for noble purposes cannot make themselves out of a lump of clay, neither can the potteries for common purposes make themselves, but it is God who actively and sovereignly creates both to be what they are. This is the consistent teaching of Scripture.
Recommended:
Creatures Cannot Initiate Motion
Vincent Cheung, "The Problem of Evil"
Vincent Cheung, Systematic Theology
Vincent Cheung, Commentary on Ephesians
Vincent Cheung, Ultimate Questions
Vincent Cheung, Presuppositional Confrontations
Gordon Clark, Christian Philosophy
Gordon Clark, Predestination
Gordon Clark, God and Evil
Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will