And our family was quite young.
In fact, we only had half our family,
two sons.
Our third son was on the way at
the time, and my wife was first sick
at that time, carrying our third son.
And at the same time, our second son
was very, had a sort of hypo-tense
condition, and I was speaking with a mare
for my first time.
So, my evenings and nights were spent trying
to keep my second son settled down in
bed, and at the same time being fresh
and alert for the students in the morning.
And we were showing at the missionary guest
home on Laramie at that time.
Some of you may remember, he used to
be there.
And I remember that I often had to
get up in the night, because my second
son was crying, upset, pains in his stomach,
and so on.
Give him a little medicine, and then I'd
run, turn him over, and rub him on
the back, and I would sing a chorus.
And I just got into the habit of
singing for him each night, the same chorus.
Jesus is the one, he's the only one.
And I would sing this away, and he
would moan, call birds, until he got so
tired of hearing it he couldn't sleep.
Then I'd go to sleep, and that went
on night after night after night, and that
seemed to his nervous condition.
I remember one day we had to go
and visit some friends.
It was a beautiful sunny day when we
left, and we got onto the loop, and
away we went.
And when we came back, we were just
lightly clad, the children, and my wife, and
myself, and it was snowing.
It had turned very cold all of a
sudden.
And so when we got off the train
at the loop, I grabbed hold of my
second son.
My wife grabbed hold of the older boy,
Peter, and she ran with him, because she
didn't want him to catch a cold, you
know.
We had to run from the station along
to Laramie, and then down.
We were cold, and they were cold, and
I was grabbing Stephen, and pulling him along
the road, and he didn't know why I
was acting like this.
I was like acting like a madman, he
thought, I guess.
And he wondered what had happened to his
dad, and as we were running along the
road, he said breathlessly, dad, dad, dad, thanks,
Jesus is the one.
Well, as I have to talk to you
about the biblical balance between Arminianism and Calvinism,
I feel I'm saying, will somebody please say,
Jesus is the one.
Seriously, let's turn to the word of God,
shall we?
And we'll just read, as a sort of
theme before we start.
From Psalm 139, I'm not going to give
any exposition of these verses, I just want
to just read this part of the word
of God, and I can make reference to
a number of scriptures.
And I would suggest to you, if you're
interested in this topic at all, and want
to get any value out of what I
have to say, you'll probably have to use
pencil and paper to make a few notes
after your own sanction, according to your own
style.
Psalm 139, I shall not read all the
psalms, but let's pause at the wonder of
it, as we've listened to this testimony tonight
from our brother Ray, which has really touched
our hearts.
And it applies to each one of us
who knows the Lord Jesus, our Savior.
O Lord, thou hast searched me and known
me.
Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up
-rising.
Thou understandest my thoughts afar off.
Thou compassest my path and my lying down,
and art acquainted with all my ways.
For there is not a word in my
tongue but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it
altogether.
Thou hast beset me behind and before, and
laid thine hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.
It is hard.
I cannot attain unto it.
So is God.
Our Father, as we read these words, we
are amazed at the grace of God in
our lives, and what you have done for
us through the Lord Jesus.
And we remember that this is not only
peace and joy for this life, but an
eternity with our Lord Jesus Christ.
And as we think of the wonder of
that, we say this is hard.
I cannot attain unto it.
And we give thanks in your presence tonight.
And as we talk together about your words,
we pray for grace to be discerning, to
prove all things, to hold fast that which
is good.
Bless us now, we pray, in our Saviour's
name.
Amen.
First, I want to say a few words
of introduction to clear the ground, so to
speak, and then I want to look at
the problem of the difference between Arminianism and
Calvinism in four different ways.
After my introduction, I want to deal with
the problem very deeply, historically, and then contemporarily,
and then emotionally, and finally what I want
to get to is how to deal with
it biblically.
Now, by way of introduction, let's just imagine
that you are traveling across a reasonably level
terrain on the journey of life, and as
you progress towards your goal, you are confronted
with a huge mountain range.
The best trail takes you right over the
peak, and you're told that there's a tremendous
view from that elevation.
But the problem is, you're not sure from
your point where you are now, you're not
sure which is the real peak in the
range, and then again you think as you
approach nearer to the mountains, there must be
some hazards to avoid.
Now, in our climb of the cruise of
divine election and predestination, we may get to
the point where, for the time, we can
go no further.
We must catch our breath and view the
sceneries.
There are things in the scriptures that are
beyond the grasp of mere intellect.
Remember, the scripture says all the depths of
the riches, both of the wisdom and the
knowledge of God, how untouchable are his judgments
and his ways past finding out.
But yet, we are responsible to discover what
the word of God does say.
That is, if God has spoken on these
lofty subjects and given us guidance, then we
have to be responsive to what the scripture
does teach, and not simply bury the subject.
The secret things belong to the Lord our
God, but the things revealed belong to us.
So, we want to be concerned, finally, in
our chat with you tonight, with the things
that are revealed.
If salvation can be described, as it has
been by someone poetically, as darkness to my
intellect but sunshine in my heart, so the
truths we shall consider may sometimes defy our
complete understanding, and yet they may produce a
spirit of worship.
I think of how the poet has said,
when all thy mercies, O my God, my
rising soul surveyed, transported with the view I'm
lost in wonder, love, and praise.
I'm not sure where I stand in relation
to the mountain peaks.
How far I have to go before I
reach the top of our subject, and I'm
able to look down with authority on what
is beneath, and say that I have arrived.
But, I think it's important to realize that
I've come a certain way up the mountain,
in my understanding, and I would like to
call back to those who are starting the
climb to warn them of some hazards that
they may run into in the process of
climbing.
Now, if you want to do a little
independent study on your own, on the subjects
of Calvinism and Arminianism, I would like to
suggest two books that have been helped to
me, not because I agree with them in
everything that they say, but books that have
stimulated me to come to perhaps a little
new understanding, and perhaps to confirm me in
some ideas which were even in opposition to
what these books presented.
The first one is God's Strategy in Human
History, an interesting book written by two authors,
Forster and Marston.
It's published by Kindale, B-Y-N-D
-A-O-E, and it's around six or
seven dollars, I imagine, here in the United
States.
Then there's another book, not perhaps quite the
same at all, but nevertheless having some value,
Grace Unlimited, by Charles H.
Pinnock, and published by Bethany Fellowship in Minneapolis,
and I think you'll get it for around
five or six dollars.
Now, when I first began to take these
proofs, or to use the analogy that I've
been using, the illustration that I've been giving,
as I began to climb the peak of
the young man, I became fascinated with certain
doctrines, and certain ideas, and when I first
began to attempt an ascent of our mountain,
I was attracted to a path lined with
tulips.
Could we have this on please?
How do we go here?
Good.
Now, you may wonder why I mentioned tulips,
but the word tulip is an acronym for
the five points of Calvinism.
I didn't realize at first just what these
points were.
As a matter of fact, it was many
years later that I learned that there was
such a thing as a tulip, and that
this means was used to express the five
points of Calvinism, which are total detravity, unconditional
election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance
of the saints.
Now, I don't know where you stand in
relation to those five points of Calvinism.
I'm not too sure that I'm exactly interested
in that, whether where you stand in relation
to those things.
I am interested in where you stand in
relation to what the scripture has to say
about election and predestination, but it is if
we're doing a study of this subject, and
we're reading what writers say, sooner or later
we're going to run into this acronym tulip,
and all that it suggests.
Now, where do you stand in relation to
Calvinism and Arminianism?
As you see here, just not on the
screen, thank you.
Where do you stand in relation to Calvinism
and Arminianism?
Well, I think I'm somewhere here, but I'm
not sure.
This is where the needle may change, as
far as I'm concerned.
If I was to talk to you about
some subjects that are found in the scriptures,
maybe the needle would swing over here, and
when we're dealing with whether a person is
a Calvinist or an Arminian, it's very hard
to just discover what is meant by those
terms.
Let me go on a little bit more
with what I've got down here to share
with you.
After I had begun to accept this idea
of tulip, without knowing what it was, I
came to accept some of the things that
authors who accepted that view presented, I began
to see that I had taken an extreme
line.
One that needed to be modified, because there
were certain that seemed to contradict what I
found under this tulip teaching.
For example, John 3.16 is rather difficult
to fit in there for me, that God
so loved the world.
I had to reconcile this with the fact
that under the tulip idea, under extreme Calvinism,
you get the view that God really, finally,
only loves a certain class of persons, a
certain group of people, and he really doesn't
love all the world.
That's in the scripture, but that's not really
what God does, according to this thinking.
And then I read passages in First Timothy
chapter two, verses four through six, and I
understood that God will have all men to
be saved, and I had to kind of
twist that a little bit, and say to
myself, well now if I accept the tulip
idea, God really doesn't will that all men
shall be saved.
The only will is that some men should
be saved, and I began to see that
I was having difficulty with the position that
I had espoused.
And let me just ask for a moment,
what is Calvinism?
And what is Arminianism?
And why do these two views exist?
And this will bring us to the problem
historically.
Calvin and Arminius both belong to the 1500s,
but the problem of God's sovereignty, and the
problem of reconciling that with human freedom, baffled
Plato 400 years before the Christian era.
Now, the way he resolved that was to
come up with a creator limited by the
obstinate and stubborn creation that he had made.
That was hardly an answer that would be
acceptable to us.
Muslim theologians wrestle with this problem, and they
arrive at a fatalistic position.
It's natural that thinking Christians should wrestle with
this problem also.
Augustine was the patriarch of what we now
know as Calvinism, for what we call Calvinism
really didn't begin with Calvin.
It is more hoary and more ancient than
that.
Calvin simply defined it more clearly, and made
it more popular in his time, but it
really springs from Augustine at least.
And then, as far as Arminianism is concerned,
the patriarch of Arminianism is not really Arminius,
but Erasmus.
Now, to put the record straight, we should
understand what Arminius believed.
You know, it's interesting when you hear what
people are supposed to believe if they're Calvinist,
and what they're supposed to believe if they
are Arminian, and when you get talking to
them you find that they believe something quite
different.
For example, is this a Calvinistic statement, or
is this an Arminian statement?
Fallen man is in a condition in which
his will is not only wounded, maimed, infirm,
bent, and weakened, but it is also imprisoned,
destroyed, and lost.
Its powers are not only debilitated and useless
unless they be assisted by grace, but it
has no powers whatever except such as are
excited by divine grace.
It follows that our will is not free
to do good unless it is made free
by the sun through the spirit.
Now, that sounds so Calvinistic to me, but
it was actually Arminius who said those words.
Now, let's come down to the contemporary problem.
Both Calvin and Arminius have been so liberally
interpreted by their followers that it's about as
definitive to say that a man is an
Arminian, or a man is a Calvinist, as
it is to say a man is a
Protestant.
What brand?
A Protestant can mean anything.
Probably all of us tend to a Calvinistic
view in some things, and an Arminian view
in others.
Today, and this is perhaps an oversimplification, but
for the purpose of our little study tonight,
today it would seem that a man is
a Calvinist if he emphasizes the role of
God in salvation, and an Arminian if he
emphasizes the role of man in salvation.
Now, J.
Kenneth Ryder of the Nazarene Theological Seminary says,
it may be that in the future there
will be still more a conversion of the
Arminian and Calvinistic theologies as the vain philosophies
of men wane in their influence, and as
evangelicals are taught more and more by holy
scripture.
That, to my mind, is a very optimistic
view.
It would seem that the doctrine of human
free will, the teaching that man is responsible
for his actions, that he can either accept
or reject what is presented to him, and
what grace makes available to him, that he
can respond to that positively or negatively, that
he can actually say yes or no to
God, that concept is pastured, preached, perhaps to
extremes today, are practiced in the sense that
in some evangelical circles, and even in some
assemblies, there is such a great emphasis placed
upon the necessity for a person to make
a response to God that God and will
are virtually left out of the picture altogether.
I am ashamed, brethren, at some of the
things that pass for evangelism in the assemblies
today.
I've been asked on two or three occasions
to counsel in evangelistic meetings.
Now, thank God this is not true of
all evangelists accepted among the assemblies, but it
is true of one or two that I
know of, and they should be nameless out
of Christian love.
But, I have been in those meetings seeking
to listen very carefully to the message, so
that when someone came up to inquire, I
could sort of grab hold of the message
and know what they've been listening to, so
that I would have a handle by which
to direct them to real decision or real
understanding of the work in Christ.
And, I've been horrified with the lack of
content in the message that is presented.
I could give you the gist of one
message I heard, and it is characteristic of
this one man's ministry, I'm sorry to say.
He preached quite well.
He began by saying, today we shall study
the story of Zathias.
That is point one.
And, he told a few illustrations about his
preaching, and his activities, and so on.
Then, he moved on and said, Zathias is
not the priest.
And, he said, so are some of you
people who are not the priest.
Now, Zathias needed to come down, and that's
what you need to do, come down.
And, then he says, you know, you didn't
come here with the idea to be saved,
but that's what you're going to do tonight.
You're going to make a decision for Jesus
Christ.
Now, how many more will come before us,
before our closing prayer?
There was practically no content, hardly any reference
to the personal work of the Lord Jesus
throughout the whole message.
Now, I don't say that to be unkind.
God did deliver us from this kind of
thing.
All that man was doing, as it seemed
to me, and God shall be his judge,
was simply to get resolved.
And, people came forward because he was, he
was an orator.
He could tell stories of the lifetime, make
you cry, make you laugh, make you come
forward.
If you want to read more about that,
you need John White's Sacred Cow, published by
the University Press.
It's a slaughter.
Anyway, I found that those people who came
forward never wanted to have anything more to
do with the chapel again.
They were thoroughly wrong.
They felt that they had been roped in
and manipulated, and I felt ashamed, though I
didn't like to tell them so.
One fellow who professed to be saved in
that campaign, we had to work with him
for years, going back over the scriptures, back
and forth, before we came to a clear
understanding of what salvation was all about.
Now, that kind of truth does not give
credit to God's activity in saving men.
Now, in reaction to this type of evangelism,
where the pressure is put upon people to
make a decision, I said, that's all there
is to salvation.
You just have to do something to say
yes to God.
There's a reaction to that, and it's built
up in certain seminaries and colleges, and it
seems to me they're retreating into an ultra
-Calvinistic pace in order to preserve and protect
God's autonomy.
So, this brings us to the problem emotionally.
Most, if not all, of the edicts and
creeds of the church have been hammered out
in the heat of controversy.
Through the centuries, church councils have been characterized
by disharmony and acrimony.
Frequently, political considerations entered into the statement of
faith.
Personality conflicts often influence church leaders to go
beyond sober consideration of all that the scripture
has to say on a subject.
The great thing in those days, it seems,
was to store points over your adversary, and
to prove that he was an uncircumcised philistine.
We should remember that the passing of time
has not changed human nature.
Each of us would be wise to recognize,
as Elijah did, that I'm no better than
my father is.
There's a tendency, when we get into debate
over the subject, over a subject like this,
to just simply want to store points and
prove the opponent wrong.
Let's then try to dispense with these things,
after such an introduction, and look for a
few moments at the problem biblically, and not
be concerned.
This is important, the attitude with which we
come to our subject.
Let us not be concerned whether we're going
to be dubbed as an Arminian or a
Palvinist by our brethren.
That is irrelevant.
What other people think of you, when you
finish, is really not important.
We want to know what the scriptures have
to teach.
Now, in the scriptures we have antimonies.
A theological antimony is an incomprehensible, apparent incompatibility
between two lines of truth.
Each of those lines of truth having undeniable
scripture support.
That's our definition of an antimony.
Two lines of truth, both of them taught
in scripture, but apparently we cannot reconcile them.
Now that's a little different than a mere
paradox.
Sometimes we're told that Calvinism and Arminianism, or
considering the fact of God's sovereignty in salvation,
and man's free will in salvation, that this
is a paradox.
But a paradox, actually, is something that is
rather cryptic, and yet it can be solved
if we only know how.
For example, Paul says things that are apparently
paradoxical when he says, as deceivers, and yet
true.
That's a paradox.
As unknown, and yet well known.
As trials, but behold we live.
Those are paradoxes, but you can reconcile them.
A spiritual mind can come to those passages,
read those things, say I know what Paul
means.
They make sense when you have your eyes
opened by the spirit of God to understand
what is being taught there.
So that's a paradox.
But an antimony is something deeper than that.
It's something that is incomprehensible, and apparently incompatible
with the other line of truth.
For example, let's take an example.
Prayer to the God who knows the end
from the beginning, and orders everything after the
counsel of his own will.
Prayer to such a God represents an antimony.
Why would you pray to God who already
orders everything after the counsel of his own
will?
The person of our Lord Jesus is improvable,
in whom we behold two uniquely contrasting natures,
yet his person is indivisible.
It's up to the apostle Paul, for example,
to say Jesus should exist as God.
He did that as man.
He is divided, yet he exists as man.
They existed in that one person of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
But his being God, and being man, presents
an antimony.
It's something that we cannot really reconcile in
our minds.
How can he be both at the same
time?
The word of God itself, the very scriptures
that we read, that we love, presents an
antimony when we realize that the authors of
scripture express themselves in this.
For example, when we read the Gospel of
Luke, we can detect that we're reading what
Luke, the beloved physician, wrote.
And after you have grown a little bit
in the Lord, you've read his scriptures a
little bit, you come to recognize, even if
you can't tell, the chapter and verse.
Or it must have been Luke that said
that, because that's the way he writes.
Or it must have been Matthew, or that's
the quotation from Paul, because that's the way
Paul writes.
That's the way he expresses himself.
And then on the other hand, whilst you
can recognize that the personality of the writer
comes through in the writing, yet the scripture
teaches that all scripture is given by inspiration
of God.
And we believe that the very words of
scripture are given to us from the Lord.
Now that presents an antimony.
How do we deal with that?
Here are three things that I have presented
to you that are irreconcilable from our present
vantage point.
We cannot bring those things together.
We can accept them, and we believe them,
I trust, but they still present a problem
to your intellect.
Let's look at some of the difficulties that
we get into when we try to reconcile
the sovereignty of God with human free will.
Breeding into scripture because of one's bias is
a real danger.
That is, you take a scripture and your
mind is already made up as an Calvinist,
or as an Arminian, or whatever view in
between, whatever you happen to stand, and you
lead into that scripture what isn't there.
Sometimes you can even read words that aren't
there.
I was listening to a radio preach for
just a few months, I think after I
had been asked to come and present this
paper, and I was listening very interestedly because
he was obviously a very strong Calvinist, so
I was listening to him preaching.
He said, that God might make known, quoting
from scripture, the riches of his glory on
the vessels of mercy in which he had
aforeprepared unto glory.
That was great.
Then he went on to refer to the
previous verse, and he said this, or at
least he said this, what is God willing
to show his wrath and to make his
power known, endured with much strong suffering the
vessels of wrath he fitted to destruction.
There's no who there, I heard somebody object.
You're right brother, I ran to my bible,
I thought my word, now I never saw
that before.
I'll have to see what I'll have to
do with that scripture, and then I looked
at my bible, I saw there was no
he there.
Now if there was a he in his
mind, I don't think he intended to deceive,
but he wrote what was in his own
mind into the scripture.
At least that's the best complexion I can
give to it.
I hope he wasn't trying to deceive us
by inserting the he into that verse.
The speaker could support an ultra-Calvinistic view
of divine sovereignty, namely that God not only
elects the redeemed to eternal glory, but he
also elects the lost for eternal damnation.
Now that is not taught in the word
of God, thank you both.
Don't brand him as an Arminian because he
said amen.
Whitewashing things is another danger that go against
our own views.
Now because foreknowledge presents the difficulty for the
Arminians, that is the one who believes that
man is responsible to make his own decisions
and he's accountable for those decisions.
Because foreknowledge presents the difficulty to a man
who holds that view, it may be tempting
to come up with a statement like this.
God foreknew who would be tried for Christ,
and so he chose this.
Now that, to my mind, makes divine election
to do nothing.
At least that's the way I see it.
I call that whitewashing, or it's cutting them
up instead of untying them.
Now sometimes you can get hope as we
look at some of these difficult verses which
exist on both sides of this controversy.
We can gain hope by getting fresh light
on a passage.
Let me confess to you very briefly that
my position, not my preaching by the grace
of God, but my position that I've held
namefully, has had to change these years.
Now when I say my preaching hasn't changed,
I have tried to stick to what the
word of God says when I preach, and
not go beyond that.
But my mind may speculate and wonder about
things which I don't preach.
If I preach what I'm speculating about, I'm
only going to confuse my audience.
But when I have a grasp at the
Lord, then I can preach that.
And we need to remember that.
And we can gain fresh light on a
passage.
I've benefited from reading the two books that
I've mentioned.
I haven't actually finished them all yet, and
I have really thanked God for what some
of the authors pointed out in those books.
Now, all that the father giveth me shall
come to me, and him that cometh to
me I will in no wise pass out,
is a difficult scripture for an Arminian.
Again, lower down in that chapter it says,
it is written in the prophets and they
shall all be taught of God.
Every man therefore that hath heard and hath
learned of the father come to me.
Now that seems to support a very strong
Calvinistic position in that God himself must draw
the person to Christ before he can be
saved.
But wait a moment.
Let's remember when we read those verses, and
this may not be a total answer, but
think about this.
That our Lord was ministering on earth between
the two testaments.
Between the old testament and what we now
have as the new testament.
There were at that time among the Jews
those who had been taught of God before
they met Christ.
Is that clear?
That is the spirit of God, or if
you will, the father had been working in
their hearts.
You remember the Lord Jesus said on one
occasion, the father worketh his sheep and I
am working.
So between the two testaments the Lord was
standing at a point where he could look
back and see the father working in old
testament times in the hearts and lives of
men.
Now because these men were already the subject
of divine working, they would be drawn to
the Lord Jesus.
For what the Lord Jesus was teaching was
perfect, in perfect harmony with what they had
already been taught by the father.
They had been drawn, they had been attracted
to the things of God, they were believers
in that sense.
But when Christ came, all those that were
so taught of God would be drawn to
him.
The truth that God had been teaching you
prior to that time would be evident in
that you would come to Christ.
If God had merely opened your mind to
his truth, and you were not merely a
hypocrite, such as some of the Pharisees were,
not all thank God, but if you were
a Pharisee in the bad sense of the
word, you would not be drawn to Christ
because you had not really been taught of
God.
You had been searching the scriptures, for in
them you thought that you had eternal life,
but you will not come to me that
you might have life.
So that in the light of that, perhaps
the verses in John 6 may be softened
a little bit, and may not just be
teaching what we think on the side of
Calvinism.
Let's make a careful note of the context
of the verses that seem to support one
verse, you or the other.
For example, John 15 verse 16 says, you
have not chosen me, but I have chosen
you.
Now that's a very Calvinistic statement it would
seem, but it's followed by the words, and
I have ordained you that you should go
and bring forth fruit.
In other words, the Lord is not there
talking about his choice unto eternal life, but
he is talking about the election of the
disciples that they should go and bring forth
fruit.
Not quite the same thing.
Again, let's note Romans 9 17 which causes
a lot of argumentation.
For the scripture says unto Pharaoh, even for
this same purpose have I raised thee up,
that I might show my power in thee,
and that my name might be declared throughout
all the earth.
Now is it an ultra-Calvinist or a
Calvinist, whichever you want to name such a
person?
You would take the view that God had
caused Pharaoh to come onto the scene of
his death, to be born into this world,
to grow up into this world, simply to
be a display for God's law, God's power
in him.
But what we have to realize is that
God raised up Pharaoh within a lifetime, strong
among his people, as a sample of stubbornness
and rebellion.
It does not say that God forced him
to be stubborn or rebellious.
In fact, a close reading of Exodus shows
us that Pharaoh first hardened his own heart,
and later God caused him to persist in
his obstinacy in order that he might show
his power in him.
This verse then is not saying, for this
reason I caused you to be born.
God did not cause Pharaoh to be born
simply in order to display his law.
We should recognize that election, divine election, is
sometimes corporate.
That is, it has to deal with people
rather than individuals.
Let's notice the often quoted Romans 9 13.
Jacob have I loved, but his Pharaoh have
I hated.
That's spoken of the nation that descended from
these two persons, not of the individual.
We should also note in passing that it
is not speaking of salvation or damnation of
those people, but of God's purpose for them
in time.
The elder would serve the younger.
That did not come about in Pharaoh's lifetime.
The elder serving the younger came about in
the history of the nations that descended from
Jacob and Esau.
So when it says Jacob have I loved,
but Esau have I hated, it has no
real reference to the persons of Jacob and
Esau, but rather to God's purpose for the
nations, and in time only, for those nations
that descended from those two men.
However, we may be able to answer certain
scriptures, and we may be able to accommodate
them to our particular understanding, but I suggest
one basic problem is always going to remain.
No matter how much we may be able
to understand and overcome certain passages that frustrate
us, we will still have a problem less.
I suggest probably to the end of our
days.
How do we reconcile?
Not verses now, but here's a problem for
you that I have been facing in this
area that I had never really stopped to
consider before.
How do we reconcile those passages which teach
that God takes the