The Joy Of Calvinism: Knowing God's Personal, Unconditional, Irresistible, Unbreakable Love

by Gregory Forster

Especially in the West, Christian ethics has long considered the proper ordering of our loves as central presuppositions for basic ethical concepts like duty and virtue.

The point of the rule against adultery is not simply to forbid the evil act but to show us how our loves ought to be ordered. The main offense is not the act itself; it’s the disordered love that leads to the act.

God made us for himself, for fellowship with him. He created us so he could glorify himself by giving us our good, and we could glorify him by enjoying the good he gives us. And we are the pinnacle of creation, the image bearers who glorify God in a way that no majestic mountains or unfathomable ocean depths, no sublimely overwhelming galaxies and nebulae, even no angel or archangel ever could.

So God does not choose which particular people are saved. He delegates that determination to the natural order, because he loves the natural order more than he loves any particular people. He “chooses” the saved and “chooses” the lost only in the sense that he chooses to leave them in the hands of nature and to abide by whatever choice nature makes.

As Calvinist theologian B. B. Warfield has put it, the proper analogy is not to a doctor healing the sick and wounded, but to a judge with a courtroom full of convicts he must sentence. A doctor must heal all those who come within reach of his care, but a judge is held back by higher considerations from pardoning every convict under his jurisdiction. It would be inexplicable if a doctor, having the power to cure all his patients, cured only some; but in the case of the judge, the wonder is not that he does not pardon all, but that he pardons any.6

You can have a Holy Spirit who makes you a new creation by working miracles in your heart. Or you can have a human nature that is not implacably anti-God. You cannot have both. And Scripture persistently teaches both that our nature is implacably anti-God and that the work of the Holy Spirit is a radical, miraculous transformation.

only God does the work. We don’t participate in the accomplishment of our salvation by getting plugged into a salvation system; Jesus accomplishes our salvation on the cross and in the empty tomb, because his saving love is personal. Our salvation is not determined by the workings of a system within nature; the Father alone determines it because saving us is his unconditional top priority. And the Holy Spirit does not give us a new birth because we consent to accept him; we come to accept him only because he has already given us the new birth—which he does because he loves us too much to abandon us merely on account of our rejection of him.

And the single most important thing that we do, the central thing that gives meaning to all the rest, is to accept and endure suffering. Sanctification is, in essence, learning to persevere in godliness through trials. The rest is details.

Real love is personal; therefore real love is a behavior, not a feeling; therefore real love is about setting priorities, real love doesn’t have to be earned, and the only real test of love is a willingness to endure suffering.

“Joy is not an emotion. Joy is a settled certainty that God is in control.”

State of man before salvation: total depravity Work of the Father in salvation: unconditional election Work of the Son in salvation: limited atonement Work of the Spirit in salvation: irresistible grace State of man after salvation: perseverance of the saints

One section of the Confession, in the context of explaining the fall, asserts that God providentially controls all human actions without doing violence to human free will by “a most wise and powerful bounding, and otherwise ordering, and governing of them, in a manifold dispensation, to his own holy ends.”7 If God governed our actions by actually planting our decisions in us directly, our wills would not be free, and God would be the author of our sins. But he doesn’t do that. He governs our actions indirectly, bounding and ordering them from the outside—that is, without directly authoring them.