And the Lord called unto Moses and spoke with him from the Tabernacle of the congregation. Leviticus 1:1
The Lord walked in the garden with Adam and was present physically with His creation. The Lord chose a physical platform to explain His plan to destroy the world with a flood. God visited Abram/Abraham and had lunch with him. They discussed the destiny of the world. Moses hung out at a burning bush and then met God on the mountain where he received the stone tablets (he had to carve his own set for the rewrite). God was constantly showing up in His own handiwork and having discussions with people about what He wanted. Meanwhile, the Lord begins an entirely new program of communication when He ordains the Tabernacle and validates it with His own presence there. The trajectory of the Tabernacle is the Throne of David, the Temple, the Exile (largely because the Tabernacle was cast aside as an embarrasment to the Israelites), the Cross and the Resurrection. God communicates to His people by being among them and, ultimately, being human (not a dog as Calvin thinks is ok), He lives a real human life and dies a real death.
It is difficult to understand how Calvinists can picture God as being pristine and distant like a cosmic fireball of energy. The idea that God's involvement in the lives of people is carried on from some ethereal laboratory setting where He is constantly viewing everything that is happening in all of creation and can never escape from His own omniscience is not supported in the Bible (If He knows everything, why does he need angelic reports Job 1:6... If He is sovereign de facto**, then why can't He choose to not know what He doesn't wish to know?). When all the bad pictures that you Calvinists come up with are processed, it amounts to the same thing...you favor a unitarian perspective of God and you subordinate Jesus to a position of semi-divine at best. Whatever your confessions and whatever your loud squawks about being committed to biblical revelation, when you make up unbiblical nonsense about God's preselection process where something you call God chooses to send babies and other people to hell just because he can and wants to, your theology does not agree with the apostles.
Jesus is God!
Did you get that?
Jesus is God.
Your ideas that put salvation in the clean room of pre-creation heaven and all of you the lucky recipients of a Holy lottery serve to exclude Jesus in action (sweaty, bloody, dirty...spitting to produce sight for the blind, weeping to produce tears for those who hurt as He hurt) on earth to provide salvation for those who trade their death for His life.
Jesus is God and He defines His glory as the cross (Luke 24:26,1 Peter 1:11). To glorify God means to live the cross, preach the cross, raise up the cross, honor the cross, cling to the cross, recognize the cross as the beginning place of salvation that only happens in time. You cannot prove anything about predestination...you can prove the power of the cross by living it.
Come to the cross.
**I am thoroughly indebted to C.S. Lewis for explaining the tension between Sovereign de facto and Sovereign de jure and his extensive explanation of the part that Calvin played in destroying de jure and setting up the modern world to accept liberalism. It is my opinion that Calvin was the spiritual grandfather of Darwin and Nietzsche who launched the modern myth of nihilistic developmentalism as good. Calvin pushed the boundaries and derived the sense that "power is venerable when stripped of all good." (Lewis).
The Lord walked in the garden with Adam and was present physically with His creation. The Lord chose a physical platform to explain His plan to destroy the world with a flood. God visited Abram/Abraham and had lunch with him. They discussed the destiny of the world. Moses hung out at a burning bush and then met God on the mountain where he received the stone tablets (he had to carve his own set for the rewrite). God was constantly showing up in His own handiwork and having discussions with people about what He wanted. Meanwhile, the Lord begins an entirely new program of communication when He ordains the Tabernacle and validates it with His own presence there. The trajectory of the Tabernacle is the Throne of David, the Temple, the Exile (largely because the Tabernacle was cast aside as an embarrasment to the Israelites), the Cross and the Resurrection. God communicates to His people by being among them and, ultimately, being human (not a dog as Calvin thinks is ok), He lives a real human life and dies a real death.
It is difficult to understand how Calvinists can picture God as being pristine and distant like a cosmic fireball of energy. The idea that God's involvement in the lives of people is carried on from some ethereal laboratory setting where He is constantly viewing everything that is happening in all of creation and can never escape from His own omniscience is not supported in the Bible (If He knows everything, why does he need angelic reports Job 1:6... If He is sovereign de facto**, then why can't He choose to not know what He doesn't wish to know?). When all the bad pictures that you Calvinists come up with are processed, it amounts to the same thing...you favor a unitarian perspective of God and you subordinate Jesus to a position of semi-divine at best. Whatever your confessions and whatever your loud squawks about being committed to biblical revelation, when you make up unbiblical nonsense about God's preselection process where something you call God chooses to send babies and other people to hell just because he can and wants to, your theology does not agree with the apostles.
Jesus is God!
Did you get that?
Jesus is God.
Your ideas that put salvation in the clean room of pre-creation heaven and all of you the lucky recipients of a Holy lottery serve to exclude Jesus in action (sweaty, bloody, dirty...spitting to produce sight for the blind, weeping to produce tears for those who hurt as He hurt) on earth to provide salvation for those who trade their death for His life.
Jesus is God and He defines His glory as the cross (Luke 24:26,1 Peter 1:11). To glorify God means to live the cross, preach the cross, raise up the cross, honor the cross, cling to the cross, recognize the cross as the beginning place of salvation that only happens in time. You cannot prove anything about predestination...you can prove the power of the cross by living it.
Come to the cross.
**I am thoroughly indebted to C.S. Lewis for explaining the tension between Sovereign de facto and Sovereign de jure and his extensive explanation of the part that Calvin played in destroying de jure and setting up the modern world to accept liberalism. It is my opinion that Calvin was the spiritual grandfather of Darwin and Nietzsche who launched the modern myth of nihilistic developmentalism as good. Calvin pushed the boundaries and derived the sense that "power is venerable when stripped of all good." (Lewis).
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