X+Y= Calvin, too.

In 2 Samuel 7:10, the Lord promises to give the Children of Israel a place to dwell that cannot be invaded by the “children of wickedness.”  I thought about this verse all week and kept noticing that my thoughts were drawn away from the conflict and focused on what is the common denominator. 

Children.

Human children.

How do human children get into the world?  Is it a spiritual process?  A rational process?  A function of the soul?  Do people talk about children and they appear?  Are there storks involved…?  Do parents order them from the Sears Roebuck catalog?  (Yes…this was told to small children once upon a time.  No doubt the modern equivalent is that they are purchased on EBay.)  Can preachers preach them into existence or do politicians derive them from villages?

There is a biological process that requires male and female cells to combine and make human children.   These cells are manufactured in the bodies of the two human parents.  When they are combined together, they share all sorts of information packets that begins the whirlwind process (air head young people should not “sow the wind” without expecting to “reap the whirlwind”) of grabbing proteins and other stuff with which to build a baby.  The baby is a human baby.

I am sure this all seems rather obvious to everyone.  It may even seem rather silly that I contemplate such things at my age.  However, if you will look at the 2^nd sentence in the paragraph above, I think you may see something very remarkable.  Physical, biological cells are manufactured in the human bodies of two separate persons.  Because of God’s creative power that He introduced into the human organism (you cannot make a case for constant/continuing creation without bumping up against the seventh day rest = Genesis 2:2), the mechanism of sperm/egg combination works today as it did on day one of procreation. 

Please stop for a moment and pay attention to what I am NOT saying.  The end result of the procreative process in a world that has been and is ravaged by sin and death can be very different from the likeness of God in Adam/Eve’s creation and the likeness of Adam to which we are all subject (Genesis 5:3…most people who make noises about man being in God’s image refuse to remember that we who have fig juice in our veins cannot go home beyond Seth).  BUT, the end result of the combination of human sperm to human egg (aka, conception) always results in human life.  It cannot turn into a dog (sorry, Calvin, you are wrong) or an indescribable critter that will become a new species.

100 billion instances of this process later, we find that it has 100% repeatability.  There is no evidence that out of 100 billion sperm/egg combinations, 1% of them (one billion), for instance, became something not human.  Even in the 1 in 100,000,000,000^th instance of an egg that is divinely fertilized (Luke 1:35), the resultant person who has the right to call Himself the Son of God, uses the title, “Son of Man.”  Jesus is GOD!  

Point? 

Calvin and Calvinists have a philosophy of “muddy mysticism” (C.S. Lewis) that teaches that corruption (depravity) in the human being is total.  This corruption, they say, reaches into all parts of humanity.  This defilement, depravity or corruption, they say, is intrinsic in all parts of the body and completely ruins the body.

Oops.  Calvin forgot to tell God how to create so that the procreative mechanism in humans would be ruined when Adam and Eve ate figs.  How sad that, once again, his ideas prove to be foolish and unbiblical and his notion of the sovereignty of sin is greater than what he calls “God.”  How sad for him that there are other human functions that cannot be understood as corrupted.  Human reasoning has to be reliable (‘Bulverism’ by C.S. Lewis) for Calvin to make his monumental mistakes in theology and for others to try to show where they need correcting.  Rain falls on the unjust and just thinker alike.  

Meanwhile, Jesus is that one in one hundred billionth instance of the reliability of the procreative mechanism with only a sinful female component – virgin birth.  Jesus fulfilled the destiny that He had been assigned when He made it plain - in time - that new creation begins at the cross (1 Peter 1:20). 

Come to the cross.