Calvinism, Reformed Theology, and Presbyterianism
Beloved reader, it is quite possible that you are unaware of the dangers of calvinist doctrine. There are many believers who simply do not know the extent of what their pastors teach and proclaim in presbyterian churches, reformed churches, and multi-point calvinist churches. While you may desire to inquire of your pastors and elders, you must understand that their doctrinal alignment is to John Calvin (where "Calvinism" gets its name). The following subject matter and studies will likely disturb you, they will seem divisive, and you will very likely be offended. When you read about the events of the last days in Holy Scripture, however, the state of the church and doctrine will be that of disarray, disorder, and confusion. We have reached an era where calvinist pastors have removed God's penalty for taking the mark of the beast. The Bible refers to "perilous times" specifically because it will be a time of peril, sorrow, and tribulation. These are things that must come to pass before the return of Jesus. It is our prayer that the grace of Jesus and the comfort of the Holy Spirit give you immense peace as you consider these deep spiritual matters.
Calvinist pastors permit the mark of the beast (4 min point)
The Marathon
Understand predestination
A Biblical understanding of Romans
Calvinist leaders teach Romans 8 and 9 with singularity. They do so in severe error. The themes of Romans 8 and 9 must include the fullness of chapters 7 through 11 which provide deeper text and context with an understanding of Old Testament truths. Understanding the Scriptures in this manner further reveals God's unending love and longsuffering, not willing that any should perish.
Impossibilities of Theory
Reformed Theology is not Biblical Theology. Rather, it is a theory of mere man that fails to align with Scripture. Dogma and theory found wanting in the balance of Scripture must always be abandoned.
Errors of Calvinist and Reformed ideologies:
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: I say with Augustine, that the Lord has created those who, as he certainly foreknew, were to go to destruction, and he did so because he so willed.
John Calvin, Commentary: Moreover, God Himself has explicitly instructed us to kill heretics, to smite with the sword any city that abandons the worship of the true faith revealed by Him.
John Calvin, Bainton: God makes plain that the false prophet is to be stoned without mercy. We are to crush beneath our heel all affections of nature when his honor is involved.
John Calvin, Commentary: Their [the Jews] rotten and unbending stiffneckedness deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without measure or end and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone.
John Calvin, Letter to the Lord Protector of Somerset: [They] well deserve to be repressed by the sword which is committed to you, seeing that they attack not the King only, but God who has seated him upon the throne, and has entrusted to you the protection as well of His person as of His majesty.
John Calvin, Defense of Orthodox Faith: Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt. This is not laid down on human authority; it is God who speaks and prescribes a perpetual rule for his Church.
John Calvin, Letter to the Marquis Paet: Honour, glory, and riches shall be the reward of your pains; but above all, do not fail to rid the country of those scoundrels [Anabaptists and others], who stir up the people to revolt against us. Such monsters should be exterminated, as I have exterminated Michael Servetus the Spaniard.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: To many this seems a perplexing subject, because they deem it most incongruous that of the great body of mankind some should be predestined to salvation, and other to destruction. From this we infer, that all who know not that they are the peculiar people of God, must be wretched from perpetual trepidation.
John Calvin, Institutes III: If God merely foresaw human events, and did not also arrange and dispose of them at his pleasure, there might be room for agitating the question, how far his foreknowledge amounts to necessity, but since He has decreed that they are so to happen it is clear that all events take place by his sovereign appointment.
John Calvin, Institutes III: Those, therefore, whom God passes by he reprobates, and that for no other cause but because he is pleased to exclude them from inheritance which he predestines to his children. But if all whom the Lord predestines to death are naturally liable to sentence of death, of what injustice, pray, do they complain because by his eternal providence they were before their birth doomed to perpetual destruction, what will they be able to mutter against this defense? Of this no other cause can be adduced than reprobation, which is hidden in the secret counsel of God. Now since the arrangement of all things is in the hand of God, He arranges that individuals are born, who are doomed from the womb to certain death, and are to glorify him by their destruction. God, according to the good pleasure of his will, without any regard to merit, elects those he chooses for sons, while he rejects and reprobates others.
Westminster Confession of Faith: God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of his own will for the glory of his sovereign power over his creatures, to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice.
Jay E. Adams, Competent to Counsel: Counselors must not tell any unsaved counselee that Christ died for him, for they cannot say that. No man knows except Christ himself who are his elect for whom he died.
RC Sproul Jr., Almighty Over All: God wills all things that come to pass. God created sin.
John Piper, The Genius of Geneva: The true genius of Geneva was not the mind of John Calvin, but passion for the glory of God.
Paul Tripp, endorsement of With Calvin in the Theater of God: Here you will be thankful for the man Calvin and how he enables you to see life-shaping truths, but you will be even more thankful for Calvin’s Christ. For as is true of Calvin, is true of every follower of Jesus, the faint glory of the man is only as good as it humbly and relentlessly points you to the spectacular glory of his Lord.
RC Sproul, Chosen: If some people are not elected unto salvation then it would seem that God is not at all that loving towards them. Further, it seems that it would have been more loving of God not to have allowed them to be born. That may indeed be the case.
John MacArthur, afterward of The Five Points of Calvinism - Defined, Defended and Documented: The doctrines of Calvinistic soteriology must stand or fall by the test of Scripture, period… I believe them not because of their historical pedigree, but because that is what Scripture teaches.
John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion: Single events are ordered by God and that every event comes from his intended will. Nothing happens by chance.
John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion: The devil and all the ungodly are reined in by God, so that they cannot conceive, plan or carry out any crime, unless God allows it, indeed commands it. They are not only in bondage to him, but are forced to serve him. It is the Lord’s prerogative to enable the enemy’s rage and to control it at will, and it is in his power to decide how far and how long it may last, so that wicked men cannot break free and do exactly what they want.
John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion: The will of God is the supreme and primary cause of everything, because nothing happens without his order of permission.
John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion: Everything is controlled by God’s secret purpose, and nothing can happen except by his knowledge and will.
John Calvin, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries - Romans and Thessalonians: The reason why God elects some and rejects others is to be found in His purpose alone. Before men are born their lot is assigned to each of them by the secret will of God. The salvation or the destruction of men depends on His free election.
Westminster Confession of Faith: By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death.
Arthur W. Pink, The Sovereignty of God: When we say God is sovereign in the exercise of his love, we mean that he loves whom he chooses. God does not love everybody.
Vincent Cheung, The Problem of Evil: One who thinks that God’s glory is not worth the death and suffering of billions of people has too high an opinion of himself and humanity.
George Whitefield, Selected Sermons of George Whitefield: If God is not glorified in your salvation, he will be glorified in your destruction.
Erwin Lutzer, The Doctrines That Divide: Christ did not die for all men in general but gave himself only for the church, the elect.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: Even infants bringing their condemnation with them from their mother’s womb, suffer not for another’s, but for their own defect. For although they have not produced the fruits of their own unrighteousness, they have the seed implanted in them. Nay, their whole nature is, as it were, a seed-bed of sin, and therefore cannot but be odius and abominable to God.
John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God: Whatever things are done wrongly and unjustly by man, these very things are the right and just works of God.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: God not only foresaw the fall of the first man, and in him the ruin of his posterity; but also at his own pleasure arranged it.
RC Sproul, Chosen by God: I no longer feared the demons of fatalism or the ugly thought that I was being reduced to a puppet. Now I rejoiced in a gracious Savior who alone was immortal, invisible, the only wise God.
John Piper (on the Sandy Hook school shooting), Confronting the Problem(s) of Evil - Biblical, Philosophical, and Emotional Reflections on a Perpetual Question: What if God is an author and this world is his story and we are his characters? Would we see the problem of evil in a different light? ... Here’s the basic claim: God is an Author. The World is his story. We are his characters.
James White (when asked, “When a child is raped, is God responsible and did He decree that rape?”), Bible Answer Man radio broadcast: Yes, because if not, then it’s meaningless and purposeless, and though God knew it was going to happen he created it without a purpose, and God is responsible for the creation of despair. If He didn’t [decree child rape], then that rape is an element of meaningless evil that has no purpose.
John MacArthur, Election and Predestination - The Sovereignty of God in Salvation: That’s one of the reasons I know the Bible is written by God, because men would fix it. If I wrote a book that had those contradictions, Phil [Johnson] would edit them all out. One of the benchmarks of divine inspiration is the fact that you’re dealing with transcendence.
James White, Debating Calvinism: God is under no obligation to extend His grace to the rebel sinner, and every single person who enters into eternal punishment would, were they given the opportunity, freely choose to remain under punishment rather than bow the knee in loving adoration of the God they hate.
RC Sproul, Chosen by God: Predestination seems to cast a shadow on the very heart of human freedom. If God has decided our destinies from all eternity, that strongly suggests that our free choices are but charades, empty exercises in predetermined playacting. It is as though God wrote the script for us in concrete and we are merely carrying out his scenario.
RC Sproul, What is Reformed Theology?: This statement refers to God’s eternal and immutable decretive will. It applies to everything that happens. Does this mean that everything that happens is the will of God? Yes.
What does the Bible say?
Ezekiel 18:32 (God's love and longsuffering): For I have no pleasure in the death of one who dies,” says the Lord God. “Therefore turn and live!”
Ezekiel 33:11a (God's love and longsuffering): Say to them: ‘As I live,’ says the Lord God, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways!
1 Timothy 2:3-4 (God's desire): For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
Acts 8:14-17 (believers in Jesus without the Holy Spirit): Now when the apostles who were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them, who, when they had come down, prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit. For as yet He had fallen upon none of them. They had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.
Luke 8:13 (short term believers): But the ones on the rock are those who, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and these have no root, who believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away.
1 Corinthians 2:12-14 (the Holy Spirit teaches): Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. These things we also speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
Observe the fruit:
Hypocrisy disqualifies:
Investment scheme of pastor's son
Rules for thee, but not for me
Therefore you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things. But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth against those who practice such things. And do you think this, O man, you who judge those practicing such things, and doing the same, that you will escape the judgment of God?
(Romans 2:1-3)
And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.
(Ephesians 5:11)
Strange fire is spreading:
In these studies, you have heard a pastor advocate the mark of Satan by failing to warn a congregation. You have also heard about predestination and studies in Romans with clarity. If you presently lean Calvinist or Reformed, you very likely have many questions deep within the soul.
Beloved reader, you must understand the times. In these last days people are not enduring sound doctrine, and they choose rather to accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions (2 Timothy 4:3). Calvinism absolutely appeals to intellect. There is absolutely a form of godliness. But where is the power of the Holy Spirit? Where are the gifts of the Holy Spirit? The answer hits very hard!
How can there be the power of the Spirit, or the moving of the Spirit, or the gifts of the Spirit, when there is no yielding to the true Sword of the Spirit?
Choose wisely:
Strange fire is rapidly spreading. While alarming, the Bible absolutely warns of these treacherous times. What are saints to do?
Disregard them. They are blind guides. If a blind man leads a blind man, both will fall into a pit. (Matthew 15:14)
Of such who have a form of godliness while denying its power, the Bible warns faithful saints to turn away from them (2 Timothy 3:5). As you prayerfully consider these matters and the will of the Sovereign, do not be soon shaken in mind or troubled, either by spirit or by word or by letter. As in Numbers 9:18, you might see a cloud over a different camp, a camp that is neither Calvinist nor Reformed. It is the camp of a better Way. You are invited to join and walk with us.
May the Lord bless you and keep you in these last days.