About This Video
Shawn presents three perspectives on God's role in salvation: Calvinism, where God predestines some for salvation and others for damnation; Arminianism, where God knows most will choose wrongly but remains powerless to save them due to freewill; and his own view, which sees God as loving and victorious, reconciling the world through Christ's sacrifice, offering salvation to all while respecting freewill. This interpretation emphasizes God's omniscience, omnipotence, mercy, and justice, ultimately presenting a deity who provides salvation from sin and death while allowing humans to make their own choices.
Calvin, Arminius or Biblical Reason
When it comes to the salvation of humankind and the purposes of God, Christianity pretty much sees God in one of three ways.
The first way is through the eyes of Calvin. This way says that from the beginning God has been in control of everything – including the salvation of man. He created the human race fully aware that He was going to save some and reject the rest. Those He saved would go to heaven and the rest would burn in literal flames of hell for eternity. The Calvinists say that this is a good God and the fact that He saves ANY of the humans He chose to create proves it.
The second way Christians see the salvation of humankind and the purposes of God is almost worse. It comes from Joseph Arminius and his way says that in the beginning, God also knew everything start to finish, including the fact that most human beings are going to fail and wind up going to an eternal hell due to their own free will. He created them anyway, fully realizing that He, in the face of the free will He gave us, could not do anything to save us. Like I said, this version of God and salvation is almost worse than the cold despotic God of Calvinism because the God of Arminianism knew, from the start, that most of the people He would create would go to an endless punishment in fiery hell and that He could not do anything about it, BUT HE CREATED THEM ANYWAY!
Another Perspective
I see God and His purposes differently. They are just as viable biblically as the Calvinist and Arminianist views – in fact, more so in my estimation. I suggest that from the beginning God, like the Calvinists and the Arminianists say, knew everything – beginning to end. I believe that He also chose to give human beings free will knowing full well that most would not choose Him. I suggest that instead of leaving it at that, God so loved the WORLD that He made that He gave us His only begotten Son who saved it – the world – from all the effects of the fall, from sinMissing the mark of faith and love—no punishment, just lost growth or peace., from Satan, from hell, and from deathSeparation from God—now overcome. Physical death remains, but it no longer separates us from life with God.. Praise to the victorious Jesus and His Father for loving us as they do!
Having reconciled the world to Himself completely in and through His Son, God now allows all people, by and through their free will, to seek and love Him – or not. He knew that most would not, but He took care of the wrath that would have abided upon them through the sacrifice of His Son. And He will reward them according to the lives they chose to live.
A Loving and Merciful God
Those who choose to receive His Son by faith, and are born of the Spirit, will enter His Kingdom and be rewarded too – for the fruits of their labors by the Spirit. In this view God is still all knowing, He is still all powerful, and He is just, but He is also victorious, good, merciful and did not fail by creating the human race, but succeeded in both giving us free will, allowing us to choose, but saving us from ourselves along the way.
That is the good, reasonable, loving, just, fair and merciful God I know. Who do you follow and serve?
