Question: The most obvious fallacy of your book, What Love Is This?, is its denial to God of the ...

August 1, 2003

TBC Staff

Question: The most obvious fallacy of your book, What Love Is This?, is its denial to God of the freedom to choose whom and in what way He will love. John MacArthur, J.I. Packer and others have pointed out that we may love in different ways and degrees (love for one’s husband or wife is different from love for one’s neighbor or for ice cream), yet your book insists that God’s love is the same for all people.

Answer: The analogy doesn’t fit. Love to friend or foe must still be love. But Calvinism insists that God “loves” those He has predestined to eternal torment before they were even born. That isn’t love! John MacArthur, Jr. writes: “He [God] loves the elect in a special way reserved only for them. But that does not make His love for the rest of humanity any less real” (The Love of God, p. 16). Can he be serious?! Those for whom Christ didn’t die, from whom He withholds salvation and whom He has predestined to eternal torment, God nevertheless loves because He gives them earthly benefits? Is it rational to say that God loves in any way those He has predestined to eternal doom? Of what value would it be to own the whole world for a few short years if eternity will be spent in the lake of fire?!

Calvinism denies that John:3:16 says God loves all mankind, for that would mean He died for all—heresy to Calvinists. But some Calvinists are embarrassed into saying that God loves everyone, though the tenets of Calvinism deny it. Thus we have contradictions, such as the following from John Piper: “Every time the gospel is preached to unbelievers it is the mercy of God that gives this opportunity for salvation” (What We Believe About the Five Points of Calvinism, p. 14). Preaching the gospel gives “opportunity for salvation” to those for whom Christ didn’t die and whom God predestined to eternal torment before they were born? Yet such madness is Calvinism’s only defense.