A Tale of Two Gospels
In my post "A Tale of Two Sermons", I shared something the Calvinist pastor at my ex-church preached, which was...
"The key verse in Jonah - the one that the rest of the book of Jonah hinges on - is 'Salvation belongs to our God.' Tim Keller [Calvinist!] says this: 'If someone is saved, it is wholly God's doing. It is not a matter of God saving you partly and you partly saving yourself. No! God saves us. We do not and cannot save ourselves. That is the gospel.' And that is the message of Jonah: Only God elects. Only God sovereignly draws. Only God sovereignly convicts us of sin. Only God sovereignly opens blinded eyes."
And here's a segment from that post sharing my comments about it, with a few edits and additions (I think this should get its own post because it's a crucial point):
1. We all agree that God saves us, that we cannot save ourselves. But what Keller - and all Calvinists - really mean is that we can't even choose to put our faith in Jesus on our own, that God decides whom to save and that He causes those prechosen people to have faith and that no one else can be saved. And the Calvinist pastor at my ex-church confirms it.
And that idea - combined with "God controls everything" (something else the Calvinist pastor says) - is what all Calvinist sermons hinge on. Their underlying belief that "God chooses who gets saved and controls everything" taints everything else they preach.
And notice how the Calvinist pastor slipped in into the middle. Oftentimes, Calvinists will preach a fairly good sermon, but then they'll slip in their unbiblical Calvinism - the bottom-line, what they really mean - somewhere in the middle surrounded by biblical-sounding things or at the end after all the biblical-sounding things. Because if they had said it upfront, it would have completely negated or contradicted the rest of their sermon.
[It's like my Calvinist pastor's Christmas sermon about why most people reject Jesus. Almost the whole sermon was about real reasons people don't want Jesus, but his very last point was that most people won't come to Jesus simply because God doesn't call them because He didn't choose them, and so they cannot come to Jesus. THIS is the only point in his whole sermon that mattered, the point that erases all the other ones because all those other ones mean nothing in light of the last one. And he saved it for the very end, tagging lies onto the end of truth, first lulling people into listening to him, trusting him, and then tossing in a dose of poison that kills his whole sermon. And then he dared to add that we should just be happy that God chose to save anyone at all when we all deserve hell - basically shaming those who might disagree into keeping quiet. We wouldn't want to be ungrateful or question God's sovereign control, now would we?]
2. To Keller: Oh my goodness, no! The gospel is not that God preplans/chooses whom to save and that He causes them (and only them!) to be saved and that we have no influence or choice over whether or not we are saved (which is what Keller is really saying)!
The gospel is (my paraphrase, and succinctly) "Jesus died for your sins and rose again so that you could believe in Him and be saved." That is the gospel!
1 Cor. 15:3-4: "For what I received I passed onto you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures,".
This is of first importance, the message we are supposed to pass on to all people: Christ died for our sins and rose again, and so we can believe in Him and be saved.
John 20:31: "But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."
1 Timothy 2:3-6: "This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ, who gave himself as a ransom for all men..."
That is the gospel, the good news!
And yet this gospel is exactly what's missing from Calvinism's message of "'If someone is saved, it is wholly God's doing. It is not a matter of God saving you partly and you partly saving yourself. No! God saves us. We do not and cannot save ourselves. That is the gospel.' And that is the message of Jonah: Only God elects. Only God sovereignly draws. Only God sovereignly convicts us of sin. Only God sovereignly opens blinded eyes."
If someone can't even get the simple gospel right then they have no business being a pastor. And I don't care whatever else they do get right. If they get the gospel wrong - the most important part of Christianity - then it doesn't really matter that they get some minor, secondary things right. Like Paul said, "of first importance." If Calvinists cannot understand the "first important" message, then they should be disqualified from teaching God's Word.
Calvinism's "gospel" is only good news for the elect. But the Bible's gospel is good news for all people (Luke 2:10): Christ died for all our sins, and so anyone can believe in Him and be saved, "For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men" (Titus 2:11).
Or even a little more fully: "We are all sinners headed to hell, but God loves us all and wants us all with Him in heaven. But because we can't get to heaven on our own (our sins keep us out), Jesus came to earth to make heaven possible for us. He paid the penalty we owe for our sins by dying the death we deserved. He died in our place so that we could live. And then to prove He's God and has power over death, He rose again three days later. And because He died for all people's sins, He offers the free gift of eternal life to all people. And if we want it - if we want to spend eternity with Him in heaven - all we have to do is accept the free gift of eternal life by putting our faith in Him as our Lord and Savior, accepting His sacrificial payment for our sins, His death in our place. And anyone can."
Romans 5:8: "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."
Romans 6:23: "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
2 Peter 3:9: "... He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."
Ezekiel 33:11: "Say to them, 'As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live..."
Acts 2:38: "Peter replied, 'Repent and be baptized every one of you ...'"
Romans 10:9,13: "That if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved... Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
