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NASB | John 3:16 ¶ "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | John 3:16 ¶ "For God so [greatly] loved and dearly prized the world, that He [even] gave His [One and] only begotten Son, so that whoever believes and trusts in Him [as Savior] shall not perish, but have eternal life. |
Subject: THE CROSS |
Bible Note: Re your post #89696 to Tim, Jibby-Jee. Look it over, review it. Then please consider this: Most often the shortcomings and pitfalls we see in others and accuse them of are nothing more or less than mirrors of ourselves. It really doesn't matter in the perspective of eternity whether one calls himself a Calvinist or an Arminian, or whether he embraces neither in toto. It does, however, matter a great deal when he begins to think of his persuasion as being the only possible one that Scripture affords and that as a consequence all other views are flat wrong. The word for this position is bigotry. We are all of us, my young friend, learners and we never in this life reach the utopia at which we need learn no more because we at last know it all. The woods are filled with Calvinists who have become Arminians and with Aminians who have become Calvinists, so it is perfectly obvious that there are convincing reasons in both theological idiologies. There are others, I among them, who see some truth in Calvinism and some in Arminianism, but who at the same time see how an adverse effect an extreme devotion to either of these 'isms' -- or to any other 'ism' -- can obscure the real message of the Scriptures and distort the plain meaning of the word of God. It is entirely possible, with sacred text or secular, to demand of the text more than text can supply, to ask the text to say more than it does or less than it does, or to take so much of our baggage to the text, the cumbersome baggage of our ideas and conclusions, that renders us so handicapped that we take too little of the text's ideas and conclusions that it could give us if our minds were unfettered. In general, I believe it is fair and accurate to say that the more convinced we become that our position is the only right one possible, and that all variant views are flawed and in serious error, the more ability we lose to grow in the faith, the less ability we retain to allow Scripture to speak to us as it is meant to do, to reprove our ways and correct our errors, and the less enabled we become to bring others to taste of the living water of Christ Jesus. When I hear a Calvinist speak so positively and so surely and with such presumed knowledge of the intricate and minute details of such enormously complex concepts as God's election and predestination -- when I know that the Bible does not reveal these subjects with anything approaching the detailed knowledge about them that the Calvinist pretends to have -- when he does that, I turn him off, because I feel certain that he doesn't fully understand what he is talking about. When, on the other hand, I hear a staunch Arminian proclaim that man has absolute free will, or that the maintenance of man's salvation depends on man's maintenace of good works to keep it viable, I likewise become slightly deaf, because I believe that man's will is not entirely free, although God did not turn man into a puppet after the fall, and thus man can still choose to accept or reject God's offer of grace but that no one comes to Christ without the convicting work of the Holy Spirit; and that man's good works will no more keep him saved than they will save him initially. But back to the point of being too sure that we have the exclusive mastery of the truth. We study, we pray, we struggle to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. We strive to keep the faith and to finish our course. But we should do so with humility and with godly fear, realizing that we see through our mirror darkly, we all have feet of clay, and none of us is pure and sinless enough to be justified in casting even that first stone against our neighbor. --Hank |