Luke 14:23
Luke 14:23 (see also Matthew 22:2-10)
“And the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the highways and along the hedges, and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled.’”
This expresses God’s motivation. God wants a full house.
Calvinists mistake the fact that God uses sin (like that of Joseph’s brothers, according to Genesis 50:20), into meaning that God wants sin. It’s part of the Calvinist mythos which holds that sin exists solely for the purpose of “displaying various divine attributes.” Calvinists need to explain why things are the way that they are (as established by sovereign order), and that’s what they’ve historically come up with. But that’s not an accurate motivation for God. The stated motivation for God is Luke 14:23. God wants a full house. Of course He also has standards, and He wants for people to seek and find Him on His stated terms (John 3:16), but the point is that Calvinism has an incorrect motivation for God. God doesn’t want sin. God wants a full house (of those who believe in Him), and He is willing to use self-hardened, sinful men like Pharaoh, and use such men’s resolve against them (God’s hardening), in order to steer others towards Him, all with the objective of achieving a full house. I think that Calvinists are subconsciously afraid of God being good, because it would otherwise conflict with their reality of a world that has become bad, but the world is not bad because of God, but because of men, and God will one day, permanently correct that. In the meantime, God is building a full house, and as much as it is up to Him, He wants you and everyone else in it. Those who believe in Him, are His voice on earth, working towards this objective. However, the effect of Calvinism is that it distorts God’s voice on earth, by teaching that Jesus didn’t die for everyone and doesn’t love everyone, and that God does not have an indiscriminate salvific desire for all. Yet God, for His part, is willing that all come to know Him, through His Son.
