2nd Chronicles 24:19
2nd Chronicles 24:19
Yet He sent prophets to them to bring them back to the LORD; though they testified against them, they would not listen.
Question: Why wouldn’t they listen?
Answer: They hardened their hearts, as God warned them not to do: “To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness: When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my ways: Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my rest.” (Psalm 95:7-11, KJV)
The prophet Ezra stated it: “Our whole history has been one of great sin. That is why we and our kings and our priests have been at the mercy of the pagan kings of the land. We have been killed, captured, robbed, and disgraced, just as we are today.” (Ezra 9:7, NLT)
One member of the Society of Evangelical Arminians: “Here God acted with the purpose that they would turn back to him, but they resisted his grace and refused to do as he purposed they would do. It amazes me how Calvinists often reject the point that God genuinely wants all to be saved and acts with the purpose of saving people, yet allows his will to be resisted based on the idea that God’s purpose cannot fail, when Scripture often speaks of God allowing his purpose to be thwarted. Calvinists will sometimes argue that if God’s purpose does not come to pass, then his is a failure. But Scripture testifies clearly against this reasoning. The answer is quite simple and found in Arminian theology: God often allows his purpose to be successfully resisted. He gives people free will and bestows resistible grace.”
Another member of the Society of Evangelical Arminians: “It is an excellent support for Arminian doctrine. I recall this from a couple years ago and the Calvinist reaction was to pull a canned response out of the bag and state it was just to show God’s Glory. I thought it was the funniest thing I had read in a while.”
Another member of the Society of Evangelical Arminians: “Verse 18 says something a bit profound as well: ‘Because of their guilt, God’s anger came on Judah and Jerusalem’ (TNIV). It was not because of God’s sovereign decree to pour out His sovereign wrath upon whomsoever He sovereignly wanted, but because of their guilt, God’s anger came upon them.”
It’s very important to emphasize the foreordination behind Calvinism, because normally a Calvinist would just attribute “guilt” and unbelief to Total Depravity, while completely ignoring the 900-lb gorilla in the room: Foreordination, in terms of the alleged “sovereign decree.” That’s why it’s very wise to keep the Fatalists focused on the real issue at hand, which is, their insistence that everything is the product of an alleged “script,” and that if there were no such script, that God would otherwise be incapable of knowing the future. For more on this point, see here.
