2nd Samuel 24:12
2nd Samuel 24:11-14
When David arose in the morning, the word of the LORD came to the prophet Gad, David’s seer, saying, “Go and speak to David, ‘Thus the LORD says, “I am offering you three things; choose for yourself one of them, which I will do to you.”’” So Gad came to David and told him, and said to him, “Shall seven years of famine come to you in your land? Or will you flee three months before your foes while they pursue you? Or shall there be three days’ pestilence in your land? Now consider and see what answer I shall return to Him who sent me.” Then David said to Gad, “I am in great distress. Let us now fall into the hand of the LORD for His mercies are great, but do not let me fall into the hand of man.”
One member of The Society of Evangelical Arminians: “What I just don’t understand is how this passage squares with exhaustive determinism. God not only told David to choose, but gave him three options from which to choose! The choice was his, without being the pre-ordained choice of God. Help us out, Calvinists. Was David free, in the Libertarian sense, in that he genuinely could have chosen any course of action? David ‘chose’ to fall into the hands of the LORD (2 Sam. 24:14), and He sent a plague (and even then demonstrated mercy, 2 Sam. 24:16).”
First, there are multiple kinds of Calvinists. Indeed, some Calvinists do affirm Hard Determinism, and thus there is but one choice: God’s, and all other choices are merely the byproduct of the divine choice to script whatsoever He wills for the alleged, immutable decree. In this sense, David’s choice to sin (by taking the census) was every bit as predetermined by the divine choice, as all of his other choices, which includes which punishment-option of the three that he would accept. Other Calvinists, such as what is indicated below, shows an alternate Calvinist view:
Calvinist, Charles Spurgeon: “No man is saved by his own free-will, but every man is damned by it that is damned. He does it of his own will; no one constrains him. ... If any of you want to know what I preach every day, and any stranger should say, ‘Give me a summary of his doctrine,’ say this, ‘He preaches salvation all of grace, and damnation all of sin. He gives God all the glory for every soul that is saved, but he won’t have it that God is to blame for any man that is damned.’ That teaching I cannot understand. My soul revolts at the idea of a doctrine that lays the blood of man’s soul at God’s door. I cannot conceive how any human mind, at least any Christian mind, can hold any such blasphemy as that. I delight to preach this blessed truth—salvation of God, from first to last—the Alpha and the Omega; but when I come to preach damnation, I say, damnation of man, not of God; and if you perish, at your own hands must your blood be required.” (Jacob and Esau, emphasis mine)
By that view, David’s choice to sin was by his own unconstrained free-will, based upon his fallen nature, rather than God scripting or pre-determining him to commit sin. Hard Determinists would challenge this variety of Calvinists to explain how God could still be sovereign if He does not pre-determine all things.
