Quote:
Originally Posted by Sonoftheday  Quote: |
If God arbitrarily chose, predestined, me for hell or heaven, if before I was born He had decided my place of eternity then I would rather go to HELL then be in heaven with this God.
| This is something that I have heard many times in one form or another coming from supposed Christians whenever discussing God's Sovereignty. How do you respond whenever someone who claims to be a Christian says they would rather go to hell than to heaven with a sovereign God? |
I assume they didn't actually say, "they would rather go to hell than to heaven with a sovereign God," but that this is your interpretation of what they mean by the quote... I understand the meanings we, being Reformed, place on their words, but don't you think that, at least in many cases, when people say this they actually mean, "I would rather go to hell than be in heaven with a God who forces people to do whatever he wants?" At least sometimes when I've heard people speak like this, that is what they are getting at. If this is the case, then our reformed confessions jump right in and agree that the true God is not like this:
There is no "violence offered to the will of the creature" (3.1) and "God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty and power of acting upon choice, that it is neither forced, nor by any necessity of nature determined to do good or evil" (9.1).
Thus any tyrant false god should not be served in any way that gets you into that false god's heaven. So if this is the intent of these Christians you have spoken with, their objection is removed since the Reformed will join right in with other Christians who would rather suffer the worst hell any false god can deliver even to the point of maryrdom, than to give up the true God in order to enjoy the greatest heaven any false god of this world could offer. That's what the early church did, and many suffered the worst hell the false god Caesar could deliver.