I am currently working my way through an excellent online book on the Reformed Doctrine of Predestination by Loraine Boettner. I think the following comments are very true of how humans try to create a god in their own image (idolatry). Wishing and hoping for a god we would like and "cherry-picking" verses from Scripture that match our preconceived desires. Rather than reading, studying and wrestling with ALL of the verses in the Bible to know God as He has chosen to reveal Himself in Scripture. I would substitute the word "theologian" for "Christian", because all Christians should be theologians.
"Men constantly deceive themselves by postulating their own peculiar feelings and opinions as moral axioms. To some it is self-evidently true that a holy God cannot permit sin; hence they infer that there is no God. To others it is self-evident that a merciful God cannot permit a portion of His rational creatures to be forever the victims of sin and misery, and consequently they deny the doctrine of eternal punishment. Some assume that the innocent cannot justly be punished for the guilty, and are led to deny the vicarious and substitutionary suffering and death of Christ. And to others it is an axiom that the free acts of a free agent cannot be certain and under the control of God, so they deny the foreordination, or even the foreknowledge, of such acts.
We are not at liberty, however, to develop a system of our own liking. "The question which of these systems is true," says Dr. Charles Hodge, a zealous and uncompromising advocate of Calvinism, "is not to be decided by ascertaining which is the more agreeable to our feelings or the more plausible to our understanding, but which is consistent with the doctrines of the Bible and the facts of experience." "It is the duty of every theologian to subordinate his theories to the Bible, and teach not what seems to him to be true or reasonable, but simply what the Bible teaches," And again, "There would be no end of controversy, and no security for any truth whatever, if the strong personal convictions of individual minds be allowed to determine what is, or what is not true, what the Bible may, and what it may not be allowed to teach."23
23 Systematic Theology, II, pp. 356, 559, 531.
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