Well if you answer those questions with something like,
"The role of preaching is to convince people to use their wills to obey the bible so
that God will give them heaven," you have a works based gospel. I can’t think of
any other reason that the will of man would be held up as the supreme device by which
people come to God, except in a works based religion where people earn from God what they
get from him. If it has not yet started to become clear to you that the doctrine of
election or predestination does not require a man in his unregenerate state to have
desires for God, or even a willingness to seek God. But that God chooses or elects
individuals not based on anything they can or will do. But through the preaching of the
Gospel God takes hold of their hearts and gives them the desire they need to be willing to
seek Him, causing them to be born again. Changing them into Christians. This is
how I understand the free gift of salvation, which man’s will can not take any credit
for, giving God all the glory. I hope this sheds some light on why it is puzzling to me
that those who oppose predestination or election would do so armed as it were with the
gospel of the free will, which to me is no gospel at all.
Now having said all that I said about the will, hopefully giving some food for thought
on the subject, let us turn to the second issue mentioned as ground for why predestination
just can not be so. Which is, if God elects all that go to Heaven, and all do not go to
Heaven, then God defacto elects all that go to eternal punishment, which is completely
contrary to the idea that God loves man infinitely more than anything else. And that
God’s highest delight is in mankind. And that everything God does He does motivated
first and solely by his desire that mankind is happy and healthy and prosperous. If these
things are true, than any theology that makes God ultimately responsible for whether or
not people go to heaven can not be representative of the truth.
First of all I need to say that I do believe that God is loving and his love for his
children surpasses anything they can imagine. The issue here is, is God’s love toward
mankind his primary motivation in all he does and wills to do? In other words does God
value mankind above all other things? If he did then we could say that God does everything
first and foremost with the benefit of mankind as a sole end. But to say that would go
contrary to so much Christian theology. First of all if this were true about God, how
could we get around the thought that God were an idolater? If God forbids us to have any
other gods (idols) except him, and commands us to love and worship only him, or in other
words to value him higher than we value anything else, how are we to understand that He
values us more than He values himself?