Does God love you and have a wonderful plan for your life? It is the longing of every soul to know that they matter and that God loves them.
Billy Graham: “In all of life there is nothing more wonderful than discovering peace with God. Step one to this discovery is realizing God’s plan—peace and life. God loves you and wants you to experience peace and life—abundant and eternal.”646
However, those who reject the gospel do not want to hear about any “wonderful plan” that God has for them—they have their own plans for their life. However, on Judgment Day, if they come to find out that God gave them certain talents and abilities intended to be used for God’s glory, but were instead misused for their own glory, thus denying God the glory that was due to Him, then they will come under a rightful and just divine judgment.
What do Calvinists believe?
James White: “Surely it is part of modern evangelical tradition to say, ‘God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,’ but providing a meaningful biblical basis for this assertion is significantly more difficult.”647
Our reply:
He has to say that. Obviously, there can be no “wonderful plan of salvation” for Calvinism’s non-elect, whom Jesus allegedly did not die for, as per Calvinism’s doctrine of a Limited Atonement. So, he is just speaking out of a prior theological commitment. It’s like when Calvinists argue that all sin must have a “purpose” and that there can be no random, purposeless sins. Why? Because of a theological pre-commitment. In other words, if God “decreed whatsoever comes to pass”—which is what Calvinists believe—then how would it make sense to say that He decreed something for no reason? Obviously, if God does something, there has to be a reason, and hence Calvinists are obligated to say that there can be no random, meaningless sins. Calvinists often take stances without disclosing their theological pre-commitments.
So, what might be a “meaningful biblical basis” to support the assertion that God does indeed indiscriminately love everyone and generally does have a wonderful plan for everyone’s life?
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.”
Jeremiah 29:11: “‘For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’”
Ezekiel 24:13: “‘In your filthiness is lewdness. Because I would have cleansed you, yet you are not clean, you will not be cleansed from your filthiness again until I have spent My wrath on you.’”
Hosea 7:13: “‘Woe to them, for they have strayed from Me! Destruction is theirs, for they have rebelled against Me! I would redeem them, but they speak lies against Me.’”
Matthew 23:37: “‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling.’”
Luke 7:30: “But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God’s purpose for themselves, not having been baptized by John.”
Luke 19:41-44: “When He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.’”
Any verse that speaks of God showing mercy to all is strong, too, such as John 1:29, 12:47, Romans 11:32, 1st Timothy 2:4, 4:10 and 2nd Peter 3:9, but the verses cited above are all things in which God says that He had a good plan and would have showed it to people but they refused His good plans for them.
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646 The Enduring Classics of Billy Graham: The Secret of Happiness (Nashville, Tennessee: W Publishing Group, 2002), 125.
647 Debating Calvinism (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, Inc., 2004), 265.
[This post has been excerpted with permission from Richard Coords, Calvinism Answered Verse by Verse and Subject by Subject, © 2024.]
