All seen from your pov.
We are made by him, and he can do as he pleases with us. If you wish to take the tack that he is evil to do so, by your own standard you will be measure. If you wish to take the tack that free will is the only way to excuse your God, still you will be measured by that standard. God have mercy on all who do such.
But if, on the other hand, you admit that we all deserve destruction, but he has mercy on whom he will, by his own council just as he says, and FOR HIS OWN SAKE, not asking our advice nor permission, yet gentle and kind when we were still at enmity with him, transforming us into his image, not taking the credit for having put ourselves into some equation we call the Gospel, you may have some concept of the truth of the Gospel that is the work of God, and not of man.
Nah, that's a fairly distorted version of the gospel. If God created man in such a way as to deserve destruction, with no part for man's own will to play, then God, Himself, creates every single act of evil, regardless of how atrocious and depraved, and then blames man for it anyway, and then even sends some to
eternal torment for it-and we'd have to bury our heads in the sand in order believe in and follow such a god. Might as well follow satan; as least he didn't
create anyone to sin. But God gave us a sense of justice; we know it when we see it-as we know
injustice when we see that. And justice and injustice done are
always matters of the will. Culpability is simply related to knowledge and deliberateness of intent-or no moral evil can be committed.
The Scripture, and Reformed Theology, and I do not claim there is no will of man, nor that man does not choose and decide. I will even admit the word, "accept" is compelling; as long as it means turning our hearts to him rather than away from him, and that it is done as he knocks, not as we see him coming, but as he does his work on us, I am satisfied. But I must insist, the work he does on us is regeneration, not merely pleading his case, or merely appealing to our reason. We do not have the nature of ourselves to reason our way into the Gospel. This is the work of God.
It's not a matter of appealing merely to our reason;
but appeal He does; that's the central message of the cross; He appeals to our whole beings with self-sacrificial love, with grace; He seeks to inform and rectify and
draw the will, without coercion, force, or strict determinism in any case. If He was going to determine our destinies for us than He may as well have prevented Adam from sinning to begin with, or simply stocked heaven with the elect and hell with the rest to begin with, and avoided all the suffering, evil, sin, pain, and death that followed the Fall of man. Instead He patiently worked with man over centuries, cultivating him until he might, just barely, begin to be drawn to and embrace the light when he's presented with it, having developed a hunger and thirst for righteousness, a hunger and thirst for
God in the relatively godless world that's he's been exiled to, so he may begin to
choose rightly IOW.
That's what God wants-that's what God covets, like a good parent desiring His children to make right choices. But we can't do it without Him; we couldn't save ourselves if our lives depended on it-which they do; we wouldn't know where to start; we're lost. But we can still
refuse to accept-or spit it all back in His face later on at any point down the road.
