I love how he can fit eternity into a word, yet we are unable to see by that word what he has done.
I have no idea what you mean by "fit eternity into a word."
I think we are unable to simply convey or understand what God means by "compel".
Well, we may not be able to understand fully everything that God does but this doesn't mean we can't understand sufficiently what He is doing, or at all. I understand well enough what "compel" means. And as far as I understand the term, I don't see that it applies to what God does in bringing us to salvation.
But the love of Christ compels us anyway.
Only after we have "known and believed the love God has for us." (
1 John 4:16) His love can constrain or control us only after we have given it the freedom to do so.
How he does what he does, I don't know.
Yes, He does what He does. And what He has done is give us free agency.
People argue against "forces us" and "double predestination" as though there was a way to divide the concepts there. There is a lot we cannot understand, because he is not like us. He is not subject to the laws to which we are bound.
Divine inscrutability is certainly a limiting factor for us, but those with a Calvinist perspective tend, I think, to use the "mystery" of God as a convenient escape from the contradictions/illogicality of their doctrines.
If my logic is valid, I have to say he does whatever he pleases, and only what he pleases may happen.
And here you go immediately awry. As it stands, your statement here makes God the Author of evil. It requires that one believe that adultery, murder, rape, incest, gluttony - whatever sin you'd care to name - it pleased God to cause humans to enact. That's not the God I see described in Scripture. (
1 John 1:5; James 1:13)
I have to also say that our choices are ALWAYS subject to his sovereignty.
Yes, of course. And if He has sovereignly decreed that we should be free agents? What then?
As such, our behaving as though we are truly independent agents is a bit much.
Not at all. See Molinism and its views on divine permission.
A dog may behave according to his desires and instincts, but can be trained. When a trained dog misbehaves, he is corrected again.
But Calvinism asserts that the desires and instincts of man are imparted to him
by God. If a man "misbehaves," then, it is only as a consequence of the desires and instincts
God has given him. Why, then, should he be corrected? Is he not doing exactly as God made him to do? It looks that way to me.
His decisions thereafter --are they by chance, by character, or by coercion?
Under the notion of the meticulous sovereign decree of God, Calvinism holds that there is no such thing as chance and that our fundamental inclinations have been imposed upon us by God. We may act in accord with our desires, on Calvinism, but those desires have been placed within us by God and so
He is ultimately responsible for our acting in accord with those desires for good or ill.
Does it matter? He is totally into his decision, this we know. He is an earnest participant in whatever he does.
Yes, it does matter.
He is an "earnest participant" by God's doing, not his own. His participation is not something he has actually freely chosen, however earnest he may be.
One thing I have noticed, that is almost universal even among believers, is the outrageous (to my assessment, anyway) fact that thought they easily admit to their decisions being influenced from all sides by circumstances, upbringing, genetics, desires, habits etc, somehow they pretend outrage that God would influence them in any way, as though that relegates their decisions to robotic programming.
Well, this isn't me. But I understand your "outrage."
I think this is significant, for several reasons --one, because it shows we recognize that God is unlike anything else, but two, because to our thinking, God is not allowed to do a small thing; even his small influences upon us are extreme, to our independent tendencies. And three, because this is the position we exalt ourselves to --that God is only like us, and we have integrity of existence independent of him.
Again, this isn't reflective of what I think. It is no less bizarre, though, than protesting sin when it is God who has decreed the sin of which men are guilty, or preaching the Gospel to those God will inexorably make His own.