Originally posted by Chester
That's because the king is not paid. Don't you see, you're telling me that God the Father was paid to forgive sinners but the parable implies that the Father was not paid to forgive at all. Absorbing the loss is not the same as being paid, in fact, it shows that He was not paid.
Chester it's a parable. If you notice, in this parable, the king was owed a great, even unpayable, debt by his servant. We owe our Creator a great, even upayable, debt for our transgressions. In the parable, however, the servant begs for mercy. There is a very important difference here than in the life of the unregenerate. The unregenerate do not ask God for mercy because they don't recognize His authority. Though they can see that God must exist they don't glorify Him, nor are they thankful to Him (Rom 1:20-23).
Consider this analogy:
A man creates a formula that will bring a person back from the dead. The man is under no obligation, obviously, to give it to anyone. He goes to the morgue and says to the twenty bodies, "Okay everyone, I have a formula that will bring you back to life, and it's yours for free, no payment required."
Now, the Arminian view of salvation would state that the corpses would get up and go get the formula and be brought back to life. That would, of course, be impossible. Dead people don't hear, acknowledge, walk, or swallow.
The reformed view is that the man goes to ten of the corpses and pours the formula down their unresponsive, unresisting throats. They are brought back to life
because of his actions, not theirs. Now they are alive and can see the gift they were given. They can acknowlege the greatness of the gift. Additionally, they can see the effects of not receiving the gift, as there are still some people that are dead. What this brings about is not a feeling of superiority. Rather, it brings about humility, gratitude and a desire to put that gift to good use.
Obviously even this example falls short because the man in my examply did not create the people that were dead.
The more we do to enforce the view that we are saved because we "go forward and accept the gift" the more we lessen the unmerited gift of salvitic grace that God bestows upon His enemy, us. The result is that we will be less thankful and will credit ourselves with far, far too much, which lessens the credit we give to God for redeeming us. That's why Christ is called our
Sav(e)ior, because He saves us. If we are saved because of something we did then we, at the very least, credit ourselves with helping God out with saving us.
God bless
