While sitting on the front porch of a bed and breakfast in Mantova, Italy, I wrote (yes, with a pen…on a piece of paper…old school, I admit!) the following regarding tonight’s debate. Please pray the gospel will be clearly heard tonight.
It is an incontestable fact of Biblical revelation that the only normative means of forgiveness set forth in Scripture is through union with Christ in His substitutionary death upon Calvary’s cross. And yet is it not the ultimate irony, the ultimate self-contradiction, that those who cry the loudest against God’s sovereignty in the matter of personal salvation, who decry the great biblical truth of divine election, and who defend with every fiber the myth of human autonomy, are the very ones who would say that God would redeem men and women while leaving them unchanged, unregenerated, fully absorbed in their idolatrous worship, so that they awake in the after life to meet a God they have never known but will now ostensibly worship for eternity? And should it be said that they had in their ignorance been worshipping the true God all along, what a torturous manner of abusing language this is! God loves them enough to redeem them but not to send to them a Phillip? Surely God should have left the Ethiopian eunuch alone, for he was already one with a desire sufficient for salvation in Rome’s modern view, but by sending Philip did God not risk the exercise of the eunuch’s free will and the loss of his “saving ignorance”?
