Read ALL of your Bibles - a God-centered approach!

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It is remarkable that Calvinists can seeming erase human responsibility from any and every passage of Scripture.  We can all agree that God is the initiator towards humans in our response to Him, but to eliminate our role, our responsibility in the name of upholding His sovereignty is ridiculous.  God has enabled His creation to respond to Him – to humble ourselves and obey or to resist His will and rebel.  It is EVERYWHERE in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation.  Taking NT metaphors, I.e. “we were dead in our sin”, to unBiblical extremes amounts to poor exegesis.  Scripture must be balanced with the rest of Scripture.  When the Scriptures teach that “none is righteous” and yet all throughout the OT and even into the NT, men and women are called/considered “righteous” - I.e. Zachariah and Elizabeth in Luke 1:6, we must allow Scripture to interpret Scripture.  We don’t let “one is righteous” trump and negate all the instances where God calls His servants righteous.  

So the next time a Calvinist wants to confine you to John chapter 6 and use it as somehow the interpretive key for the rest of the New Testament (or Romans 9), remind them that you read ALL of the Bible and when you do, you will no longer be convinced by what amounts to Calvinist “proof texting”.  This is a “God-centered” approach the Bible, to read ALL OF GOD’s revelation!

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