Contradicting Views

As per another tread about seeing the “Bible contradicting your views” and “fighting it”; I wanted to share this experience to show that it was first “man contradicting my views” attempting to call it the truth of the Bible to do so:

When I first heard Calvinism, it was brought in to a conversation in which I was witnessing to someone within the first month or so that I had discovered the internet-back just a few years ago. I had located a site that claimed to be Christian and was attempting to chat live (not knowing how to type) with someone who earnestly appeared to be searching. Someone came on and started contradicting me in my efforts to proclaim that God extended His hand to everyone and that this person had a choice of whether or not to take His hand and that if he saw and understood the love of God written in the Word he would see there was no greater love and take His hand and believe. I did not know at the time that the person that was contradicting me so methodically was doing so with dogmatic views of Calvinism.

While all this went on over a matter of a few days I was interrupted by a few others by PM; one of these people began to tell me she struggled with witchcraft and felt demons were stopping her from believing and she couldn’t escape them; she told me it had started when she became involved in wicken games and had begun role playing, she seemed to have a real fear and worried about this wicken “dragon” guy. Anyway, she joined in the live conversation and when this guy that was contradicting me with dogmatic Calvinism came on she bolted! She later emailed me and told me this guy was the “dragon”. It turned out this same guy was Satanic and used his knowledge of the doctrines of Calvinism to convince people they were probably not the elect and had no chance to believe. Later, I found out the site was full of witchcraft and the reason this dragon dude was so powerful and feared to be demonically empowered was because of his ability to twist the scripture on those proclaiming the Gospel. I got in to it with this guy big time but wasn’t prepared to counter everything he said; he really ticked me off with his lies and I soon left the site and found the Baptist Board. True story, and when I re-read want I just wrote I can laugh now at the implications it seems to suggest and will state that I know many Calvinist are faithful to share the Gospel, but will admit I still find the way Calvinism is taught today by some to seem a bit cultic.

When I started learning more about the C/A debate from real Christians and compared scriptures I leaned toward being a 3-pointer but not fully on those points; red flags popping up.. After a lot of study in to determinism I dwindled done to a partial T-pointer, guess I could call myself a ½ point Calvinist now. The C/A debate in whole, while driving me into the deeper meanings of scripture, has only served to enlighten me and strengthen my theology, so no harm done to me personally. (Romans 8:28 to 38 has very special meaning to me without implying the TULIP determinist doctrine as per my beliefs and understandings.) After some time and my old computer having crashed I couldn’t find that other stupid site again for a re-match. :smilewinkgrin: