Hello Matt
Great to hear from you. And no need to apologise for taking a break from the forum. We all need to get away from the cyber world for a bit and breathe some of God’s clean air in the real world. 
Thanks for your response to my question. You have clearly thought hard about your reply. And while you make some telling and Biblical points, it won’t surprise you to hear that I reject your conclusions. I’ll briefly explain why.
You concede that it is indeed “impossible for God to act contrary to any of His attributes, love included”. Hence you are agreeing that God must always act in a loving way. For if He did not, He would not be perfectly loving.
But then a couple of sentences later you say that God deals with the reprobate “according to His righteousness (sin must be punished), not mercy or love”. And then you say “He does not love the reprobate”.
I will pass over your statement that “sin must be punished” (for Christ’s death atones for sin, does it not?). For my major problem is that you contradict yourself, Matt. Further you are doing precisely what you say we must not do about God, ie compartmentalising Him according to our own understanding. You isolate His righteousness from His mercy and love – which we must never do.
Everything God does is simultaneously righteous *and *just *and *merciful *and *loving. Hence His righteous punishments are at once an expression of his justice, mercy and love. Only if you accept that God’s punishments have an ultimate reformative, remedial purpose (which does not exclude an element of righteous retribution also), can they be classified as loving. As Thomas Talbott has pointed out, if God’s predestination of the reprobate to damnation has no remedial purpose whatsoever, and does not have the ultimate good of the reprobate in view, then God simply does not love the reprobate. Hence God is not always loving. Hence God is not love. And hence we are stuck in a complete logical contradiction. I’m afraid that your answer does nothing to resolve this contradiction.
Basically, in order to be consistent, Calvinism must assert that God does not love everybody. Which you yourself do assert. But once you say this, you must also reject a fundamental attribute of God – ie that He is love. The God of Calvinism is not love; He is only a God who loves some of the time. Which means, ultimately, that he is not God.
As for URs not “talking about the perfect love that exists within the Godhead itself”, I don’t know where you got that idea! Most (but not all) URs, including me, are Trinitarians, who accept the perfect love that exists within the Godhead. But how does this relate to the question of reprobation? I do not see that it has any relevance.
The passages about “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” do not throw any real light on this issue. For Paul himself talks of handing over a sinner to Satan “for the destruction of the flesh” so that his spirit might be saved. Destruction in this sense, then, can easily be read as the destruction of the old, sinful man – Saul is destroyed, but Paul lives eternally as a result.
Correctly interpreted, in the light of the Biblical meta-narrative of love, restoration and reconciliation, the concept of destruction does not mean complete and utter destruction of a person, resulting in their ultimate and irrevocable damnation. It means the process by which the old sinful man in us is destroyed, and we are redeemed by God’s love. As, I think, Abraham Lincoln said, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make friends of them?”
The story of Jacob and Esau does not end in Esau’s destruction. In fact the two brothers are lovingly reconciled. The language of love / hate is simply a Hebrew idiom – similar to Jesus’ command that we must “hate” our own families.
Your analogy of Gracie and the barbecue, while I agree it illustrates a point about God’s sovereignty, does not bear on this issue. Because of course, a loving parent often forbids their children from doing things – things that might ultimately be harmful for the child. But that does not mean that there is one set of moral rules for the parent, and another for the child. They are still bound by the same moral obligations. Saying that God can tell us to “love our enemies” when He himself does not is tantamount to saying that what we call white, God calls black. If that is the case, our entire basis for believing anything breaks down completely.
I agree with you that “God is right to ordain that we behave in a certain way that He Himself is not limited to, for reasons that He alone has perfect understanding of.” God is God, He is sovereign, and He has perfect and infinite knowledge. But that doesn’t entail that He can therefore act in a way that is contrary to the notions of love, justice and righteousness that He has instilled in us.
As George MacDonald affirms, “To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God.”
I see you have posted a tough question for me, which I will try and answer shortly. But until then –
Shalom
Johnny
) or by the Covenant of Works (the reprobate 
). He reveals His goodness, mercy and love to some and His justice to others. Why is a sovereign Lord not allowed to do that? “I will be merciful and compassionate to those whom I choose”.
On his watch, more Americans were killed in war than all of the other wars combined. A fact conveniently left out by the liberal historical revisionists.