I never said they did Bob. There’s plenty of scriptures where all are destroyed in a nation or city. Even in the flood all are destroyed. Animals included. I know it’s hard being a blasphemer to understand what’s being said. You even distort and misrepresent the doctrine of predestination.
Hyper-Calvinism believes in Positive - Positive predestination. Reformed Calvinism believes God positively chooses a remnant by grace through faith. He passes over the reprobate. It’s positive - negative.
As I understand it… evangelicals have been totally hoodwinked by ‘Calvinism’ in that Calvin has been allowed to determine what the nature and boundaries of issues like election and predestination actually are; and all this to the detriment of both believers and those beyond.
I will act with furious rage against you, and I Myself will punish you sevenfold for your sins. 29You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters. ~~ Lev. 26:29
1 Samuel Chapter 15
Hosea 13:16 - Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.
Deuteronomy 2:34 - And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain:
Deuteronomy Chapter 3
5 All these cities [were] fenced with high walls, gates, and bars; beside unwalled towns a great many.
Here’s a whole list
https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Bible-Verses-About-Genocide/
Repeatedly shouting “Blasphemer” is a curious way of winning over those unconvinced by your post exalting the slaughter and torture of children and the innocent. But I wear your name-calling proudly if it comes from those who celebrate a deity who chooses a few in a remnant, and leaves most of his offspring to be reprobates who have no chance of avoiding his “furious rage.” (And I admire Piper for admitting that for classic predestinarians, this choice to damn most folk surely is as sovereignly ordained as everything else.)
Thanks for the reminder that I take joy in standing with the Jesus who conveyed the Abba who even loved reprobate sinners, and was accused by the Bible teachers in God’s religion of being a Blasphemer.
As long as God has morally sufficient and justifiable reasons for hell it’s not unjust to allow it. I gave 50 justifiable reasons for the death of Christ. The burden of proof is on you who thinks God can’t have justifiable reasons for hell. Grace is unmerited favor and never owed. God’s never obligated to be merciful to someone. He owes us nothing.
But I wear your name-calling proudly
I rest my case.
Talbott & I have never doubted that there are very good reasons for hell or for the death of Christ. Do you not realize that those are crucial to the classic view of God’s victorious reconciliation of his creation?
But I don’t at all see why you think Christ’s glorious sacrifice and absorption of our sin and evil, somehow proves that his Abba is bound to exalt the slaughter of God’s offspring or innocent kids by those called to be a light to the pagan nations. Such logic simply appears to me to be a non-sequitur.
That’s fine, just wanted to reinforce the existence of that view as a [possible] valid explanation/justification for OT violence committed/commanded by God. Of course, I understand that you reject OT violence altogether.
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I gave the philosophical argument and showed that there is a possible world where the death of Christ was justified. I gave the argument and provided the evidence from the philosophy of law. Therefore, your moral principle “killing the innocent is wrong” isn’t a necessary moral truth. It doesn’t hold in all possible worlds. Your response was to quote a passage from the OT to which I answered. Again, here’s Swinburne’s argument on what a necessary moral truth looks like:
We might say that acts of telling lies in such and such circumstances are bad. But it must be said that if there is a world W in which a certain action A having various non-moral properties is bad, there could not be another world W* which was exactly the same as W in all non-moral respects, but in which A was not bad. The concept of the moral is such that it makes no sense to suppose both that there is a world W in which A is wrong and a world W* exactly the same as W except that in W* A is good. It follows that there are logically necessary truths of the form "If an action has non-moral properties B, C, and D, it is morally good, if an action has the non-moral properties D, E, and F, it is morally wrong and so on. If there are moral truths some of them are necessary moral truths. - Richard Swinburne
My Examples:
- Necessarily, telling a lie in such and such circumstances is wrong
a) telling a lie just to see if you can get away with it when it would harm
others is wrong.
- Necessarily, cheating in such and such circumstances is wrong
a) Copying someones Ph.D. dissertation just to get a Ph.D. to look smart is wrong
- Necessarily, killing in such and such circumstances is wrong
a) Murdering an innocent 13 year old girl in a drive by shooting for fun
is wrong.
- Necessarily, stealing in such and such circumstances is wrong
a) Stealing money from your mother to buy drugs just to get high
is wrong
“Killing the innocent is wrong” isn’t a necessary moral truth as I showed. You still haven’t given a philosophical argument for your position. Instead you quoted a passage from the OT. I gave my argument and evidence from the philosophy of law. Even if God has established a system of justice among human beings in the OT that forbids the punishment of the innocent, He Himself is not so forbidden. What they meant for evil God meant for good. We see this all through the OT when God judges His people. He will use evil to judge His people and then turn around and judge those who brought evil against His people. (Judges 2:11-19; Isaiah 10:5-6) One act two intentions. Mans intentions are evil God’s intentions are holy and good. I gave 50 justifiable reasons for the death of Christ. Glad to see you are in agreement.
The Bible doesn’t say that’s the only reason. God is infinite in wisdom and knowledge and logical explanations are infinite in number. Even the staunchest of contemporary retributivists, Michael Moore, recognizes that the demands of retributive justice are prima facie demands that can be and are overridden in specific cases. This is why Moore is not committed to moral legalism Moore says that we must not confuse the intrinsic goodness of retribution with the categorical duty to carry out retributive justice on every possible occasion. He calls himself a threshold deontologist, that is to say, he abides by the categorical norm of morality until doing so produces sufficiently bad consequences to pass some threshold. So in the extreme case where one must punish an innocent person or else the whole world would be tortured forever one should punish the innocent person. By waiving the prima facie demands of retributive justice and punishing the innocent person he has mercifully saved the whole world from being tortured forever and was therefore acting compatibly with moral goodness. I gave 50 justifiable reasons showing that this is how God operates. He has justifiable reasons for punishment and logical explanations are infinite in number. Especially when we are dealing with a being who is infinite in wisdom and knowledge.
The secret things belong to the LORD our God , but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.
The Bible would say I’m punishing them just for retribution. It doesn’t. In fact when we look at another example of where the innocent is punished for others sins (Christ) we find at least 50 justifiable reasons for retribution on the innocent. God is a being infinite in wisdom and knowledge and logical explanations are infinite in number. Moreover, all events in the past lead up to the cross and culminate at the cross. Therefore, we look at all the justifiable reasons at the cross. Moreover, Job underwent suffering and had no idea why.
FWIW My personal conscience sympathizes with Qaz’s that ANY using of the sins of others to justify brutalizing little children or the innocent appears to conflict with any intelligible sense of righteous justice. I love the 50 things that Jesus’ willingness to absorb the wrongful punishment of sinners accomplishes, but have no idea how his loving submission would show that it can be morally good for the righteous to brutalize the innocent. But I admire Hollytree’s willingness to try to explain why such acts appears appropriate to him.
Still waiting for the argument Bob. I wouldn’t blaspheme the Holy God of the Bible over an intuition.
As I confessed Hollytree, I personally am not willing to deny or sear my conscience, and if you need an argument for how anyone’s conscience could be troubled by exalting the brutalizing of innocent children, yours functions differently than we who you know that our Lord despises.
But I reaffirm that I admire your willingness to go to bat that you are convinced our Father and his Scripture has told you this and that it is blasphemy to question it. I was raised and served many decades in that tradition and understand and salute you for seeking to be genuinely faithful to the view of morality that you recognize as\ plainly valid.
I think that Monty Python had a GREAT idea…for folks looking for an argument. 
Here’s a few quotes from Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry Into the Non-Rational Factor in The Idea of the Divine and it’s Relation to the Rational, chapter 2, pp. 5 and 6. We will see that Bob has misunderstood Otto and completely misunderstands the Supra Rational
Holiness - the holy - is a category of interpretation and valuation peculiar to the sphere of religion. It is, indeed, applied by transference to another sphere - that of ethics - but it is not itself derived from this. While it is complex, it contains quite a different element or ‘moment’, which sets it apart from ‘the Rational’ in the meaning we gave to that word above, and which remains inexpressible - an ineffable - in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.
The fact is we have come to use the words holy, sacred in an entirely derivative sense, quite different from that which they ordinarily bore. We generally take ‘holy’ as meaning ‘completely good’; it is the absolute moral attribute, denoting the consummation of moral goodness. But this common usage of the term is inaccurate. It is true that all this moral significance is contained in the word ‘holy’ but it includes in addition - as even we cannot but feel - a clear overplus of meaning, and later or acquired meaning; rather ‘holy’, or at least the equivalent words in Latin and Greek, in Semitic and other ancient languages, denoted first and foremost only this overplus: If the ethical element was present at all, at any rate it was not original and never constituted the whole meaning of the word.
But this ‘holy’ then represents the gradual shaping and filling in with ethical meaning, or what we shall call the ‘schematization’, of what was a unique original feeling response, which can be in itself ethically neutral and claims consideration in its own right. And when this moment or element first emerges and begins its long development, all those long expressions mean beyond all question something quite other than ‘the good’. This is universally agreed upon by contemporary criticism…Accordingly, it is worth while, as we have said, to find a word to stand for this element in isolation, this ‘extra’ in the meaning of ‘holy’ above and beyond the meaning of goodness.
Any human being who brutalizes little children would be legally charged and probably imprisoned. To say that it is a righteous act if God does it, is ludicrous.
Even non-Christians recognize that goodness is goodness no matter who does it! The same with evil.
“To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?” ~John Stuart Mill
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Paidion,
Your making a categorical mistake when you compare humans to God. As I said in the OP:
The Bible tells us that God is holy. Holiness when applied to God not only refers to moral purity but to everything that separates God from His creation and His creatures. There are ways we are like God and ways we are not. He’s distinct. For example: God in infinite in wisdom and knowledge and sees all circumstances past, present, and future. He’s in a privileged position. He’s all-knowing, all-powerful, self-sufficient, Sovereign over the universe and omnipresent. We are none of these things. God is in a category all by Himself and cannot be compared to anything or anybody. To do so is to make a categorical mistake. Thus, God’s love is a holy love. His justice is a holy justice. This isn’t the same omnibenevolence and goodness that we try to ascribe to God. Because of Divine revelation we are justified in saying the God of the Bible is holy. We don’t say that since God is good He couldn’t have commanded such and such. But because God’s essence is holiness or because God is essentially holy He has justifiable reasons for commanding the killing of the innocent, etc, etc, in particular and utterly unique (Holy) circumstances.
No, that is just what Calvinistic theologians want you to think. Jesus compared us to God in his sermon on the mount. We didn’t fair as well as God the father, did we? And yet, you would tell Jesus “You are making a categorical error, Jesus!”. The statement that I quoted from you is, quite simply, the arrogance of intellectuals who have closed off their tiny sandbox to others who might be able to make better sand-castles or other well built structures. To be clear, there are no real discussions where one side can solely define what a categorical error is…
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I already stated that there’s ways we are like God and ways we are not and then gave the examples for this specific context. It is a categorical error. You twist the Bible Gabe because you have blasphemed the holy. You call the God of the Bible unjust and evil as well.