Good News?

[Craig]

    Dear Ray
     
    My question is not intended to point any finger at you or criticize you in any way as I have the highest respect for you and your writings.  However, here is my question.
     
    What is the Good News?
     
    We are born cursed due to the acts of another.  In spite of the curse, If someone becomes a believer, then they are oppressed more by suffering then the unbelievers.  I give you Job.  He didn't do anything wrong but God baited the Devil into persecuting Job.  I've always felt that Job's children are the real victims of all this.   Job survived and was blessed again but his children just died.
     
    Then we die and perhaps, if we are lucky, we may be among the elect but no one can know for certain till that day arrives.
     
    So what is the Good News?  This all appears to me as a veiled form of fatalism and pretty impersonal at that.
     
    So you will know where I have been I am a five point Calvinist, a real believer, but oppressed and persecuted daily in my struggle, and for what?  So that I might be saved some day?  I cannot know with any certainty that I will be saved and even if I am, do I really understand what "saved" means?  I am fast loosing faith that God intends anything for us except suffering and find this a terrible state of mind.  Where is the peace of God or is it peace with God, and if so, what the heck does that mean when God baits the Devil into tormenting the elect.  How cruel all of this is but despite it all, I still believe Jesus is the Son of God, that he died for our sins and was raised form the dead.  I just feel dead and hopeless.
     
    Unless you know something that can give hope, I do not want, or need an answer but thanks for listening.
     
    Steve
     

    Dear Steve:
    First of all, if I were a "five point Calvinist," I too would be depressed.  What an evil doctrine they teach!  And not supprisingly so, seeing that John Calvin was one of the most evil human being to ever draw breath on this God's earth. Burning a brother do death under low heat so as to extent the insane torture of the ordeal?  Unbelievable!
     
    Even so, you question your "blessed assurance," when Calvinism teaches that those elected will not and cannot ever lose their calling.  Calvinists have a strange twist on "free will."  They claim that man has no free will UNTIL he recognizes his "election," and then he does have free will!
     
    The Gospel is the "Good New of THE KINGDOM OF GOD," which includes many things, not the least of which is "eonian life" ruling and reigning with Jesus Christ to bring about the salvation of the entire world.  It includes sonship with God.  We are to becomes spiritual sons and daughters of the Great God and Creator of the Universe.  We will be like God--for ever!  LIKE GOD..............FOREVER!  It doesn't get any better than that, Steve.  But, I'll admit, even that has little value in the eyes of the carnal mind.  You do not have the spiritual eyes to SEE the goal and destiny that God has ordained for humanity. God is "CREATING humanity in His very Own IMAGE."  It was begun in the garden: it was never completed in the garden. The process of being transformed into the Image of Jesus Christ Who is the Image of His Father IS THE WHOLE PURPOSE FOR LIFE.  And all of the misery and heartache of life is a needful part of the process.   We may not understand it fully at this time, but in time we will.   It truley is "GOOD NEWS," for those who can see it.
     
    God be with you,
    Ray