The only real problem with tackling adult doctrines like God’s sovereignty, predestination, election, and reprobation is that if you’re still a spiritual child, you’ll predictably end up injuring yourself and everyone in your vicinity. I recall Vincent Cheung dropping a line like this a few years back, and it just keeps ringing true every time I bump into churchgoers who prove the point.
When knowledge fails to amplify a person’s faith, it merely enhances their talent for faking it. Simply because some self-appointed expert decides to wrestle with an “adult” doctrine doesn’t automatically grant them spiritual or intellectual maturity. Sure, you could hand a baby the keys to a Ferrari, but he’s bound to total it in seconds. Plopping him behind the wheel doesn’t magically age him up. In the same vein, the vast majority of theologians are nothing more than spiritual toddlers clumsily juggling adult concepts. They toy around with ideas like divine sovereignty, the covenants, and the grand arc of redemption history, but the moment they try to drive—when they start formulating, teaching, and applying these doctrines—they cause massive pileups in people’s faith. [1]
I recently had another short exchange with a person (we’ll dub them Billy for anonymity) on the topics of faith and healing. I was laying out some key Bible verses about faith and healing, while encouraging them to actively cultivate and strengthen their own faith. I made a particular point about how faith in God’s promises—be it for forgiveness or physical healing—ensures you receive what you’ve asked for in prayer.
I pulled directly from John 15:7-8: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever YOU want and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this: that you bear much fruit, and prove to be my disciples.”
Not only does this passage explicitly state that you’ll receive what “YOU” personally desire (it doesn’t limit it to what GOD might want, but emphasizes “YOU”), but Jesus Himself positions these answered prayers—for the very things “YOU WANT”—as His genuine test of orthodoxy and discipleship. The gospel is Jesus’ Creed, and answered prayers is His test to see if you are legitimate. He declares that it “proves” you are truly His disciple if you pray for what you want and God provides them.
And why is that the case? It’s because only those who are true insiders within the Contract enjoy this level of privileged access to the Father. Outsiders simply don’t have the clearance. Jesus is offering up a test of orthodoxy that’s impossible to counterfeit or simulate. Only legitimate children of God can casually ask for anything they desire, and watch as the Father delightedly grants it. Reprobates and those outside the covenant are barred from this access and the vibrant life it brings.
This mirrors the kind of proof Jesus provided for His own identity as the Son of Man. The religious phonies and obsessive fanboys would obsess over external rituals, like washing the outside of a cup, to fabricate an appearance of being part of the Elect. But since they are, in reality, reprobates, they can’t deliver the authentic proof of orthodoxy, which boils down to genuine faith. Faith provides unhindered, direct access to God and serves as irrefutable evidence that you’re among the Elect. Jesus demonstrated that God was listening to His prayers, and through that, He showcased the Father’s full approval. This wasn’t something He achieved through His own isolated power; rather, God bestowed upon Him the fullness of the Spirit (a gift we’re also explicitly commanded to pursue and receive), and granted Him every request He made in prayer. By doing so, Jesus proved that His insider relationship with God was of the most intimate variety possible. Jesus urged people to believe Him, precisely because of His miracles. “Don’t believe me unless I carry out my Father’s work. But if I do his work, believe in the evidence of the miraculous works I have done, even if you don’t believe me,” John 10:37-38. And here’s the kicker: God commands us to do something similar, to receive answered prayers for miracles as tangible proof that we are indeed Elect insiders, rather than reprobates destined for the flames. He insists on a form of proof that no reprobate could replicate.
Aside from Jesus’ Creedal “proof” for discipleship, there’s also the truth about just how intimate our status as Contract insiders truly is. God loves us deeply; He views us as cherished children who sit at His family table. We can boldly ask for whatever WE want, and He will joyfully hand it over. The Father destroyed His only begotten Son by the agony of crucifixion. He was scourged and torn apart. He motions toward Jesus’ bloodied body and declares, “This is how seriously I take my promises.” He goes to great lengths to provide assurance that He will fulfill what He has pledged. And He has pledged to give us whatever we ask for in faith. Pause and reflect on the sheer lovingkindness of God toward us, on the unwavering loyalty of His unmerited favor for those He has chosen to love!
Billy came back with this retort:
“Where are all these miracles? I do not see them. If what you are saying is true, then no one is saved.”
In my head, the immediate reaction was, “You David Hume empiricist whore, you spiritual adulterer and faithless pervert. You have sold out your soul to worldly philosophy at the most bedrock level of your worldview, outright rejecting God in the process.”
Aware that this individual prided themselves on being “Reformed,” I chose to respond by drawing on how God Himself addressed a comparable accusation in Scripture. First off, Paul in Romans chapter 9 acknowledges that if we’re just going by human observation (that is, empiricism and inductive reasoning), it might appear God has failed to save His people. But Paul counters that God hasn’t failed at all, because His promise was always to bless those included in the promise through election, not merely those born naturally as Jews. An overwhelming surplus of reprobates in no way invalidates God’s promise to save His elect ones.
Paul then references the story of Elijah and God as a prime illustration. Elijah was no minor figure in Israel—he was a heavyweight prophet, widely recognized, extensively traveled, and deeply experienced in the nation’s affairs. After enduring so much, he hits a low point of discouragement and complains to God that he is the sole remaining believer in all of Israel. As I mentioned, Elijah wasn’t some isolated rural farmer with limited exposure; he had seen and interacted with Israel. So, from a purely human evaluative perspective, his credibility for drawing an inductive—though fundamentally irrational—conclusion from his observations is better than most. He concludes, based on empirical data and inductive logic, that he is the last faithful one, and he presents this as truth before God Himself. But God rebukes Elijah, informing him that He has personally reserved 7,000 individuals who have stayed loyal. This ties directly into the Romans 9 framework, where God asserts that before people are even born or have done anything good or bad, He sovereignly chooses to love some and hate others, according to His election and reprobation. The lump was neutral; it wasn’t already bad or good. From this neutral lump God then creates good or bad things.
“God has not rejected his people, whom he foreknew! Or do you not know, in the passage about Elijah, what the scripture says—how he appeals to God against Israel? ‘Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have torn down your altars, and I alone am left, and they are seeking my life!’ But what does the divine response say to him? ‘I have left for myself seven thousand people who have not bent the knee to Baal.’ So in this way also at the present time, there is a remnant selected by grace,” Romans 11:2-5.
The very same response God gave to Elijah, Paul affirms, held true in his own era and continues to apply today.
Therefore, when someone whines, “I don’t see all these miracles and answered prayers (as Jesus described and commanded in John 15:7-8), so they must not exist, and so what Jesus said can’t possibly mean what it plainly states,” they’re behaving with the same irrational arrogance as Elijah did. God’s rebuke to Elijah is perfectly applicable here as well. God has reserved for Himself 7,000—or perhaps 70,000,000—who have not bowed the knee to empiricism (that modern Baal) and who haven’t abandoned Jesus’ directive for answered prayers. Regardless of what Elijah could observe and compute through his senses, God’s declaration is the sole valid starting point for all knowledge. God is truthful when He proclaims a remnant according to election, while Elijah was acting as a liar and a false witness against the truth. His false testimony stemmed directly from his reliance on empiricism and inductive conclusions.
So what if you personally don’t witness an abundance of answered prayers and miracles? Even if that implies there’s an excessive number of reprobates infiltrating the church, just as Paul noted with the Jews, it doesn’t indicate any failure on God’s part. It simply means the reprobates have failed to attain insider status due to their deficient faith, and as for the rest, it’s likely because you yourself are a reprobate, which explains why you’re not positioned to witness God’s power in action.
Religious fanboys and self-proclaimed Reformed enthusiasts love to bandy about doctrines like election and reprobation, but since these are mature, adult-level truths, they are utterly wasted on childish minds. This doctrine of reprobation is like a loaded gun pointed straight at their own faces, and they are the ones gripping the trigger. They will end up harming themselves and bystanders whenever they mishandle it. Perhaps the reason they fling around the term “reprobate” so freely is that, by God’s ironic providence, they themselves are reprobates and feel an unconscious affinity for the word.
I absolutely cherish God’s providence, especially because I don’t reject half the Bible to suit my preferences. As Vincent Cheung insightfully observes in “Predestination and Miracles,” I am predestined to experience miracles. But you outsiders, just because you have grasped a narrow sliver of God’s sovereignty and reprobation doesn’t exempt you from being reprobates yourselves. Similarly, just because Satan could lecture you on certain facets of hell doesn’t spare him from eternal imprisonment there. He might know it intimately because he’s experiencing it firsthand as God’s enemy.
If you are a genuine disciple, you will embrace with wholehearted faith all of God’s commands, promises, and His sovereign faithfulness. Those who have been “born from above” don’t fabricate excuses for their faltering faith if they encounter struggles; instead, they echo the desperate father seeking deliverance for his son, crying out, “Help my unbelief.” The Elect will pursue and obtain stronger faith. They are authentic disciples who mature in faith rather than in unbelief. They advance forward instead of retreating in fear. They are true insiders; thus, the Spirit whispers within their souls, “You are a child of God, so ask! And you will receive. Draw near to your Father, for He loves you deeply.”
There is a divine daycare drama: Spiritual losers are crashing theology cars, while the elect grown-ups cruise on miracle highways, leaving empiricist whiners in the dust.
Starting Point for Knowledge.
The other glaring issue in this person’s response is their rejection of God at the most profound level of worldview construction. That is, when confronting the ultimate question of knowledge (here using “knowledge” is exchangeable for truth), what serves as the foundational starting point or first principle from which you derive this knowledge? Every other ultimate question—whether concerning existence, causality, ethics, value, history, humanity, salvation, and beyond—will flow directly from this epistemological foundation. To call it merely important would be a massive understatement.
The Reformed cult loves to ridicule Catholics for their boastful dual starting point for knowledge, which adds the Pope to Scripture. But let’s dissect that: What is the Pope, really? He’s just a fallible man. When the Pope appends additions to Scripture, it’s rooted in the Pope’s observation and empiricism (a blatant logical fallacy) and often layered with additional fallacies of induction. The technical terms here are speculation (for empiricism) and superstition (for any inductive logic). The crucial element in both is a “man”-centered starting point for knowledge. In this epistemology, man does not begin with God’s direct revelation but with himself. Man, through some fallacious empiric process, magically extracts invisible true and false propositions from mere observation. Then, he employs superstitious induction to craft a premise from which to deduce further. But since this premise is built on speculation and superstition, even applying deductive logic can’t salvage or transform it into knowledge. It’s fundamentally a “man” starting point versus a God-revealed starting point that’s divinely disclosed, not sensorily derived. As Jesus told Peter, “Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father has.”
By a straightforward logical analysis, empiricism is exposed as inherently irrational. Therefore, as a starting point for knowledge, it is ontologically impossible. It doesn’t exist.[2]
However, since Scripture is my starting point, what does my epistemology declare about empiricism? Vincent Cheung was the one who first drew my attention to these pertinent verses.
Commenting on 2 Kings 3:16-24 [3], he explains: “What did the Moabites see – blood or water? The Moabites thought they saw blood, but their senses deceived them. We know that they saw water that looked like blood because this is what the infallible testimony of Scripture says. Thus the passage points out that the senses are unreliable, and shows that we depend on divine inspiration to tell us about particular instances of sensations.” [4]
Vincent also references John 12:28-29, Matthew 14:25-27, and Matthew 28:16-17.
Even though these represent just a handful of divine revelations where empiricism (knowledge beginning with sensation) is shown to be erroneous, it’s enough to consign the entire approach to the trash heap of skepticism.
To underscore the gravity, consider if I could demonstrate even one instance where Scripture was false. For instance, what if it turned out Jesus was born in South Asia rather than Israel? The problem isn’t that every other premise would automatically be wrong; rather, there would be no infallible mechanism to justify any premise from scriptural. It would plunge the entire Bible (as a starting point for knowledge) into skepticism. But skepticism inherently denies the law of non-contradiction and is thus ontologically impossible.
If the notion that invisible knowledge arises from sensation is true, then where is the justification? How is this possible without violating the laws of contradiction and identity? Where is the sound argument to prove it?
Having a mental image of Mt. St. Helens is merely a copy of it (2); it’s not the actual mountain itself (1). That’s one categorical distinction, and then there’s yet another leap: forming propositional thoughts about (3) this indirect copy (2) of the real Mt. St. Helens (1). There exists no logical justification for these two categorical jumps between premises and conclusion. Essentially, the syllogism is as absurd as stating, “All dogs are mammals. All blue things are colors. Therefore, all humans are clouds.” There’s no more valid justification for that nonsense than for claiming that propositional thoughts in an invisible mind, based on a pictorial copy in my physical brain, constitute genuine knowledge about the actual Mt. St. Helens. Both are manipulating categorical realities as if they were malleable play-dough. That might fly in selling fantasy novels, but it falls flat when analyzing the reality.
This exposition has established that our sole viable starting point for knowledge is God Himself. Any starting point originating with “man” inevitably leads to skepticism, but skepticism is logically impossible and nonexistent. All human-initiated starting points for knowledge are illusory, existing only in realms of delusion and fantasy.
Most Christians intuitively grasp this without requiring all this technical breakdown. But when reprobates sneak into the Church and mislead the flock, it becomes necessary to deliver a thorough and scathing rebuke.
Many will affirm something like, “The Bible is our final authority.” But what I’m articulating here is even more foundational. I begin with the Bible as my exclusive public first principle for knowledge, and nothing else. If you claim ‘x’ is knowledge but can’t demonstrate it derives directly from the Bible or logically deduces from it, then by definition, it’s not knowledge.
Thus, when the Bible states that if I believe in God’s only Son for salvation from my sins and confess it, that’s a definitive truth claim about reality. It’s not a mere probability; it’s an eternally sure and reliable truth. If Billy counters, “Well, I’ve observed some Christians who renounced their faith and now worship Satan. Therefore, the Bible must be wrong, or people misunderstand it. What the Bible really means is that one can have faith in God for salvation, yet God might still reject them to hell.”
The core problem here is foundational. Billy has employed a “human” starting point to generate supposed knowledge, then uses that as a superior authority to override the Bible, forcing the Bible to conform its meaning to this human-produced “knowledge” via empiricism and induction. The fatal flaw is that all human starting points for epistemology yield nothing but speculation and superstition. No authentic knowledge emerges from a human epistemology—not even basic identifications like what constitutes a “tree” or a “dog.”
Most Christians, upon hearing Billy’s twist on faith and salvation, would be rightly alarmed; they’d at least have a hazy sense that he’s using a human starting point to dismiss what the Bible clearly teaches about faith and salvation. But when the conversation shifts to faith for answered prayers or faith for healing, suddenly a slew of Christians flip to human starting points as if they’re lifelong experts. They wield empiricism and induction like undisputed champions, enough to make David Hume and the Pope turn green with envy. If those historical figures could have clung to human foundations as instinctively as some Christians do, they would have lured even more souls to Satan’s side.
If resorting to empiricism for knowledge production feels so natural and automatic, then there’s a strong likelihood it’s your actual master and foundational bedrock. If you don’t commence with God for knowledge, how on earth do you expect to conclude with His revelation? You won’t, naturally. What you start with is your ultimate authority. If you don’t start with scripture, its not your authority.
When you read Jesus declaring that if His words abide in you and you in Him, then you can ask whatever you wish and God will grant it, you must begin with this as unassailable knowledge and refuse to contradict it. Obviously, you can’t pit other Scriptures against this, because the Bible and Jesus repeatedly affirm that if you have faith—whether for salvation, healing, or whatever you desire—you will obtain it. Jesus specifies it’s what “YOU” want.
There is a wrong place to start: it’s in starting with YOU when generating knowledge. From this place, you can ask in faith and God might still deny it. To fall back on “I do not see…, or I observe…, or the church fathers did not see or observe,” makes you nothing short of a recycled Pope. You’re a spiritual pervert at the foundational level of knowledge. You don’t initiate with God to acquire truth; you begin with YOU. You’ve relied on speculation and superstition in equal measure to some primitive shaman gazing at the moon and deducing ‘x’ or ‘y.’
Why do people engage in this? First, it’s how reprobates naturally think and operate. They’re simply acting in accordance with their inherent nature. Apart from Scripture as the starting point, all alternatives (including every non-Christian religion) revert to some form of human starting point. Thus, it’s instinctive for reprobates to reveal their true human foundation when encountering biblical truths that unsettle them or provoke discomfort. Secondly, to camouflage their own human starting point, they’ll mock more blatant examples like the Pope. This allows them to hide in the shadows of obvious reprobates. They chant “sola Scriptura,” but it’s a magician’s misdirection for “sola empiricism.” Thirdly, they crave human approval, and since it’s natural for reprobates to favor human epistemologies, other reprobates will gravitate toward them, offering praise, validation, and financial support.
If you are truly not a reprobate but merely imitating one out of spiritual immaturity, then repent immediately while opportunity remains. Tomorrow isn’t promised. God is eager to forgive and restore you. He will fulfill what He has promised. If you ask in faith for God’s forgiveness, He will grant it. If you are an insider to His love and Contract, then ask and receive, because He desires you to do so. He commanded it precisely because He wanted to create scenarios where you ask and He provides. God orchestrated this dynamic, because He sovereignty wants it. He wants you to ask, while He pays the bill. You don’t need to grovel or beg.
Because of God’s promises, which He sovereignly chose to issue, and the Contract sealed in blood, God has made it necessary for Himself to heed your faith-filled prayers and bring you what you desire, be it spiritual or material. Jesus stated it was “necessary” for the daughter of Abraham (who had been bent over for 18 years) to be healed on the Sabbath. The term “necessary” here is akin to saying 5+5 necessarily equals 10. It’s not just a sufficient or preferable reason; it’s an inescapable one. Jesus asserts that because she is a Contract insider to God’s love, it is “necessary” for God to heal her. God set it up this way because He wants it.
Jesus, in perfect alignment, stood firmly on God’s Word as His source of knowledge, and those who truly follow Him will emulate that stance.
“And this woman, who is a daughter of Abraham,
whom Satan bound eighteen long years—
is it not necessary that she be released
from this bond on the day of the Sabbath?” (Luke 13:16 LEB)
Epistemological smackdown central: Where empiricist pretenders build crumbling sandcastles of sense-data delusion, Scripture loyalists fortify unbreachable truth citadels, laughing at the skeptical tide washing it all away.
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[1] Vincent Cheung. Faith Override. From the ebook, Sermonettes Vol. 9. 2016.
[2] Even the secular philosopher David Hume admitted as much about his starting point of empiricism leading to skepticism.
[3] While the harp was being played, the power of the Lord came upon Elisha, and he said, “This is what the Lord says: This dry valley will be filled with pools of water! You will see neither wind nor rain, says the Lord, but this valley will be filled with water. You will have plenty for yourselves and your cattle and other animals. But this is only a simple thing for the Lord, for he will make you victorious over the army of Moab! You will conquer the best of their towns, even the fortified ones. You will cut down all their good trees, stop up all their springs, and ruin all their good land with stones.”
The next day at about the time when the morning sacrifice was offered, water suddenly appeared! It was flowing from the direction of Edom, and soon there was water everywhere.
Meanwhile, when the people of Moab heard about the three armies marching against them, they mobilized every man who was old enough to strap on a sword, and they stationed themselves along their border. But when they got up the next morning, the sun was shining across the water, making it appear red to the Moabites—like blood. “It’s blood!” the Moabites exclaimed. “The three armies must have attacked and killed each other! Let’s go, men of Moab, and collect the plunder!”
[4] Vincent Cheung. Presuppositional Confrontations. 2010. Pg 70. http://www.vincentcheung.com
