John R. Rice Quotes of the Week

God wants "all men every where to repent." No one has a right to blame God if he goes to Hell. Any foolish preacher who makes it appear that God is not willing to save some people sins against the Gospel, sins against the loving heart of God, and perverts the Scriptures. - John R. Rice [Predestined for Hell? No!, pg.49]

Those hobby-riders who believe that God predestined some people to be saved and that they will be saved by God's coercive grace, and that others are predestined to be lost and cannot be saved because of God's deliberate choice, are foolishly wrong, desperately wrong. They are wrong in having a doctrine that cuts clear across so many emphatic Scriptures statements inviting all to be saved, showing that Christ died for all, that God is not willing that any should perish. But they are also wrong in that they go against great fundamental, logical, scriptural reasons inherent in the nature of God and of man, inherent in the nature of right and wrong. It is a moral impossibility for God to coerce man to do wrong and choose for man ahead of time that he must repent or that he cannot repent. - John R. Rice [Predestined for Hell? No!, pg.74-75]

There is the nature of man as it is pictured in the Bible and as it actually exists. God breathed into Adam's nostrils and he "became a living soul." He was made in the image of God. And what is this about man that is God-like? He is a reasoning creature with a moral responsibility, a conscience toward right and wrong, with the freedom of choice in right and wrong. Man is superior to beasts in mental powers, but the simple truth is that now man can make an electric computing machine which can go through complicated mental processes of adding, subtracting, remembering, judging, hundreds of time faster than man can do it! But the electronic brain, the Univac, has no will, no conscience, no consciousness of right or wrong. Hence it has no personality. It lacks the God-given moral nature of man. - John R. Rice [Predestined for Hell? No!, pg.75]

 Here is, I think, the strongest possible argument that God could not have predestined some to be lost and some to be saved. If God had predestined some to be saved, there would be no virtue in their love. Their righteousness would only be an outward formal righteousness with no heart virtue in it. But if God predestined some to sin, to reject Christ, to refuse repentance, to hate the Bible and God, then God Himself would be the creator of sin, would be partaker of man's sin and wickedness, and partner in that wickedness, God forbid! It is an unthinkable and wretched doctrine! - John R. Rice [Predestined for Hell? No!, pg.77]

Hyper-Calvinists have a bad teaching, a false doctrine. And it comes from a misapplication and a misunderstanding of a very few Scriptures, and a total ignoring of many others. No Scripture ever said that God predestinates anybody to be lost. Not a verse of Scripture in the Bible says that some are predestined to be saved whether they choose to trust in Christ or not. No, such a teaching is only inferred by a misapplication of certain Scriptures. But God does teach that He has determined ahead of time to take all who trust Christ safe to Heaven. - John R. Rice [Predestined for Hell? No!, pg.85]

It is true that in Exodus we are told that "the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart." But from the context and the discussion in Romans 9:14-24, it is clear that Pharaoh was already a wicked rebel against God, a murderer, the enslaver of God's people, rejecting every call, every demand that God made. So God raised him up for destruction. He hardened Pharaoh's heart in his refusal to let the children of Israel go. But He did not harden Pharaoh's heart toward the matter of salvation and God. That was already done before God brought him to destruction. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart. - John R. Rice [Predestined for Hell? No!, pg.86]

I cannot fully understand God's foreknowledge of all things.

But with God there is no past or future, but an eternal present. Before the world began, He knew every person who would be born and what they would do. The future He knows perfectly; the past He remembers perfectly. The past is as clear to God as the present. But the future is also as clear as the present. So before the world began, God gave His Son, and in the mind and plan of God, Christ was a Lamb slain before the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). Did God know when every sinner would trust in Him? Yes, He knew that before the world began, and He knows it now. And the only predestination regarding salvation is that God has determined that those who trust in Him will be carried on straight through to Heaven! Briefly that is the sum and substance of predestination, foreordination, and election as far as they relate to salvation at all. - John R. Rice [Predestined for Hell? No!, pg.91-92]