I’m writing from my very favorite place on earth—south Miami Beach. My whirlwind road trip down here from Arab is sort of a “last fling” as I intend to move back to Chicago in April or May.

My thinking was, “I want to get in one last good dose of the Atlantic before I settle into cold and land-locked Illinois.” Living in New York City the past seven years really spoiled the beach bum in me. In good weather, not matter what time of year, I would frequently hop on the N or Q subway to Coney Island or take the L.I.R.R. train to Long Beach.

My fierce love for this particular section of the Atlantic stems from childhood and my family’s yearly summer vacations to Miami Beach, staying at a since torn-down art deco hotel called The Surfside (my dad always called it “The Fleabag”). All five of us—along with our poodle Mimi—would stay in one double-bed room for two whole weeks!

One of my very first memories as a kid is swimming in the ocean here and choking on salt water, truly feeling I was going to drown from the waves pummeling me. Both my older sister and brother were swimming ahead of me and my dad was swimming way ahead of them, not even looking back to see if I was okay. I remember thinking, “No one cares that I’m dying!”

The Surfside is where we spent a summer in 1973 after my dad, for reasons unknown even to my mom, abruptly decided to end his stint as a missionary doctor in the jungles of Ecuador (through the same HCJB outpost made legendary by missionary pilot Nate Saint, subject of the recent movie The End of the Spear).

We stayed at the hotel not even knowing where we going to go next! As it turned out, we camped out at my grandmother’s house for a year back in my hometown of Akron, Ohio.

A great story from that summer is how my sister struck up a conversation with a man on the beach who informed her he was the creator of a hit TV show. She raced back to where my mom and I had been sunbathing to tell us about it.

The name didn’t mean a thing to my mom, though, and she suspected maybe my sister had just been given a story. Sure enough, though, after we got back to Ohio, his name appeared on the credits for a sitcom that didn’t begin airing until 1971, two years after we had left for our missionary tour in Central and South America. It was Norman Lear, creator of “All in the Family”!

*****

On my way through Florida (across the panhandle and then down the Gulf side until I hit St. Pete Beach and cut eastward) I made a 24-hour pit stop in Orlando to visit a friend who is currently living with Pastor Fred Beckemeyer.

For the adult Sunday school class at Beckemeyer’s church, his brother, Hal, gave a great study on Calvinism. I took a few notes, including jotting down this great quote from Hal: “What they’re saying is that when Jesus Christ died on the Cross, He didn’t die for the sins of the world, He just died for ‘the elect.’ ”

As Hal points out, Calvinists would love II Thess. 2:13 if only they could chop it off after the word “salvation.” The verse reads, “But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth.”

Hal says, “He chooses us because we believe the truth, so it is conditional. There is a condition to being chosen and it’s in Him—we’re made accepted because we’re in Him!”

From Galatians 3:26 (“For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus”) we know we become children of God by faith, not because God chose some of us special from birth for no particular reason.

In I Thessalonians 1, Paul writes, “We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers;
[3] Remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and our Father;
[4] Knowing, brethren beloved, your election of God.”

Under Calvinism, you can’t identify who’s “elect” and who isn’t, but Paul says he knows these Thessalonians are elected. Doesn’t jive, does it?

Here’s a great quote on the same subject that I saved from an old sermon by my pastor, Richard Jordan:

“How about the verse in II Thessalonians 2 that says God damned some people because they didn't believe? How about when He says, ‘Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved’? You get that thing built up there (in Calvinist doctrine) where it says you can't believe and then God condemns you because you don't believe, and you just scratch your head. . .”

*****

John Calvin's system was taught by Augustine 1,000 years before his time. “Free will” is a term found in the Bible and yet many of Calvin’s basic terms aren’t found anywhere in the Bible—“irresistible grace”; “limited atonement”; “total depravity”; “unconditional election” and “sovereignty.”

“The way these guys arrive at their conclusions is by totally and completely ignoring dispensational truth, along with the Word of God in general,” says Jordan. “Calvin, in a commentary he once gave of I Tim. 2:4, wrote, ‘Paul demonstrates that God has at heart the salvation of all because He invites all to the acknowledgement of the truth.’

“Then, in another commentary, Calvin wrote, ‘As Scripture then clearly shows, we say that God once established by His eternal and unchangeable plan, those whom He long before determined once for all to receive into salvation and those who, on the other hand, He would devote to destruction.’

“Now, you tell me how in the world can a guy say something that's so good and then turn right around and say something so nutty?! You know how you do that? When you take a Bible and you've got to read the words that God wrote on a page, you can't just come up with all the hare-brained things that your logic and philosophy will come up with. That's what theologians do! You get to extrapolating and extrapolating, and you premise and premise and premise, and extend it out and then you've got theology.

*****

A key passage of Calvinism which is interpreted incorrectly is Romans 8:28-29. Paul writes, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
[29] For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.”

As Jordan explains, “The word foreknow or progonosco (pro is before and gonosco is that good old Greek word ‘to know something’) simply means to recognize it: to have knowledge of it. You recognize it beforehand. It's exactly what our word ‘foreknowledge’ means; to recognize something in advance.

“But Calvinists change that meaning and say it means to ‘forelove’ something; you love it beforehand. Foreknowledge does not mean foreloved or foreordained. It doesn't mean God determined ahead of time what was going to happen even though that's exactly the way theology defines the word.

“The word ‘know’ (gonosco) is often used in the sense of ‘intimate acquaintance.’ But in Matthew 7, Christ says, ‘Depart from me I never knew you.’ Well, you know He had knowledge of him—God knows everybody that's on the earth. He’s saying He didn't have regard for him.

“So, Calvinists say the word ‘foreknow’ has to mean ‘foreloved’ because the word ‘know’ means more than just being an acquaintance with, but the problem with that is the word ‘foreknow’ and the word ‘know’ aren't the same word.”