Speaking of God’s “desires,”
Calvinists have maintained God’s desire for the salvation of all people in the
revealed will and have maintained the genuineness of the offers of salvation. But
they struggle to give a consistent answer to why these desires of God are not
met. If election is unconditional and grace is irresistible so that the atonement
is limited by God’s sovereign choice known only to him, then it seems that if
God desired all be saved, then all would be saved, and it also seems that if
Jesus only died for the elect, then the offer of salvation to all who hear the
gospel is not genuine; the offer is only truly made to the elect.
But there is another, deeper, problem
here. If God is absolutely and definitionally simple (as all the Reformed
hold), then God’s desires must be, by definition, absolutely identical to his
will, else divine simplicity is lost. By definition it is impossible for God to
desire something other than what he has foreknown/willed/predestined/brought to
pass. The one will of God in two modes or aspects (decretal and revealed)
conceptually falls apart. It is sophistic rhetoric to speak of God’s two wills
(or his one will in two manifestations)—a deception, though perhaps more self-deception
than anything. (David L. Allen, Liberating Romans from Reformed Captivity: A
Critical Evaluation of Calvinism’s Interpretation of Paul’s Letter [Dallas:
Legacy Ink, 2025], 28)
