Winning souls is an activity commanded for all Christians. However, I do not subscribe to the idea that an entity which is all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, and the Creator of everything would "agonize" over something He controls. That would be like me agonizing over the misspelled words that pepper my posts: If I don't like them I change them. I do what I please with my blog and God tells us he does what he pleases with his creation.
His doing is not whimsical like mine often is, as he has revealed through Scripture he does have a purpose for what he does. His purposes are not entirely clear to humans, but enough of them have been revealed for us to know there are some things men say that are simply beyond reason or logic.
The phrase "god agonizes" (or worries, or frets) is one such statement.
I think one of the saddest things I see in modern Christianity is the concept that God has emotional sensibilities like ours. We attribute to God's love, for instance, the human response of emotional delight. Since God says He is "love" and he is not something created, love must be volitional. Yet we insist that we are to love the lost as God loves them, all the while thinking, erroneously, that means a feigned-emotional human response to them. Personally I know many, many, people whom I cannot love as I love my children. I don't really have a good feeling about murderers, rapists, and sadists. Does that mean I have disobeyed God's command to "love my neighbor as myself." I don't think so. It means our definition for love is distorted and twisted. It means we define love inductively - i.e. we begin our thinking from ourselves toward God - when in fact all of our thinking should be deductive, or starting from the revealed Word toward ourselves and our activities.
If we thought deductively in all things, (i.e. starting from the first principle of God's revealed word) as we should, we would note from Scripture that love means to take care of others, whether we like them or not. We are to be the good Samaritans to the World. When we begin living in this manner, we do not have to wonder if we are "loving" our neighbor as ourselves. We will feed them if they are hungry, we will give them water if they need it, we will tell them of Christ, and we will fulfill the Law of God in so doing.
This is volitional caring and it is the exact form of "love" God has toward all His creation. He is not emotionally attached as we are, he is fulfilling his will in all things. Some men are created for salvation, the Bible says "many," (Heb. 9:28) and some are created for destruction. (Rom. 9:22). God's love toward his Son's Church is the volitional motivation behind both conditions. Some men don't like this idea so they inductively begin attributing to God human ideas and emotions eventually going so far astray by saying things like, "God agonizes over one lost sinner" thinking they have spoken something profound when, in fact, they are actually teaching heresy.
If we refuse to read, study, think, or ponder about these kinds of things it isn't long until we say things like "all you have to do to be saved is believe," without explaining human-creatures can't do that without a rebirth by the Word. (1Pe 1:23)). Or worse yet we assert, "God did not make a bunch of little robots," in claiming our human-right to choose to become a Christian - or not.
Cornelius Van Til as quoted by Greg Bahnsen said:
The traditional [apologetic] method...is based on the assumption that man has some measure of autonomy, that the space-time world is in some measure "contingent" and that man must create for himself his own epistemology in an ultimate sense.I'll close this with a quote from Vincent Cheung, "...the Spirit exercises active and direct control over the minds of all men, causing thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and motives in them according to his own will. The Bible is the usual instrument - the intellectual content that he works with as he controls men's hearts - that he uses to convert and to sanctify, but also to harden, the hearts of men. And men are the usual instruments by which he propagates the contents of the Bible." (The Bible, the Preacher, and the Spirit, Vincent Cheung, 2006, pp 15)
[Apologetics] traditional method was concessive on these basic points on which it should have demanded surrender! As such, it was always self-frustrating. The traditional method had explicitly built into it the right and ability of the natural man, apart from the work of the Spirit of God, to be the judge of the claim of the authoritative Word of God. It is man who, by means of his self-established intellectual tools, puts his "stamp of approval" on the Word of God and then, only after this grand act, does he listen to it. [emphasis added] God's Word must first pass man's tests of good and evil, truth and falsity. But once you tell a non-Christian this, why should he be worried by anything else that you say. [sic] You have already told him that he is quite alright just the way he is! Then Scripture is not correct when it talks of "darkened minds," "willful ignorance," "dead men," and "blind people"! [emphasis added] With this method the correctness of the natural man's problematics is endorsed. That is all he needs to reject the Christian faith." (Cornelius Van Til - cited by Bahnsen, PA. pp. 13-14)
Read Isa 45:7 if you have problems with any of the above.
