Apologetics & the Doctrines of Grace
Two Parables of
the Love of God
A Study in Election, Grace, and the Character of God
Credit and Context
Adapted from Dr. James R. White’s April 2026 Dividing Line Podcast for Alpha and Omega Ministries.
The Critic’s Parable is adapted from White’s reading of Norman Geisler and a similar version used by Jacob Hansen in April 2026 during his debate against White.
The Proper Parable is adapted from White’s reading of Sam Storms.
For fuller context, visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFywugDXj0g
The Critic’s Parable — “The God of Calvinism”
A farmer owned a large pond on his property. Because the pond was deep and its currents deceptive, the farmer posted signs along the banks in bold letters: "No Swimming — Violators Do So at Their Own Risk." The warnings were clear and unmistakable. No one who saw them could plead ignorance.
One afternoon, the farmer looked out from his porch and saw three boys splashing recklessly in the middle of the pond. They had climbed over his fence, ignored every posted sign, and plunged headlong into the forbidden water. Within minutes, the treacherous undercurrent seized them, and all three boys began to drown. Their arms flailed. Their heads dipped beneath the surface and came up gasping. They were helpless, sinking, and dying.
The farmer walked to the water’s edge and surveyed the scene. He folded his arms.
“They saw the signs,” he said to himself. “They read the warnings. They chose to disobey, and now they are reaping the consequences their own actions have brought upon them.”
In this, the farmer was not wrong. Justice was on his side. The boys had trespassed. They had defied his clear command. Whatever befell them, they had brought it upon themselves by their willful rebellion against his plainly stated rule. Every reasonable person would acknowledge that the farmer had the right to be indignant.
But then the farmer said something else.
“I will make no effort to save them.”
He stood on the bank and watched them struggle. He had the strength to swim. He had rope coiled in the barn. He had a rowboat tied to the dock not thirty yards away. And he did nothing.
Any compassionate person, hearing this, would immediately perceive that something was grievously lacking in the farmer’s love. A man who watches three children drown while possessing every means of rescue and refusing to act is not a man anyone would call loving, no matter how justified his anger at their disobedience.
But the farmer was not finished. As the boys’ thrashing grew weaker and their cries more desperate, the farmer stroked his chin and, by what could only be described as an inexplicable whim, made a declaration.
“Very well. Though they are drowning because of their own foolishness, I will, out of the goodness of my heart, save one of them. But the other two I will leave to perish.”
And so the farmer waded into the water. He swam past two of the drowning boys without so much as a glance, seized the third by the arm, and hauled him back to shore. The other two slipped beneath the surface and were gone.
The rescued boy coughed and sputtered on the bank, alive because the farmer had chosen him. The other two were dead because the farmer had not.
Was the farmer loving? He had the power to save all three. He had the means. He had the opportunity. And yet, by nothing more than an arbitrary decision of his own will, he chose one and condemned two. His love, if it could even be called love, was partial, selective, and incomplete. A truly loving man would have rescued all three, or at the very least made the effort to do so. A love that chooses favorites among the equally desperate is no love at all. It is a cold, capricious preference dressed in the language of mercy.
This, the critic says, is the God of Calvinism: a God who stands on the bank of human ruin, possessing infinite power to rescue every drowning sinner, yet by sovereign whim saves only a chosen few and watches the rest perish without lifting a finger on their behalf. Such a God, the critic concludes, is not omnibenevolent. His love is defective. His mercy is a sham. And no one should worship Him.
The Proper Parable — The God of Calvinism Is the God of Scripture
There was a great King, the most noble and righteous ruler the world had ever known. His kingdom stretched beyond the horizon, and His reign was marked by justice, generosity, and steadfast goodness. He governed His subjects not as a tyrant but as a benefactor. He had opened His table to them. He had fed them from His own stores, clothed them from His own treasury, and extended to them privileges and blessings they had never earned and could never repay. His castle stood as the center of His kingdom, the seat of His righteous rule and the dwelling place of His beloved family.
The King had laws, and His laws were not arbitrary regulations scribbled on a fence post. They flowed from His very nature. His justice was not an old hat He could toss aside when it became inconvenient. It was woven into the fabric of His being as inseparably as His love. To ask the King to suspend His justice was to ask Him to cease being Himself, and that He could never do.
Now, among His subjects was a company of men who had received every good thing at the King’s hand. They had eaten at His table. They had enjoyed His protection. They had benefited from His lavish generosity all the days of their lives. And this was not the first time they had repaid His kindness with rebellion. They had a long and documented record of treachery, and many times the King had shown them mercy they did not deserve. Yet each act of mercy only seemed to embolden their defiance.
One day, the King returned to His castle from doing good among the people of His land. What He found defied all comprehension. These very men, His own subjects, the ones who had sat at His table and enjoyed His hospitality, had broken into His castle. They were robbing His treasury. They were assaulting His family. They were murdering His friends. They had set fire to the structure itself, and the flames were climbing the walls and licking at the rafters. If they did not escape soon, the fire would consume them along with everything they were destroying.
But here is what must be understood about these rebels, for it is the part the critic’s parable conveniently omits.
They were not crying out for help.
They were not looking for the exits.
They were not sorry.
They were enjoying themselves. They loved every moment of their destruction. The smoke filled their lungs and the heat scorched their skin, and still they laughed as they tore down the tapestries and smashed the King’s throne. They cursed the King’s name with every breath. They made excuses for their violence. They encouraged one another in it. They mocked anyone who dared to call what they were doing sinful. Far from wanting rescue, they despised the very idea of it. They would sooner drag a rescuer into the flames than follow him to safety.
And it was not merely that they chose not to escape. They could not choose it. The smoke had blinded them so thoroughly that they could not see the doors. The fire had so seared their lungs that they could not cry out even if they wished to. Their rebellion had so consumed their nature that the desire to be saved did not exist within them. They were dead to every impulse of repentance, dead to every inclination toward the King’s mercy. A life ring thrown into their midst would be cursed and hurled back. A squad of rescuers breaking through the smoke would be attacked with fists and debris. These men did not merely refuse to cooperate with a rescue effort. They lacked the capacity to cooperate with it. They were slaves to their own rebellion, and they loved their chains.
If the King had done nothing more than ring the burning castle with His finest soldiers, stand in the courtyard in perfect and terrible majesty, and let the flames consume His enemies, no one in all the universe could have charged Him with injustice. Every rebel inside that castle was there by his own will. Every one of them had sinned against the King’s person. Every one of them had enjoyed his benefits and repaid him with violence. Justice demanded their destruction, and the King would have been perfectly righteous to let the fire do its holy work.
But the King did something no one had the right to expect. Something no rebel deserved. Something that cost the King more than any creature could fathom.
He turned to His only Son, whom He loved with an everlasting love, and He sent Him into the fire.
The Son did not hesitate. He entered the burning castle knowing what it would cost Him. He stepped into the smoke and the heat and the fury of the flames, and He made His way toward the rebels. They screamed at Him to leave. They cursed His name. They threw burning timbers at His head. They spat in His face and clawed at His arms, and through all of it He pressed forward.
He reached out His arms and laid hold of one of the rebels. This rebel was no better than the others. He was vile. He was covered in the filth of his own treachery. His hands were stained with the blood of the King’s household. His mouth was full of blasphemy. There was nothing in him that commended him to the Son’s affection, nothing that made him more deserving of rescue than the others. He was chosen not because of anything in himself, but solely because of the King’s sovereign, purposeful, eternal will, the kind intention of His heart determined before the castle was ever built, before the rebels were ever born.
The Son seized this rebel and carried him through the flames toward the door. The rebel fought him at first, as all the rebels would have, but something happened as the Son bore him forward. The Son’s strength overcame the rebel’s resistance. The Son’s love broke through the blindness of his smoke-filled eyes. For the first time in his wretched life, the rebel saw what was happening: the Son was dying. The fire that should have consumed the rebel was consuming the Son instead. The punishment the rebel deserved, the Son was bearing in his place.
They reached the open air. The Son laid the rebel on the grass and collapsed. The flames had done their work. The Son, the King’s only beloved, was dead. He had given His life, willingly and knowingly, to bring one undeserving traitor out of the fire.
The rebel lay on the ground and something shattered inside him. He looked at the body of the Son, the One he had cursed, the One he had fought, the One he had hated, and he was suddenly and irreversibly broken. Tears he had never been capable of shedding before now poured from eyes that had been opened by a power not his own. The filth of his rebellion felt unbearable to him now, and the gratitude that flooded his heart was unlike anything he had ever experienced. He did not understand why he had been chosen. He only knew that he had been, and that the cost had been the Son’s life.
The King came to him. He lifted the rebel from the ground. He washed the soot and blood from his body. He stripped away the rags of his treachery and clothed him in the spotless garments of His own dear Son. And the King embraced him, and the rebel fell to his knees, and they wept together with a love that would never end.
Inside the castle, the others continued their rampage. The flames roared higher. The walls began to collapse. And as the smoke billowed upward, those still inside could be heard laughing, mocking, and celebrating that the Son of the King was dead. They did not want rescue. They would not have accepted rescue. And the King declared, with the authority of one who knows all hearts perfectly, that even if time itself could be rewound and the whole scene played over from the beginning, every one of them would dive headlong into the flames without a moment’s hesitation.
This is the God of Scripture. This is the love of God in its fullness, its costliness, and its freedom.
Why the Critic’s Parable Fails and Why the Biblical Parable Stands
God is a moral peer of His creatures, obligated to save everyone He has power to save. Sinners are helpless victims crying for rescue. Election is arbitrary. Redemption costs nothing.
God is the infinite, holy, self-existent Creator. Sinners are active rebels who love their ruin. Election is the eternal, purposeful counsel of the Triune God. Redemption cost the life of the Son.
The Critic Creates a False God
The farmer in the story is a mere creature. God is not a farmer. God is not a creature.
The most fundamental failure of the critic’s parable is that the God it purports to represent does not exist. A man standing beside a pond is evaluated on the plane of human relationships, and every listener instinctively judges him by the standards we apply to our fellow man. We expect a human being to rescue a drowning child because human beings are peers of one another. They share the same nature, the same moral standing, and the same creatureliness before God. The farmer may himself have jumped into another farmer’s pond as a boy. He is in no position to render ultimate judgment on anyone.
But God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism declares and as the 1689 London Baptist Confession affirms in Chapter 2, God is “most holy in all His counsels, in all His works, and in all His commands.” He is a se—existing of Himself, dependent upon nothing and no one. A parable that treats God as though He were a moral peer of His creatures, subject to the same expectations and evaluations, has committed a theological error so foundational that everything built upon it collapses.
Francis Turretin is emphatic that God’s freedom in the distribution of grace is not subject to creaturely approval or evaluation. God does not owe grace to anyone. If He did, it would not be grace. The farmer illustration smuggles in the assumption that God is obligated to save everyone He has the power to save—but this is a philosophical assertion, not a biblical one. It confuses God’s power with God’s purpose and His ability with His intention.
Francis Turretin — Institutes of Elenctic TheologyThe moral obligations that bind creature to creature do not bind the Creator in the same fashion. When Reformed theologians such as Stephen Charnock and John Owen speak of God’s attributes, they are careful to note that God’s justice and God’s love are not competing interests that He must balance like a man weighing options. They are equally ultimate perfections of His one, undivided, simple nature.
The Critic Trivializes Sin
Swimming in a forbidden pond bears no resemblance to cosmic treason against infinite majesty.
The critic’s parable presents the sin of the drowning boys as nothing more than youthful mischief. They ignored a “No Swimming” sign and went for a swim. This is a trivial infraction—a minor act of civil disobedience that any reasonable person would overlook in the face of mortal danger. The listener is meant to feel sympathy for the boys and outrage at the farmer, and the parable succeeds in this precisely because it has drained sin of its true nature.
Scripture presents sin in terms that bear no resemblance to swimming in a forbidden pond. Sin is cosmic treason against the infinite majesty of God. It is a personal offense against the most holy, most generous, most patient, and most righteous King in all existence. The rebel sinner has not merely broken a rule posted on a fence. He has violated the law of the One who gave him life, breath, and everything he possesses. He has taken the gifts of God and used them as weapons against the Giver.
As Jonathan Edwards powerfully argues, the heinousness of sin is measured not by the act itself but by the dignity of the One sinned against, and since God’s dignity is infinite, the guilt of sin against Him is infinite. The prophets describe sin not as a boyish prank but as spiritual adultery, as the murder of innocents, as the desecration of everything sacred.
A King who judges rebels for the rape and murder of His own household looks like a righteous sovereign. The critic’s parable depends entirely on this distortion for its rhetorical force. When sin is trivialized, grace appears unnecessary and justice appears unreasonable. Remove that distortion and the entire argument collapses.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave… There is no fear of God before their eyes.
Romans 3:10–12, 18The Critic Ignores Total Depravity
The boys in the pond are presented as helpless victims who want to be saved. This is a direct contradiction of the biblical testimony regarding the natural man.
Perhaps the most glaring omission in the critic’s parable is its complete silence regarding the moral and spiritual condition of the sinners it represents. The boys in the pond are presented as helpless victims who want to be saved. They are thrashing. They are crying out. They are desperate for rescue. All they need is for the farmer to wade in and pull them out.
This is a direct contradiction of the biblical testimony regarding the natural man. Romans 8:7–8 declares that the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God, that it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and that those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Dead men do not cry out for help. Dead men do not reach for life rings. Dead men do not cooperate with rescue efforts.
The Reformed tradition has universally affirmed—from Calvin’s Institutes through the Canons of Dort, through John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, through the writings of Charles Spurgeon, through the careful exegesis of John Murray, and through the systematic presentations of Louis Berkhof—that fallen man is not merely sick, not merely disadvantaged, not merely inclined toward sin. He is spiritually dead. He is a slave to sin. He lacks the capacity, not merely the inclination, to respond to God in faith and repentance apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit.
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Ephesians 2:1–3The critic’s parable assumes that sinners are willing participants in their own rescue who are merely waiting for God to act. The Bible teaches the opposite. Sinners are active enemies of God who would sooner drag their rescuer into the flames than follow him out. Any parable that fails to account for this is not a parable about the biblical God and biblical humanity. It is a parable about a fictional scenario that has no correspondence to revealed truth.
The Critic Misrepresents Divine Election
The critic describes the farmer’s decision as “an inexplicable whim.” Scripture uses very different language.
This language is calculated to make God’s sovereign election appear arbitrary, capricious, and purposeless—as though God flipped a coin or drew straws and happened to land on certain sinners rather than others. Scripture uses very different language.
Ephesians 1:4–5 declares that God chose His people in Christ before the foundation of the world, and He predestined them to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will. This is not a whim. This is the eternal, purposeful, wise, and loving counsel of the Triune God.
I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will show compassion. So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.
Romans 9:15–16When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God responded: “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion” (Exodus 33:19). This is not arbitrariness. This is divine freedom, and it is glorious.
Exodus 33:19Reformed theologians across the centuries have labored to show that God’s election is never arbitrary in the sense of being purposeless or irrational. It is mysterious, yes. It is beyond the full comprehension of finite minds. But it is rooted in the infinite wisdom of God, in the counsel of His own will, and in purposes that redound to the praise of His glorious grace. Calvin, Beza, Perkins, Owen, Edwards, Hodge, Warfield, Bavinck, Sproul, and White have all affirmed that God’s election is purposeful, wise, and good, even when the reasons for His particular choices are not fully disclosed to creatures.
The Critic Undermines the Cost of Redemption
The farmer simply has to wade into the pond. Salvation is not free to God.
The critic’s parable involves no cost of rescue. The farmer simply has to wade into the pond and pull the boys out. It is a trivial act of physical exertion. This makes the farmer’s refusal to save all three appear monstrous because, in the world of the parable, saving everyone costs nothing.
But salvation is not free to God. The redemption of sinners required the incarnation, suffering, and death of the eternal Son of God. The Father did not merely throw a rope from the safety of heaven. He sent His only begotten Son into the world, into the fire of divine wrath against sin, and the Son bore in His own body on the cross the full penalty that the elect deserved.
Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand.
Isaiah 53:10For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21The proper parable captures this cost. The Son enters the burning castle knowing He will die. He takes hold of the rebel and carries him through the flames, and in so doing He perishes. This is the love of God: not a love that costs nothing and is dispensed indiscriminately, but a love that costs everything and is bestowed with sovereign purpose and infinite tenderness upon those whom the Father has given to the Son.
The Critic Demands That Grace Cease to Be Grace
The moment God must give grace to all, grace ceases to be grace and becomes a debt God owes to sinners.
The logical conclusion of the critic’s argument is this: if God does not save everyone, His love is imperfect. But this assertion, when followed to its necessary end, destroys grace itself. Grace is, by definition, unmerited favor. It is that which is freely given and cannot be demanded, earned, or required. The moment one argues that God must give grace to all or else be deficient in His love, grace ceases to be grace and becomes an obligation. It becomes a debt that God owes to His creatures, and a God who owes salvation to sinners is not a God of grace but a God under compulsion.
So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills… Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?
Romans 9:18–21If the critic insists that God must save all or save none, then the critic has only two options. Either God saves everyone (universalism, which Scripture explicitly rejects), or God saves no one. To avoid both of these conclusions, critics of Reformed theology are forced to argue that God sincerely desires to save all people but is ultimately thwarted by the autonomous free will of the creature. In this scheme, God tries to save everyone but fails. His will is overruled by the will of man. His purposes are frustrated by creaturely stubbornness. The sovereign King of the universe is reduced to a well-meaning but impotent bystander who does His best but simply cannot get the job done without the creature’s cooperation.
This is not the God of Scripture. The God revealed in the Bible declares the end from the beginning. He does all His holy will. His counsel stands, and He accomplishes all His good pleasure.
My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose… I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.
Isaiah 46:10–11All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out… And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.
John 6:37–39The Proper Parable Reflects Biblical Truth
The corrected parable corresponds to Scripture at every critical point where the critic’s parable distorts it.
God as a finite creature. Sin as minor mischief. Sinners as helpless victims. Election as arbitrary whim. Redemption as trivial effort. Grace as obligatory rescue.
God as a great and holy King. Sin as heinous personal treason. Sinners as spiritually dead rebels who love their rebellion. Election as the King’s sovereign, purposeful, eternal will. Redemption as requiring the death of the King’s own Son. Transformation as sovereign grace overcoming the rebel’s resistance.
The corrected parable also captures the transformation of the rebel as a work of sovereign grace that overcomes the rebel’s resistance and gives him a new heart, new eyes, and new desires he never possessed before. This is the gospel. This is the love of God. Not a love that tries and fails, not a love that waits for permission, not a love that depends on the cooperation of spiritually dead rebels, but a love that enters the fire, bears the cost, conquers the resistance of the beloved, and brings him home.
This love is not imperfect because it does not extend saving grace to all. It is infinitely perfect because it actually saves those upon whom it is set. It does not merely make salvation possible. It makes salvation certain. And every one of those for whom Christ died will be brought safely to glory, washed in His blood, clothed in His righteousness, and held in the everlasting arms of the King who gave His Son to bring them home.
The King would have been perfectly just to let every rebel perish. That He saved any is grace beyond measure. That He saved them at the cost of His own Son’s life is love beyond comprehension. And that He did so while they were still cursing His name, fighting His Son, and reveling in their sin is mercy that will be the song of the redeemed for all eternity.
The Gospel Stated
This is the God of Scripture. This is the love of God in its fullness, its costliness, and its freedom. Not a love that costs nothing and is dispensed indiscriminately. Not a love that tries and fails, that waits for permission, that depends on the cooperation of spiritually dead rebels. But a love that enters the fire, bears the cost, overcomes every resistance, and brings every one of its objects home with absolute certainty.
The sovereign God has elected a people from every nation. The Son has redeemed them at the cost of His own life. The Spirit effectually calls them to faith, breaking through the smoke of their blindness and the chains of their rebellion. They come freely, having been made willing by grace. They will persevere to the end, kept by the power of God. This—and nothing less than this—is the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8 (NASB 95)For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Ephesians 2:8–9 (NASB 95)All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.
John 6:37 (NASB 95)