Is God Sovereign or Is Man Responsible in Salvation? with Jonny Ardavanis
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Jonny Ardavanis
4.9 • 902 Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
Is God sovereign in salvation, or is man responsible? This is one of the most asked questions in theology. In this episode, we dive into Scripture to answer whether Calvinism or Arminianism is correct.
We explore key passages like John 3, John 6, Romans 9-10, and Matthew 11 to show how God's sovereignty and human responsibility are both clearly taught in Scripture. You'll learn:
✅ What hyper-Calvinism gets wrong
✅ Why human responsibility matters for evangelism
✅ How election and "whosoever believes" work together
✅ What an antinomy is (and why it's not a paradox)
✅ How to answer "Am I one of the elect?"
Whether you're wrestling with predestination, struggling with evangelism, or just want to understand what the Bible actually teaches about salvation, this conversation will ground you in Scripture.
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES: John 3:3-7, 16 | John 6:37-47 | Romans 8:29-30 | Romans 9:15-18 | Romans 10:9-17 | Matthew 11:27-28 | Ephesians 1:4-11 | Ephesians 2:1-10
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Am I a Calvinist? |
| 0:02.1 | Juxtapose constantly. |
| 0:03.4 | You see this reality of God's sovereignty and salvation. |
| 0:06.9 | And then there's this right after that, you need to believe in Jesus Christ. |
| 0:11.2 | So which one is it? |
| 0:12.3 | Like, is God sovereign or is man responsible for responding in faith? |
| 0:17.9 | And concisely, how would you answer that question? |
| 0:27.3 | No. for responding in faith. And concisely, how would you answer that question? Hang, thanks for sitting down. |
| 0:28.8 | One of the things I get asked a fair amount and comments, |
| 0:32.8 | and by the way, if you have different ideas for future episodes, |
| 0:35.7 | we want to know those, you can drop us a comment below telling us, we want to be a resource to you listening and sometimes people |
| 0:42.4 | respond with questions that are prevalent and prominent. One of those questions is... Can I guess? |
| 0:48.4 | Yeah. Are you Calvinist? Yeah, exactly. Am I a Calvinist? Is God sovereign in salvation or is man responsible? Sometimes when we're reading a passage of scripture and it seems like we're affirming God's sovereignty in one area. People respond with, that's Calvinism. And I say, no, no, that's in the scripture. At other times, people that are in the Calvinist camp |
| 1:11.4 | tell me, I sound Armenian, right? Because I'm affirming man's responsibility to respond in faith |
| 1:17.5 | to the message of the gospel. And to your point, there's nothing fundamentally wrong. Like, |
| 1:23.0 | it's good to know terminology and to be able to define those terms. But maybe I feel like at least in my instance, working with students or even talking |
| 1:31.0 | with other brothers and sisters, oftentimes they'll assume that they know the definition. |
| 1:35.8 | And then it gets very divorced from scripture. |
| 1:38.4 | And so maybe it would be useful to actually dive into scripture itself and maybe address |
| 1:42.1 | those questions kind of from first principles. |
| 1:44.4 | Yeah. And really in this episode, we want to answer the question is God, sovereign and salvation, |
| 1:48.0 | or is man responsible? Regarding Calvinism as a whole, we'll maybe do an episode next week on, |
... |
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