Johan Roets🇿🇦

I’ve recently decided I’d rather be known for telling stories. I do love my country, but my government should repent and believe in Christ. As we all ought to.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

My Journey to Reformed Theology

If someone truly means it when they say, “I follow Jesus Christ,” they must take seriously the implications of that commitment.

“Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12–13)

This passage compels a serious, ongoing pursuit of understanding salvation—not casually, but with reverence and diligence. One must closely examine what Jesus taught, investigate the Scriptures He referenced, and carefully weigh the testimonies of those who knew Him most intimately. There is simply nowhere else to turn if one genuinely seeks salvation.

“Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’” (John 6:68)
Jesus Himself declared, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)

The gospel that saves—the one fully revealed and proclaimed—was complete and fully communicable by the time of the apostles.

“Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 1:3)

Note the key phrase: a common salvation rooted in a faith delivered once for all to the saints. The apostles were so convinced of its finality that they issued strong warnings against any deviation:

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.” (Galatians 1:6–9)

And similarly, “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” (Revelation 22:18–19)

From these passages, I reached a clear conclusion: If I am truly seeking salvation, I must understand it not as I might prefer it to be, but as it actually is—as the apostles preached it. Any other approach risks rendering my faith and walk with God empty.

“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:1–2)

This commitment produced several immediate and practical outcomes. I had to set aside everything that arose after the time of the closest eyewitnesses—the apocrypha, Islam, the teachings of the Latter-day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other later developments or movements. My sole focus became the word of life, nothing more and nothing less.

This priority also shaped how I approached Scripture itself. The Bible presents one unified message of redemption. Forcing one verse to contradict another, or reading my own preferences into the text, could never lead to genuine saving faith. Instead, I aimed for consistency across the whole of Scripture—harmonising the teachings of Christ with those of the apostles.

This rigorous, Scripture-centred path ultimately led me to embrace the Reformed position. It offered the most faithful and coherent expression of the gospel as once for all delivered: a salvation that is entirely by grace, through faith, grounded in God’s sovereign work from beginning to end.

This journey has not been about adopting a system for its own sake, but about submitting to what the biblical witness most clearly teaches.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@Wild_Horse The best bible is the one which is read. There is a broad spectrum of translation philosophies and many Christians find excuse here to debate. For now, I'd recommend leaving the deuterocanonicals. They are thus for a reason. A solid translation, NIV, ESV or LSB and you're golden.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@Wild_Horse I would not force conversion; a truly converted Christian life is not an easy one. But it is the only life that lets us move beyond the comfortable lies we hoped to live in and face truth on its own terms. The evidence for Christ exists; what’s missing is the will to face it.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@TheHeroesForge

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@TheHeroesForge And on that day, no prisoners were taken.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@Wild_Horse Bra, I might not be American. But that post was so savage that I never want to be your enemy. As a writer, I can also appreciate the candour and clarity. No softening of terms, just truth and the resultant contempt. I bet we'd be great friends.

[Drew @drewdyck]

If you're a Christian leader who's had an affair, it's ok to go sell insurance. Or build houses. Or drive Uber. You should repent and be fully restored to community within the life of the church. But you don't have to get back on stage. You don't need to teach. If can't serve without being in the spotlight, maybe you weren't really serving in the first place.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

To be known as one knows is a rare gift—not everyone can offer such depth of knowing, nor can everyone bear to be known so deeply.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@LCabonena This has been the slogan since 94, it has lost its credibility and meaning. Clearly some are more South African than others. May history place this country precisely where it belongs.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@RichPierce14 I really appreciated some of your insights, it was a great pleasure to "compare notes". I have recently done my own verse-by-verse work though John 3 and agree that a provisionist reading of verse 16 collapses any meaningful, structural analysis of the text.

[Brad Brisco @bradleybrisco]

"It has become clear to me that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging."

~ James Hollis

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

The most important type of intelligence assessment is telling the difference between a surface appearance of intellectualism, and the actual capability to understand complex relationships between cause and effect.

Because it's easy to spot when someone is dumb.

What's harder to discern is when someone is pretending to punch above his weight class.

Go watch a recorded speech given by Barrack Obama, or Christopher Hitchens. If you don't listen carefully, you could easily be fooled into thinking these men were intelligent.

They speak in ways that sound like how smart people speak.

But, for a moment, imagine you were to take the ideas in their eloquent speeches, and restate them using the phraseology and vocabulary of a stereotypical construction worker... would either of them still appear intelligent?

No. They would not. The ideas, stripped bare of rhetorical frills and fancy presentation, reveal themselves as simple restatements of bumper-sticker level political and social commentary.

You see, plenty of people are clever enough to watch the habits of genius and imitate them.

But geniuses are not geniuses because they are eloquent. They are eloquent because they are geniuses. Eloquence, and other such habits, are a side effect of genius, not its essential nature.

The side effects of genius can be imitated with study. The core functions cannot. Because anyone who can is, by definition, a genius.

And now, for those of you who have been more patient with me than I deserve, and are still following along, we have at last arrived at a general principle we can use.

If you want to know how truly intelligent someone is, take him out of his comfort zone.

Make him do something new, learn something he's never learned, try a skill he's never practiced, solve a problem he has never faced before.

How does he adapt? How does he think? How does he learn?

Without his thousands of hours of practice, without all his familiar tools neatly stashed in his comfort zone, a man is forced to fall back on who he is, on the genetic recipe that makes him.

This doesn't mean that he will make no mistakes, or that he will magically know what he could only learn from experience. But it means that he will learn quickly, understand each mistake as soon as he makes it, and never make the same error twice.

This is why we prize genius.

Not because it speaks pretty words or covers whiteboards in complex mathematically formulae, but because genius learns.

And then genius teaches.

Genius captures knowledge from the world for the rest of humanity.

So if you want to spot it, ignore the habits, ignore the frills and tells and tics, and watch how it engages with the unfamiliar.

[JD™ @LostMyHats]

The difficult part about arguing about Calvinism with an Arminian, Semi-Pelagian, or your run-of-the-mill Synergist is that you have to catch them up on basic Christian vocabulary and doctrinal concepts before you can even have a coherent conversation about the subject. You have to put them through ten years of Sunday School to catch them up on Biblical concepts even to discuss the subject with you.

Things like justification, regeneration, the difference between election and predestination, imputation, effectual calling, and the like- the foundational building blocks of biblical soteriology- are often over their heads, while they present you with metaphors like, “It’s a gift, but you have to accept it" and speak in vague generalities and illustrations. Many times, they hear those Biblical terms - used right there in the Scripture- and think you are quoting them Calvinist catchwords and key phrases, like Westminster invented them just to confuse the normies.

Largely, it requires significant catechesis for them to even grasp what you’re saying. And no, I don't mean pretentious theological terms invented by seminarians, but terms and doctrines drawn straight from Scripture, concepts a well-catechized child in a Reformed church can understand. You basically have to teach them Christianity 101 before they can even have the vocabulary necessary to argue that you're wrong. They're not ready for "regeneration," let alone an "prevenient grace."

Synergism really is the default position of the unlearned. All they know is that one day they believed in God, and suddenly they were saved. From the vantage point of their experience, faith appears to be the first thing that happened because it was the first thing they were there for to experience, so naturally they assume it was the thing they did that caused everything else to happen.

This is why Spurgeon said, “I was born an Arminian, as all of us are by nature.”

Arminianism makes intuitive sense because you don't have to know HOW the Gospel works to be saved by it (praise God). And because what you need to know to be saved is really simple, you naturally assume what happens on God's end of salvation is really simple. You have no idea how the sausage is made. So when an educated Christian comes along explaining to you the Ordo Salutis, you freak out because you had no idea what happens behind the curtain.

You heard the Gospel, saw Christ as desirable, believed, repented, and came willingly. From inside the experience, it felt entirely like YOU doing it. And then somebody comes along and says, "God did that," and your pastor never told you any of this before because - let's face it - your pastor is a Joel Osteen clone who preaches 15-minute sermonettes from The Message, so this shouldn't be surprising.

There’s a reason why it seems like Calvinists are pretentious know-it-alls: they acquired their position by learning. They weren’t born with it. They found it in the Bible, by study of the Scriptures, and by struggling with the Text. The Arminian arguing their default position is nine times out of ten not ready for a debate with someone who had to crawl through bloody glass to arrive at his theology, kicking and screaming past every verse he wished said something else, only to surrender because the accumulated weight of Scripture finally left him no other option than to become a Calvinist. Most Calvinists did not wake up one morning and decided the doctrines sounded pleasant. They were dragged there verse by verse, objection by objection, often fighting the conclusion the entire way.

That creates an enormous asymmetry in these arguments. One man is defending what has always seemed intuitively obvious to him. The other has already occupied that position, discovered its problems, fought his way through Romans 9, John 6, Ephesians 1 and 2, John 10, Acts 13, Ezekiel 36, and every objection presently being thrown at him, and finally abandoned the intuitive explanation because he could no longer make it survive the Scripture which, chances are, he knows backwards and sideways.

The Arminian thinks he is introducing the Calvinist to the obvious problem with Calvinism, giving him a metaphor he hasn't considered before. Nine times out of ten, he is introducing him to the objection that kept the Calvinist awake fifteen years ago.

That doesn’t make Calvinists smarter, and it certainly doesn’t make them incapable of error. It does explain why the conversation can feel so lopsided. The Calvinist frequently knows the Arminian position because he used to hold it. He knows why it feels persuasive. He knows the verses used to defend it. He knows the objections to his present position because he once made them himself. He didn’t arrive at Calvinism by choosing the easier road. He arrived there with his fingernails torn off from trying to hold onto the theology he had before Scripture finally pried his fingers loose and he had to admit, "Salvation is of the Lord."

[David D. Edgington 🦬 @DavidEdgington]

From a friend:

"So many men in that situation (White Knights & Reviling Wives) take the Smith and Wesson retirement plan. You might not know but your books are saving more lives than you know."

Men, if that is you, it is NOT God's will for you to end your life. In spite of what you may "feel," our Lord and King, Jesus Christ is WITH you 💪🏻👑

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@DavidEdgington I couldn’t blame them. For many of these men, there’s no way out. Family, church, some friends, the courts, the culture—all picked her side. What could he possibly say or do that changes anything? It’s not lack of faith. It’s helplessness that drives them to the retirement plan.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@MikeWingerii True of my generation in South Africa.

[Mike Winger @MikeWingerii]

It’s an unspeakable tragedy that my generation grew up thinking it was a bad idea to have children.

We were told the earth was overcrowded.

We were told the world was full of too much sorrow. Why bring someone into that?

We were told to have fun and wait.

All lies.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

I'm such a fan of how things can scale, but one of the things we have utterly failed to scale is basic humanity. And the most human reason why? Because people are not things! idiots.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@YourCalvinist This status quo, even within the evangelical church, is going to harm not just this generation, but the generations to come. A lot of ground has been ceded to the enemy without even a modicum of resistance.

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@_sureimsure @JennMGreenberg An attack on my character does not make an argument and reflects badly on yours. Now you cannot be considered a good faith actor or argument anymore.
Please read some good commentaries on Genesis before posting on X. #goodadvice

[Johan Roets🇿🇦 @Artex23]

@JennMGreenberg @_sureimsure Gen 3:16 is the curse on the relationship. The same “desire… rule” language appears in 4:7 about sin. So the woman desires to dominate, just as the man’s rule is distorted. If one side is abusive, fairness requires calling the other side abusive too. Check commentaries, please.