Hart’s discussion on the modern deification of self-will has all kinds of interesting implications:
Certain theologians began to worry that to grant any of God’s other attributes – his goodness, mercy, rationality, and so on – priority over his will could not help but dilute a proper sense of the majesty of divine freedom. A few particularly extreme formulations of the voluntarist position even seemed to descrbe a God whose will is somehow supreme over his own nature, and seemed to suggest that this God’s acts toward created reality should be understood solely as demonstrations of his power, and nothing else. By this logic, the laws of nature and of morality could no longer be said to reflect who or what God is, or to communicate any knowledge of this nature or character, but should be seen simply as inexplicable decisions emanating from the unfathomable abyss of his will. Here explicity, for the first time in Western thought, freedom was defined not as the unobstructed realization of a nature but as the absolute power of the will to determine even what that nature might be. One might even say that, in this view of things, God’s essence simply IS will. And if this is what freedom is for God, then this must be what freedom is for us as well.
David Bently Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, p.225
I know that Calvinism rejects “theological voluntarism”, which is being described above. However if you listen to the rhetoric you hear from some reformed corners, I wouldn’t blame you for getting confused. Keep your eye on the ball (who God IS), not what, in all his sovereignty, he SEEMS to be doing or at least seems to be letting happen.