KyleSpringer
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- Feb 13, 2018
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I responded exercising a choice to do so. Predestination and foreknowledge does not mean we don't have choices. It means we act according to the nature of our choices. We are either dead in our sins and sons of disobedience or slaves to righteousness and Christ. Our choices are in accordance with what or Whom we are in bondage to, or slaves to.
Romans 6: NASB
8Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, 9knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. 10For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. 11Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
12Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, 13and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. 14For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
15What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be! 16Do you not know that when you present yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin resulting in death, or of obedience resulting in righteousness? 17But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, 18and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. 19I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness, resulting in further lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness, resulting in sanctification.
20For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the outcome of those things is death. 22But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. 23For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Now ask the question. Do our choices thwart the will and purpose of God? Because it seems everyone wants to deny God His own Will and Purpose by calling any move by God to predestine does not make us 'free.' As we see from Romans 6 we truly are not 'free' in the Deistic Enlightenment or modern Libertarian mentality. We are under bondage to either sin leading to death, or Christ and righteousness. So that limitation right there squashes the notion of 'free will.' We are free to make choices but those choices are in bondage.
This teaching is apostolic, Biblical, historical and Reformed.
Our choices are in submission, not bondage.
Though the word enslaved is used, we are being told that we were purchased and that those who accept the free gift of salvation will serve a new master.
The term slave here insinuates an indentured servant, who is free to choose to stay or leave, but as the scripture says “you derive your benefit, resulting in salvation” therefore we assume that we serve a Master who is good to those that serve in His House.
We know that his kindness draws us in. Paul would put it this way,
“Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.”
Philippians 3:12 KJV
This does not mean that he had no choice, and was put in a state of bondage, but the manner in which his heart was so grabbed by the grace of his Lord compelled him in a way that is comparable to someone simply overwhelming him with might and majesty, that to not submit would be foolish.
You may contend this fact, but then how does one explain leaders in the community admittedly and knowingly walking into sin, even after they claimed to have been converted from death to life?
All that to say choice would be an illusion in which trust and hope would play no part, if our choices truly were situational. The way the truth and the life for each person, sinner and saint, is Jesus Christ.
And as Joshua said, I lay before you a choice between life and death. Choose life.
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