All predestined?

[fhansen]

We can’t get around the fact that man is a morally accountable being who can make the right choice, the choice for God, at least with the help of a degree of grace. And we can’t deny that there are encouragements and exhortations as well as admonishments and warnings to believers to do the right thing, to make the right choice, and persevere in it. Ever since Eden, beginning with Adam, God has been in the business of helping us do so and that’s why He didn’t just stock heaven with the elect and hell with the reprobate from the beginning.

He’s been patiently educating and molding and drawing humanity towards making the right choice without making the choice for us. His “predestination” involves His foreknowledge of those choices. His education includes a prodigal's education-of life spent in exile, without intimate contact with/knowledge of God in a world where man’s will reigns instead and the resulting evil is experienced by us, along with the education He’s given by revelation down through the centuries in bits and pieces as we become ready to receive it. In any case man is expected to act: God reaches down and offers, but we must then reach up and grasp His hand-and hold on to it.

 

[Albion]

We can’t get around the fact that man is a morally accountable being who can make the right choice, the choice for God, at least with the help of a degree of grace.

You are assuming that all that is necessary is to do things--that this is the sum total of what God wants, which would also mean that any decent act done by an unbeliever or reprobate is also God-pleasing. But of course we now that that is not the case.

 

[fhansen]

You are assuming that all that is necessary is to do things--that this is the sum total of what God wants, which would also mean that any decent act done by an unbeliever or reprobate is also God-pleasing. But of course we now that that is not the case.

Not sure how that follows-if the "decent act" was the choice for God.

 

[fhansen]

Faith is both a gift and a human choice. We already know that God exists. Adam's act was essentially an act of preference, for himself over God. In that act of disobedience he denied God's existence for all practical purposes, because to deny God is to deny His rightful place as God, to deny His godhood. Faith, then, is to restore that belief: in His existence first of all, and of His right to be our God. And we can always forgo that faith at a later date, because He's not right here where we can "see" Him- and the offerings of this world and the praise of men seek to turn us back away from anything akin to real faith; we can deny Him all over again by our pride and sin.

So we choose to accept the gift of faith, perhaps falteringly so at first, and then we continue in this choice and the fruit it should produce throughout our lives, and strengthen it-or not. No one can predict their own perseverance-and there's no reason for Scripture to exhort believers to persevere in the first place if not for the very real possibility of that not happening.

 

[RDKirk]

Not sure how that follows-if the "decent act" was the choice for God.

That isn't "any" decent act, then, is it? Nor can we really call it an "act."

Or, with more biblical precision, we can't call it a "work."

 

[fhansen]

That isn't "any" decent act, then, is it? Nor can we really call it an "act."

Or, with more biblical precision, we can't call it a "work."

I'm not sure of the best term to use for it, but either way it's a matter of grace, a gift we can refuse to "act" on, or respond to. And as such, the human will is involved.