thereby causing them to willingly obey the Gospel. The entire process (election, redemption, regeneration) is the work of God and is by grace alone. Thus God, not man, determines who will be the recipients of the gift of salvation."
"Willingly obey". Exactly so.
You have been informed many times what the Calvinist position is on this.
The one who is willingly obeying the gospel is a new creature, one taught by the Holy Spirit of God, not the old man who, in and of himself, would not obey the gospel according to Romans.
You may disagree about the order of salvation and the literal interpretation of the Romans teaching about fallen man. But please don't misrepresent what Calvinists believe about them. That is a straw man of your own making. It proves nothing to kick him around.
Either a person does some thing of their own will or they are caused to do it with that person having no choice in the matter. A person is not willingly doing some thing if he was caused, made, forced to do it.
Everyone agrees that the decision to obey the gospel is done out of the will of men. To say that Calvinists teach something different is a misrepresentation to put it charitably.
Jesus Christ willingly obeyed His Father out of His own will. He obeyed because of His nature which gave Him the ability and willingness to listen to His Father and obey.
I rather like having the nature of the Son of man and I thank God for making me a new creation. I didn't much like the old one - cursed as he was.
If you insist on saying that God "caused" Him (and us) to obey - you are in good company and, if you want me to use that term I will. It is just as I have humored you by using the term "work" for the act of believing - even though it requires some nuance - which I have provided for you.
The Westminster Confession of Faith says the same thing. God is the "first cause" of all that happens. How could He be otherwise? But He works through "second causes" to bring to past what He has predestined to occur.
God was the first cause of Joseph being sold into slavery just as He was the first cause of Caiaphas' prophecy and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. But He used the natural inclination of fallen men to bring to past what He intended to come to past.
These things aren't hard to understand unless you simply want to argue to be arguing.
.........Nineveh therefore was not "caused to willingly obey" against their will by predestination for such is the illogic of Calvinism and not of God's nature.
No one including Calvinists have said that anyone is caused to obey "against their will".
You insist on using the word "force". The WCF clearly excludes that kind of thinking from the formula. I won't even humor you by using the word "force" because it simply is not true and no Calvinist would use such a word.
No Calvinist would say that they were caused to obey "against their will". That's another of your straw men.
No Calvinist would say that the Ninevites did not have a will of their own and that they were not able to obey God at all. Calvinists only say that no natural man is willing and able in his own self to obey things related to the gospel. No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.
Calvinists agree with Romans that Nineveh did not in and of themselves seek and understand God's will without intervention by the Holy Spirit.
They certainly were "caused" to obey in the way the WCF lays out for us. But not in the way you lay out in your "straw man" argument against Calvinist's teachings.
God was the first cause of their decision and He worked through a second cause to bring them into a repentant state. That second cause was their own will - influenced no doubt by their own fear of judgment and perhaps by the inscrutable working of the Holy Spirit of God.
By the way - you have no idea if the Ninevites who repented were among the elect of God or not. They may well have been and perhaps we'll see them in Heaven. You have no idea what God was doing in them internally.
You and I have no idea if their obedience was credited to them as righteousness as was Abraham's faith.
Of course we, hopefully, agree that if they make it to Heaven it is ultimately because of the work of Christ at Calvary.
Regarding God saying something will happen when something else entirely happens - He laid that principle out clearly for us by teaching us that He knows all possibilities as clearly as He knows what will actually happen.
He does have foreknowledge and He does know what He has been predestined to happen.
God is omniscient. He did know what Nineveh would ultimately do and He was not wrong in what He knew about it.
It is clear that it was His way of emphatically stating what would happen if they did not repent. The very fact that He sent a prophet to warn them of their assured destruction proves that He was presenting them with an alternate destination.
Anyone would have to wrestle with how to look at the fact that He said one thing would happen and another thing happened.
That dilemma is not unique to Calvinists and both Calvinists and non-Calvinists explain it the same way.
You obviously believe that God's working through the will of others is the same as "
forcing" them to do things they do not want to do. Calvinists disagree and say that it is not.
They use the examples of the will of Joseph's brothers, the prophecy of Caiaphas, the decision of Gog to come against Israel, the perfect obedience of the Son of Man, the choice of evil men to crucify Jesus and any number of other situations to illustrate that this is not so.
Men will be rightly judged for their evil. Men will be rightly judged for the obedience. That is true whether God predestined the attendant events in history to happen or not.
God has predestined everything which happens in His creation. He works through second causes to bring to past His decrees. The second causes (whether good or bad choices in this case) will be judged by God and God will be found righteous in His judgments when all is said and done. That will be true whether the events surrounding those choices turn out to be predestined to happen or not.
If you believe all of the Bible you must believe that.
If you chafe at the idea that you are not completely independent of God you are not alone. It is the story of the root of sin from the very beginning. You simply cannot and will not be completely independent of God. In Him you live and move and have your being as does all of creation.
All things were created by and for His Word and in His Word all things consist.
Reformed theologian have done their best to include everything the scriptures teach into a cohesive and systematic theology. For the most past they have done well IMO, even though I disagree with them in some places.
There is good reason why almost all good complete systematic theological works come down on more or less the Reformed side of things. The only way one can avoid doing so IMO is to appeal to emotion and human logic in their deliberations.
