People know the truth of the one, true God, but have from birth suppressed that truth for a lie due to corrupt reasoning faculties, per Romans 1:18-32.
No one seeks the one,
true God lest God so enable them per the power of the Holy Spirit such that they will then possess the moral ability to do nothing but choose to believe.
Per Holy Writ, the unbeliever will never seek God's righteousness for the unbeliever...
- is
deceitful and
desperately sick (Jer. 17:9);
- is
full of evil (Mark 7:21-23);
-
loves darkness rather than light (John 3:19);
- is unrighteous, does not understand,
does not seek for God (Rom. 3:10-12);
- is
helpless and
ungodly (Rom. 5:6);
- is
dead in his trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1);
- is by nature a
child of wrath (Eph. 2:3);
-
cannot understand spiritual things (1 Cor. 2:14); and
- is a
slave of sin (Rom. 6:16-20).
Clearly from the above small sampling of the many teachings in Holy Writ about the
total inability of the lost, it is clear that they have
no moral ability to seek after the righteousness of God. It is only
when God the Holy Spirit
regeneratively replaces their lost hearts of stone with one of flesh (Eze. 36:26) that the lost are given the moral ability to believe and then
irrevocably evidence
the fruit of their regeneration—faith and repentance.
The miracle we should be in awe about is that God saves anyone, for all are born fallen
in Adam and deserve nothing but God's justice. Would that all give God all the glory for their salvation rather than clinging on to some humanistic thread of their own wisdom, willingness to be open to the Good News, openness to being "wooed" by the Holy Spirit, "choosing rightly while their neighbor chooses wrongly", etc.
Soli Deo Gloria! was the
cry of the Reformation, yet after the likes of Arminius, Finney, and others it is now
Soli Deo Gloria...and me!
AMR
