Predestination??

[mlqurgw]

It seemed that you answered your own question on the previous page about gifts being received and the recipient is passive in receiving it. In my response to others here, I've agree with ya. "Receiving a gift" is not equal to "work" or "merit." I've never heard of anyone waking up Christmas morning and thinking to themselves "Drat! I have a lot of work to do today" or "Awesome, I'm going to earn some presents today!"

How then does a person receive Christ? If it is passively they do nothing just as a glass does nothing in receiving water. God pours in His grace and mercy in the person of Christ. He does all the work and it is very clear from both Scripture and experience that He doesn't do it for all. He gives it to whom He will. Do you agree with this?

 

[JimfromOhio]

Do our selfish interests collide with Christ's Lordship? Jesus means Savior; Lord means Sovereign; Christ means Anointed One. There are many Christians do not truly believe in God's sovereignty. How can any Christians not be aware of the sovereignty of the God? It is amazing that there are some who deny any God's divine involvement in our lives.

Sovereign God is the absolute, infinite, unqualified ruler in all realms in heaven and earth and sea. He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. God takes no orders from anyone and He has already planned out our tomorrows and holds the world in the palm of His hand. God possesses what no creature can—an incomprehensible power, potency that is absolute. God have not created us to be robots. God is not a dictator while at the same time, He uses His resources to direct us according to His will. Within certain areas of our lives, we are free to choose. Even though we are free to choose, there are times that God is involved in the direction of human history and directing us to specific, predetermined God's plans. God governs the world (Isa. 40:22-24), the nations (Isa. 40:15-17), and us (Proverbs 16:9). God have His plans and no one will be able to change them. If God sees anyone trying to change, He will divinely change the course. God does not want any to perish but if we want to do so He will allow it. Human pity is both a beautiful and a dangerous emotion. In the same way uninformed and unreasoning sympathy tends to take sides with the fallen and rebellious people against the God whose name is Holy. Biblically, it is very clear that no one seeks God on their own (Romans 3:11) and God calls and saves us by the Holy Spirit, not according to our works but according to His own Will and Grace which were granted us in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 1:8-9). God chose us and gave us saving grace (Eph. 2:8-9).

Ungenerated people have no capacity to understand God's spiritual truth; instead they created God in their own image, calling God's truth foolishness (1 Cor. 2:14). They are spiritually blind (2 Cor. 4:4), spiritually dead (Eph. 2:1) and spiritually ignorant (Eph. 4:18) to understand biblical truth.

 

[calidog]

How then does a person receive Christ? If it is passively they do nothing just as a glass does nothing in receiving water. God pours in His grace and mercy in the person of Christ. He does all the work and it is very clear from both Scripture and experience that He doesn't do it for all. He gives it to whom He will. Do you agree with this?

nope. He gives it to all whosoever will.

 

[mlqurgw]

nope. He gives it to all whosoever will.

How does a person become willing?

 

[calidog]

How does a person become willing?

God helps us to will. He helps ALL of us to will. 1John2:2
And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the WHOLE world.

 

[mlqurgw]

God helps us to will

How?

 

[calidog]

How?

He convicts us (ALL) of sin, righteousness, and judgement.

 

[mlqurgw]

He convicts us (ALL) of sin, righteousness, and judgement.

What does that mean? How does He do it?

 

[BBAS 64]

God helps us to will. He helps ALL of us to will. 1John2:2
And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the WHOLE world.

Good Day, Calidog

1 Jn 2:2 , says nothing close to what you attributed to the verse. Would you happen to have another?

Does God "help" all people equally?

When does it occur to God, that no matter how much "help" he gives in the end that "help" will fail in it's purpose?


Peace to u,

Bill

 

[Reformationist]

It is best to affirm what the Bible affirms, and be silent where it is silent, and be in awe of the gracious mystery of election and predesitnation.

I completely agree with you, and Luther, that it is best to leave the unrevealed will of God to God, however, this issue is not unrevealed. Lutherans simply refuse to acknowledge what their view states. They purport the view of "single predestination, a view which even those who oppose the idea of predestination reject. For clarification, I distinguish between single predestination and the reformed view of predestination which includes within it God's passive reprobation of the non-elect. I do not espouse the view of equal ultimacy. In a mathematical formula, the Lutheran tactic is to espouse the following as the truth of predestination in its most prime form:

2 + 2 = ?

They are unwilling to define ? and feel that Scripture does not either. So, they refrain from doing so under the banner that such knowledge is exclusive to God and should be left undisturbed. It simply isn't so.

God bless

 

[Reformationist]

He convicts us (ALL) of sin, righteousness, and judgement.

If He convicts all, then why does the same conviction cause one person to turn to God in repentance while another simply rebels?

God bless

 

[oworm]

He convicts us (ALL) of sin, righteousness, and judgement.

To convict is to bring one under the conviction that they are in fact, guilty. One who is convicted is convinced and one who is convinced of sin against God will be brought to repentance. If all are convinced then all will repent. We know that not all are convinced of their sin against God so its logical is it not, that God has not convinced all of sin righteousness and judgement to come?

 

[calidog]

What does that mean? How does He do it?

That's a good question. I don't know.

 

[Jedi]

Jedi, when I wrote about the hypothetical person who freely chooses to believe in God as making the "best choice," I meant that such a free, autonomous choice would be morally praiseworthy (if it were possible).

But like I said before, if a person who most wants to be away from God (the source of morality), doing something morally praiseworthy would be quite the opposite of what he actually wanted (thus it is not “best” for that person).

As Scripture speaks clearly about all sinners being "enslaved to sin" and also states unequivocally that "no one seeks God," such a free, autonomous choice is an illusionary concept... more the product of human wishful thinking than a conclusion reached from an honest assessment of humanity's condition as depicted in the Bible.

In scripture, hyperbolic language is used quite frequently to illustrate extremities. That’s what you find in these two cases: everyone is enslaved to sin (in the sense that sin has condemned them), sure, but sin is not all they do.

God's Word states that we are dead in our sins. How can spiritually dead people make the objectively good and wise choice to turn from their sins and trust in Christ for salvation?

Another one of the Calvinists’ favorite passages. We were dead in our sins because we had already rebelled against God – our choice had already been made and there was no coming back, just as there is no coming back from being dead. Yet Christ gave people a second opportunity and for those who were willing, God “raised them to life” (for there is no sense in raising a corpse who is bent on being dead).

They can only make that choice if God opens their eyes and gives them ears to hear the Truth. If they could make the choice freely, they would not be spiritually dead-- just spiritually fatigued, or at worst, damaged. Scripture shows sinful humanity as being in a much, much worse state though.

Spiritually dead refers to the status of people without Christ – they have sinned (made their decision of rejection) and so if left to their own devises from there on out, they perish because of that decision. This is not to say that their wills are dead to goodness or that they have lost all potential for good choices – that part is read into the text by those with Calvinistic theologies.

Election is emphatically not favoritism on God's part. It's not about God "playing favorites." Both election and reprobation are about God displaying His attributes. Election displays God's mercy to sinners who don't deserve it. This shows His love. Reprobation displays His wrath toward sinners who do deserve it. This shows His justice.

But the question arises, “What does God base His decision on who to elect/save and who He leaves to rot?” Every Calvinist here has said “His purposes and will,” but that is nothing more than a euphemistic way of saying “favoritism.” The bullet still hasn’t been dodged. Further still, it is more glorious to have your enemies join your side than to mow them down like grass. The Calvinists’ God has taken the lesser of the glories in this respect because He did not save all He could.

You keep saying that in order for God to be "fair," He has to "save as many people as possible." Think about the implications of that statement, in light of the fact that all human beings are willfully sinful rebels against God. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that if God were really going to be "fair," He would have to damn all of us?

I’ve already been through this with our friend Reformationist. To condemn the wicked is fair for sure. However, God has decided to show mercy to at least some, but in order to be fair, He has to give the same mercy to everyone He can, else He is not being fair in His distribution of mercy. It’s like a parent whose two sons were put in jail for the same crime and he only chose to bail one out when he could have bailed both out. No fair parent would do such a thing, so why do people insist that the ultimate just being would?

You have used the analogy of a lifeguard saving drowning civilians and applied it to God saving us. By your logic, for God to be fair, He has to save (or "give the opportunity to accept salvation to") as many "drowning" sinners as possible.

Quite right.

Let's look at the analogy you are making here-- drowning civilians to lost sinners. It doesn't hold up, because the former are drowning against their will, while the latter are exactly where they want to be. Drowning people are only too happy to be rescued.However, as the Bible clearly states, lost sinners are at emnity with God.

I’m sure if you asked the vast majority of atheists and nonbelievers, they would tell you they do not wish to go to hell (civilians who do not wish to drown). In this respect, the analogy stands: God neglects to save those who need saving and want to be saved. Further still, since when does the will of a person matter at all to the Calvinist? In the Calvinists’ scenario, everyone wants to drown, so why does God save only some if He truly is all good? By your previous analogy of the surgeon and the brain-damaged man, these people aren’t thinking clearly; they are patients to be cured, not enemies to be crushed. For God to neglect saving them when He could would make Him not all good.

You say that although lost sinners sin (by definition), they also desire goodness. You are defining "goodness" according to your own subjective standards though.

I’m defining goodness by the standards of scripture: loving your neighbor as yourself, acting our principles such as charity, selflessness, honor, patience, respect, etc., so for your to say that all these things are merely my “own subjective standards” is clearly a straw man. Plenty of nonbelievers do these very things without ever thinking to themselves “I am doing this with the understanding of the correct doctrinal presuppositions.”

You are not defining it as the Bible does, because Scripture states that whatever is not done out of faith (in terms of moral actions) is sin. Perhaps that seems a bit harsh or extreme to you, but Scripture says it!

But again, I’ve already been through that passage when Reformationist brought it up. In a nutshell, it’s not talking about “You have to be thinking the right theological thoughts whenever you do an action, else it is sin;” rather, it is saying that your moral actions must line up with the very nature of God (“from faith”), specifically in the context of being considerate to your neighbor.

The only morally good, pleasing acts to God are those that are done, first and foremost, out of faith in Him.

From the understanding you seem to have in the “from faith” phrase, you could a nonbeliever who pushed an elderly nun out of the way of a speeding car and, in the process, got hit himself was paralyzed from the neck down and tell him that what he did was sin. I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy that.

Lost sinners who don't know God don't do anything out of faith in Him

This would be true only if they did nothing good, yet every time someone chooses to do something good for the sake of goodness, they are in a very real sense choosing God (that is, goodness itself).

Therefore, lost sinners do not desire goodness!

You should really talk with some non-believers some time. It might enlighten you that they’re not these savages with no sense of moral goodness who desire only to do evil.

Things that would be horrific for us to do, as finite beings, might well be good and wise for God to do, from His viewpoint of infinity

God is a God of consistency and would not tell us to do good and then turn around and do the exact opposite Himself. When God spells it out that lying is wrong, that does not mean it’s okay for God to lie. The list goes on.

Any good human father would not willingly allow his child to be physically harmed. However, God allowed Job to be physically afflicted for His own purposes. He was sovereign over Job's suffering-- He allowed Satan to attack Job and his family. God didn't step in as soon as He saw Job starting to crack under pressure. If a human father treated his son in such a way, we would say that the man was cruel, heartless.

This would be true only if it were not beneficial to Job in the end. Ultimately, all of those things worked for Job’s good in the end, so God was very good to him. There are times when a great amount of good can only be accomplished by going through a smaller amount of evil and an entirely good being would realize this. Yet this cannot be the case for those whom God neglects to eternal damnation – they have an eternal bad waiting for them simply because God didn’t care enough to save them.

 

[Jedi]

We have no right to say such things about God though, because He sees from the beginning to the end, in all things, and we don't. He is perfectly wise, and we are not. Therefore, we cannot (and have no right to) "hold God hostage" to standards of what would or would not be fair for us to do, as finite beings with a limited view of history and reality.

Then God Himself could come down in human form, rape people, create a race of people who are sinless only to cast them into hell, torture people for fun, etc. and we would have no cause to question him? I’m sorry, but again, I just don’t buy that. I will never serve a God who is anything less than goodness itself.

So, while on the way to persecute Christians, being knocked to the ground, blinded, and sent off for three days, only to be told at the end of that time, "You are my appointed spokesman".... that is being given an opportunity? No.

Yes. Paul could have said, “screw this,” but he didn’t. Nowhere does scripture say, “God made Paul do his bidding as a mind-controlled slave, completely unwilling (until God twisted his will to become someone else) to follow God in every way.” God knew Paul and who he was at his core. His zeal for God was obvious, but he had the facts wrong. THAT’S what God did on the road to Damascus. He handed Paul the facts, from which Paul decided to act upon.

A severely brain-damaged man is not culpable for his lack of lucidity, i.e. "not thinking clearly." However, a depraved sinner is culpable for his sin.

Then the analogy doesn’t follow (since “sin” isn’t equal to “brain damaged”).

The sinner's form of "not thinking clearly" is being in love with his sin, honestly enjoying it.

So? The brain damaged man could just as well enjoy his insanity, but that doesn’t make him any less insane or even culpable for enjoying his insanity (since it is insanity that makes him enjoy it). The same thing for sinners in this analogy: they enjoy sin but it is sin that makes them enjoy it. Given this, they cannot be held accountable.

It is a sort of "spiritual insanity," but it is not morally neutral (as being brain-damaged is), because it is self-chosen.

From what I hear of Calvinistic theology, it was Adam and Eve that chose it, not any of us. Thus someone else chose it, got infected with what you make out to be a “disease style” of sin, and passed it on to everyone else. If this is so, it is not self-chosen. I can’t imagine a single person in the world who willfully thought to themselves, “I would like to be contaminated by sin and thus separated from God.”

You said, in regard to the "brain-damaged man/lost sinner" analogy, that if everyone "thought clearly," then they would all choose God. Yes... if we were all still in the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve had not fallen, we would all naturally choose God.

But weren’t Adam and Eve thinking clearly? They weren’t infected with sin. Why did they not choose God? Seems to me there are a few loose ends for the Calvinists to tie up here. If when we think clearly, we choose God, then Adam and Eve were either (A) not thinking clearly, or (B) even in thinking clearly, some people may not choose God. If the answer is the former, then Adam and Eve were not thinking clearly and were thus corrupted some how (meaning that not even they had a fair choice). However, if the latter is true, then what you say is false.

For others, He leaves them as they are-- which is how they want to be.

Pointing this out in the Calvinistic paradigm is rather irrelevant, since everyone wanted to be like that. This phrase makes it seem like those God saved didn’t want to be like that so He saved them and those He didn’t wanted to be like that so He left them to themselves. Further still, what about the problem of God raping them? If no one wanted to be saved, why did God save them? Everyone was getting what they wanted – except for God, so He apparently had to force Himself upon them to get what He wanted. Sounds an awful lot like rape to me.

When God changes a sinner's heart so that he (or she) will be honestly, truly love God, it is not "rape"-- it is an act of love and mercy, because God is saving that person from his own destructive ways!

Whenever you force yourself upon someone who does not want you, it is rape. In this situation, these people didn’t even want to be saved, and still God saved them. Further still, it is not truly them that God is saving if He has to twist and contort their wills. At best, He is saving only a mere shadow of who they really are because He has forced them to be someone they are not.

As for your exegesis of Romans 9, if it doesn't have to do with salvation, then why do the passages go from speaking of God's love of Jacob and hatred of Esau, based on His "purpose in election," "not by works but by Him who calls," straight over to a description of God as the "potter" and us as the "clay," finally culminating in the picture of God's "vessels of wrath, prepared for destruction?"

We must not make the mistake in thinking that all grace, mercy, wrath, destruction, etc. are salvific. The entire passage is about people’s place in life and the positions they are placed in. Imagine a giant chess bored where God is putting pieces in certain places. Simply because puts a piece in a certain place does mean the nature of that piece has been altered. The one part where God is described as the potter who makes people a certain way has no salvific implications, but easily fits into the rest of the context in describing the general attributes of that person (e.g. like Pharaoh’s tenacity).

On a side note, I think I’m going to call it quits in this thread. Finals are this week, so I still have Biblical Greek, Philosophy of Religion, and Management to study up for, not to mention I’d like to donate more time to the wonderful World of Warcraft (massive online game: think the Matrix and you get the idea, but instead of machines and computers, it’s a Lord of the Rings environment). It’s been fun.

Oh, one more reply here to someone else:

Sure it is impossible for God to lie ................. that is why he sends out Lying Spirits !

Your view of God is clouded by what you have heard , when you discover what God is really like .......... You will tremble!

see Job , Isaiah and Ezekiel.

This is really a superficial reading of the text and those often lead to misunderstandings. Long story short, God “allowed” those spirits to mess with people because they were no longer doing what God wanted. I don’t know about you, but I will not serve a God who deceives and commits immoral acts. Not only does that throw everything God says into question (He could be deceiving you at any moment), but it throws morality into chaos (since its roots are found in God).

 

[calidog]

If He convicts all, then why does the same conviction cause one person to turn to God in repentance while another simply rebels?

God bless

That too is a good question. We are all rebels by nature, some give in early, some late, some not at all.

 

[Reformationist]

That too is a good question. We are all rebels by nature, some give in early, some late, some not at all.

I appreciate your reply. Do you mean that you do not have an answer to the question? If so, is this simply something that you do not desire to investigate? I ask because, in my opinion, the why we came to faith is quite important in how we view ourselves in relation to God and how we view the gifts He has given us.

God bless

 

[mlqurgw]

That's a good question. I don't know.

I commend your honesty. For some it is nearly impossible to say such words. If you will be a little patient with me I will get back to you on this. I have to leave now to make a living for my wife, she is such a slave driver and in 31 years of marriage I have never been able to convince her to support me.

 

[calidog]

To convict is to bring one under the conviction that they are in fact, guilty. One who is convicted is convinced and one who is convinced of sin against God will be brought to repentance. If all are convinced then all will repent. We know that not all are convinced of their sin against God so its logical is it not, that God has not convinced all of sin righteousness and judgement to come?

I don't believe anywhere in the bible is the claim that all will repent, but that:
Joh 16:8 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:

 

[calidog]

I appreciate your reply. Do you mean that you do not have an answer to the question? If so, is this simply something that you do not desire to investigate? I ask because, in my opinion, the why we came to faith is quite important in how we view ourselves in relation to God and how we view the gifts He has given us.

God bless

I don't know why. I do know we are rebels against God by nature. When we believe God, He can save us. When we resist God we call God a liar.