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What do you believe in?

Do you believe in free will or predestination? (Baptists only)

  • Free will

  • Predestination

  • Neither

  • Undecided


Results are only viewable after voting.

98cwitr

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You're referencing Romans 3:28 and I agree...but....

Without eternal justification I can't conclude then there's eternal salvation :/

As Paul tells us:

Romans 8:30-32
New International Version (NIV)
30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

I think your list of contents are all interdependent, including salvation on it's "contents."

I think justification via humility can be as well...see Luke 18.
 
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twin1954

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Reformed theology teaches justification by faith, the Bible teaches justification through faith. We are not justified when we believe but we lay hold on that justification that is already ours when we believe.
 
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Skala

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If the elect are eternally justified, why do they need to, in their lives, come to faith in Jesus Christ?

Rom 3:28 For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

Gal 2:16 yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ,

Gal 3:11 ..."The righteous shall live by faith."

Gal 3:24 So then, the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.


In eternity past, I didn't exist, so I could not have exercised faith. How then could I be eternally justified?

@Twin1954: i'm not sure why you are trying to make a distinction between "justified BY faith" and "THROUGH faith", the Bible words it both ways. What difference does it make?

As Paul tells us:

Romans 8:30-32
New International Version (NIV)
30 And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

Yes but aren't you presupposing that each "step" happened all at the same time? It seems that some of the steps happen at different times, for example, being "called" happens during our life when we are called by the gospel call/the Holy Spirit's call unto salvation. I believe the same is true of justification, it happens in time, not in eternity, and it happens via means of faith.
 
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98cwitr

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because God, the ONE that justified you, has known you before your existence! You're still focused on SELF, focus on GOD. But I've you this, you acknowledge that faith is from God, and I believe you're right on the money there.
 
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Jake255

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because God, the ONE that justified you, has known you before your existence! You're still focused on SELF, focus on GOD. But I've you this, you acknowledge that faith is from God, and I believe you're right on the money there.
Exactly!

Let no man boast!

Predestination puts focus on self, and that is the problem with it, even if predestinators don't believe they are, they must because they are "the chosen", you are NOT the chosen, Christ is the chosen one.

Galatians 2:20 - I am crucified with Christ, it is no longer I, but Christ in you.
Who has been crucified? Who is alive?

We are to lay our lives down, IN HIM, He is the elect, not us.
 
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Skala

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Predestination puts focus on self, and that is the problem with it, even if predestinators don't believe they are, they must because they are "the chosen", you are NOT the chosen, Christ is the chosen one.

This shows an ignorance about the doctrine of predestination. Predestination doesn't teach that you are chosen because you're special. It says you're chosen because you deserve hell, but God decided to have mercy, based on the good pleasure of his own will, all for his own glory.

Why bother with statements such as this, Jake? Anyways, here's some scripture to backup my assertions:


Eph 1:4-11
(4) even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love
(5) he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,
(6) to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
(7) In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,
(8) which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight
(9) making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ
(10) as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
(11) In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will,

Why would you conclude that such a doctrine results in us focusing on ourselves? That's not the conclusion the apostle makes, predestination is all about God and his mercy on us, though we don't deserve it, and it focuses on God's own glory.

I submit that the opposite is true, that "free will" salvation or "conditional election" (arminainism) puts the focus on self, because you were smart enough or spiritual enough to merit God's choice of you. You were able to believe when your unbelieving neighbor didn't. You're special, good for you! Etc...
 
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Skala

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because God, the ONE that justified you, has known you before your existence! You're still focused on SELF, focus on GOD. But I've you this, you acknowledge that faith is from God, and I believe you're right on the money there.

But the Apostle Paul / The Bible makes a distinction between predestination and justification, and we should too.

There is a distinction, they are different things (not the same thing), so we should view them as such
 
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DeaconDean

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We are to lay our lives down, IN HIM, He is the elect, not us.

So, according to your statement here, we must conclude that since Christ "is the elect":

"And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened." -Mt. 24:22 (KJV)

Those days would be shortened for Christ's sake not ours.

Uh huh.

God Bless

Till all are one.
 
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DeaconDean

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Here is an exerpt from an article I wrote entitled "Predestination, Foreknowledge, and Free Will What do these have to do with each other?"

Predestination: Some Definitions:


Continued...



[1] John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, Book III, The Mode of obtaining the Grace of Christ, Chapter 21, [book on-line] accessed 6/21/03, found on the world wide web at http://www.monergism.com/sys_theo/Calvin/Inst.html

[2] Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Edited by: Gerhard Kittel, Translated by: Geoffery W. Bromiley, Vol. V, “proopizw”, p. 456, K. L. Schmidt.


 
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DeaconDean

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God Bless

Till all are one.
 
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98cwitr

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But the Apostle Paul / The Bible makes a distinction between predestination and justification, and we should too.

There is a distinction, they are different things (not the same thing), so we should view them as such

No disagreement there
 
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Jake255

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I am trying to make the point that Jesus is the chosen ONE, He is the elect and those IN Christ are the elect, ONLY because of Christ IN us us, He is the One.
There is ONE BODY, HIS BODY - ONE.
 
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Jake255

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But the Apostle Paul / The Bible makes a distinction between predestination and justification, and we should too.

There is a distinction, they are different things (not the same thing), so we should view them as such
And did I say they were the same thing? NO.

We are justified IN Christ, we are ONLY the elect, IN Christ.

Man has nothing w/out Christ, who is the Chosen One.
 
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Texan40

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I really don't see that any of these are mutually exclusive. God's omniscience guarantees that everything is known before it happens. He knows when we will be presented with choices and the choices we will make but we still have to recognize opportunities and make them a reality through action. We make choices. God does not put us on like hand puppets and remove that.
 
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Jake255

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Very nicely said. Amen!

Predestination and Free Will are both bibical, both are true, it is God offering and us accepting!
 
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GrayAngel

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Very nicely said. Amen!

Predestination and Free Will are both bibical, both are true, it is God offering and us accepting!

Problem is, your definition of predestination is wrong. What you believe in is free will, but you've changed what predestination is to fit your beliefs.

Predestination means that we were elected, according to God's own will, not ours. It's not a reaction to the faith God foreknew we would conjure up ourselves: that would be acknowledgement, not election.

If you believe that we have a choice in the matter, then you believe in free will, which is incompatible with predestination, which claims that we don't.
 
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histruth

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Once again, everything God does is according to His foreknowledge. God knew who would come to His Son, and He chose to save us. He could have chose to not send His Son, and not save us, but He didn't. He chose to save us. He also answers prayer, and He told us to pray for everyone including our enemies. I will ask the question, do you not care about all the other people? I truly wonder why God told us to pray for them if He wants nothing to do with them.(Mathew 5:44) I also wonder what Calvinists need preachers for since God will ultimately force Himself on those He wants anyway? I also ask the question, what glory do you think your bringing to God by declaring that He only loves certain individuals? Also, I seem to recall quite a few verses spoken by Jesus Himself who said, "Thy faith hath saved thee, and thy faith hath made thee well. There are too many to list. He said this almost everytime He healed someone. Also, I wonder why Jesus marvelled because of their unbelief in Mark 6:6. I also wonder why He said that the condemnation is, "that Light has come into the world, but men preferred darkness rather than Light"?

I will never understand why anyone would try to say that God creates certain people for no other reason than to send them to hell forever. I know that He knows who will and who won't, but to try and say that the God of love would pre-plan someone's eternal destruction before they are even born, and give them no chance whatsoever for salvation is one of the biggest heresies I've ever heard. I want you to remember that when your praying for your loved ones. Why are you even praying for them? If God wants them, He will force Himself on them anyway. That is false doctrine. God gave us the Gift of His Son, and it is up to us to accept or reject Him. Think on this for a while; if God condemns people to hell for not believing, but it is He Himself who causes them to not believe, than He is punishing them for something that He caused to happen. That would be like me punishing my daughter because I told her not to spill the paint, but then I knocked it out of her hand just so I could punish her. The God I serve is NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL. He is full of love and compassion, and it is His great pleasure to wash us in His blood and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. He gives everyone a chance for salvation, once again you cannot argue with Acts 17:26-30 or 1st Timothy 2:3-6
 
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Skala

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Once again, everything God does is according to His foreknowledge

Foreknowledge of what? The Bible never says that God foreknew our faith and then chose us on that basis. rather, it says that the reason we come to faith is because we are predestined for it:

Act 13:48 And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.

So not only does the Bible not say that God's choice of us was based on our faith, it instead tells us what in fact his choice was based on:

Eph 1:4-6
(4) even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love
(5) he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,
(6) to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
Eph 1:11 In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will,

God's choice of us, which results in us coming to faith in Christ, is based on His own purpose, will, and grace, it is not based on our faith.

That would make faith into a work whereby it merits God's choice of us and merits our salvation because we were smart enough to "get ourselves saved" when unbelievers weren't

In other words that would make the believer himself the difference between believers and unbelievers, not God's grace. But the Bible says it is God's grace that makes us to differ.

God knew who would come to His Son

Of course he knows, because He himself is directly responsible for the fact that anynoe at all comes to His son! He doesn't sit back and passively discover who of their own will, with no input from God, comes to the Son:

"All that the Father gives me will come to me.." John 6:37

We come to Jesus because the Father gave us to Jesus. God tasked Jesus with the mission of saving His own chosen people to present a church to himself as pure, for his own glory, and Jesus accomplished that task, without fail.

The Triune God has a 100% success rate in salvation.

The reason anyone puts personal trust in Christ is because of God's gracious act in drawing us to the Son, not because of our supposed free will.

I also ask the question, what glory do you think your bringing to God by declaring that He only loves certain individuals?

I wonder if you truly understand the history of the OT in which God loved israel alone in a special way that differed from the other nations of the earth, whom he did not demonstrate his love to!!!

You only have I known among all the families of the earth Amos 3:2

If you told an OT hebrew that God loved them equally as he loved the other pagan nations, they would laugh in your face. Though God loves all people, he has a special love for his own people, this love is described as the special love a husband has for his wife in Eph 5:25

To say that God loves the saints in heaven as much as/no different than God's enemies in hell is ridiculous, and not Biblical.

I will never understand why anyone would try to say that God creates certain people for no other reason than to send them to hell forever.

All humans deserve hell, so for God to save any at all is pure grace. This type of argument only exists to draw on emotions and misses the elephant in the room known as "sinful criminals who deserve hell"


Then your problem is with the Bible my friend for we hear all the time that God has blinded eyes and hardened hearts:

Joh 12:39 Therefore they could not believe. For again Isaiah said,
Joh 12:40 "He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them."

Further, your argument assumes that creatures deserve a chance at salvation, therefore you argue that it is injustice to withhold from them what they deserve. This is not biblical, as nobody deserves salvation. You cannot be owed what is gracious, or else the definition of "grace" is destroyed. Grace by definition means "not owed, but given freely". It's almost like these basic concepts go flying out the window when someone decides to bolster an attack against God's predestinating grace.

I want you to remember that when your praying for your loved ones. Why are you even praying for them? If God wants them, He will force Himself on them anyway.

What you don't understand is that your own argument here backfires against you my friend. If salvation is ultimately up to mans' will, and not God's, why are you praying to God for your lost friends to be saved? God can't/won't do anything about it, right? So why are you praying for them?

On the contrary, each Christian knows deep down that only God can convert that person and change their heart, which is precisely why we pray to God when we feel helpless (which we are). Only God can bring someone to the knowledge of the truth, that's why we pray to God to save our lost friends. If God had nothing to do with it, why would we pray to him as if He did?

So you see your argument isn't well thought out


First of all, God doesn't condemn people to hell solely for their lack of belief, he condemns them to hell for their sins. As always, the doctrine of sin seems to be conveniently left out in these anti-predestination analogies. This results in a watered down, shallow analogy that misses the real picture and doesn't represent the Biblical understanding at all.

Further, God never forced anyone to sin, much like your "father" in your analogy who forced the bucket of point out of the hand. So right off the bat this analogy falls short. Here's a better, Biblical analogy:

You are the king of a small kingdom, and you go away on a trip. While you're gone, 10 men murder and rape your wife and daughter.

Upon your return you hold a trial, and you sentence 9 of the men to death because it's what their crimes deserve. However, you decide to have mercy on 1 of the men, because it's within your right and power to do so. You pardon the 1 man. No injustice was done to the other 9 men because they had no claims upon your mercy to begin with.

He gives everyone a chance for salvation, once again you cannot argue with Acts 17:26-30 or 1st Timothy 2:3-6

Yet again, this leaves man's sinful nature and condition and enslavement to sin out of the picture. Yes, God commands all men to come to Christ. But no man will naturally do that because they are rebels of God and are spiritually dead, and unable to understand spiritual things. No man can come to christ without the Father' enabling them (John 6). It takes God's direct intervention and grace for anyone at all to come to Christ.

God doesn't just sit back and chill and wait and see if sinners will suddenly embrace the God they hate so much and forsake the sin they love so much. In my Bible, God pursues people, he chooses people, he changes hearts, he converts, he elects, he predestines, he makes sure that billions of people are saved.

In your view, it seems God doesn't' do any such thing. He doesn't make sure a single person is ever saved. This is likened to taking a blind man to an art show and saying "pick your favorite picture". You can't expect a blind man to see without first giving him sight. Yet your argument is that God simply offers salvation to sinners with stony hearts - but doesn't actually change those stony hearts and take off the blindfold so that they respond positively to the gospel.
 
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Robs07M6S

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Im not defending the free willer's idea of what foreknowlege is, in fact im arguing against it and I think its possible you may have misunderstood my post all together.

Please read my post again, I explained how God is everywhere all at the same time including the past, present and future because God exist outside of time. This would explain how he could still have foreknowledge of his elect while giving them the choice to respond to his call. Its hard for me to explain things in text but if you really think about what im saying you will get it.

But let me ask you, why does it take away the Glory of God in salvation if when God calls a sinner the sinner then chooses to either say yes or no to Gods call? If the sinner chooses to say yes to Gods call and is then saved does that some how negate the fact that God called and because he called the person was saved? Doesnt God still get all the glory? I would say yes, he does, because if it were not for God extending grace and mercy to that individual then he would never have been saved.
 
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Skala

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I think I understood your post Rob.

You were countering my argument that Arminians try to say that God foresees faith, by asserting that God doesn't "foresee" anything, but rather, simply knows, and always has. (aka, God isn't in linear time)

My response was: for the sake of the argument, lets say that God does in fact "know" who believes, and then chooses on that basis. If that is true, why do Arminians point to verses that speak of "foreknowledge" as part of their argument?

In actuality, obviously God does know who believes, and always has, but no where does the Bible say that His choice of us is based on this knowledge. Instead, the Bible says that God based his choice of us on his own purpose and grace (Eph 1), and we believe because of God's appointing us to eternal life (Acts 13:48). That's the whole point. It doesn't matter how God knows about our faith, the fact remains that the Bible never says that faith is the basis of His choice of us, contrary to the arguments of Arminian theology.

I'm convinced that the only reason God could possibly know who has faith is precisely because God himself gave that faith to us as a gift, as the Bible teaches that faith is a gift from God. So it really doesn't do any good to make an argument that speaks of God "knowing about our faith" and then choosing us on that basis.

In other words, God's knowledge is based on his decree. He doesn't just simply gather intellectual information apart from his own decree. God knows something precisely because He himself is sovereign and ruling creation as He sees fit.

As for your next question:


The problem I have is that sometimes being saved/converted is watered down or oversimplified. The bible teaches that is God who converts us, God changes our hearts, God removes the blindfold, God calls us out of darkness into light, God brings us to Jesus, etc.

In short, God is directly responsible for the fact that any sinner answers positively to God's call in the first place.

To say that this whole thing is credited to man's will does rob God's glory, because the Bible pins the whole thing on God's grace for His own glorification, not on man's will.

So, it's not robbing God's glory to say that sinners answer God's call.

But it is wrong to not attribute the sinner's act of answering God's call to God himself and his work of penetrating our hearts and changing us and granting us spiritual eyes to see and ears to hear, etc.

The rub:

Can God be credited for the fact that a person response to the gospel call? Does God have anything to do with it at all? What is God's role in salvation/conversion, if anything?

Did God just send Jesus to die, and then leave the rest up to humans? Or is God active in bringing sinners to salvation, for his own glory and so he can present a church to his Son?

It seems, for many here, God does no more other than send Jesus, then he sits back and sees what happens. He doesn't actually enter the human situation to ensure that anyone at all is saved. That's not how God works as I see it in the Bible:

"...Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy has caused us to be born again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead"
(1 Pet 1:3)

Why are we born again? Because of a decision? Or because God caused it?

"...Christ Jesus has made me his own" - Philippians 3:12

Who made me Christs'? Myself with my smart decision? Or was God at work behind the scenes, so to speak, the whole time? For his own purposes and glory?

"But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved." - Ephesians 2:4-5

We were made alive, while we were dead. By God. We didn't make ourselves alive.

1Pe 2:9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

God translated us from darkness to light. Not us.

1Co 1:30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,

It's because of God we are in Christ, not because of our "Free will decision"

Rom 8:30 And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Salvation is completely by God. We are the recipients of God's action of saving us. Salvation is not a negotiation. Notice, God justifies whom he calls. So when we are called and respond by faith, and are thus justified, its because "God justifies whom he calls". He doesn't fail. Nobody falls through the cracks, whom God calls. God has a 100% success rate.
 
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