Unconditional Election And the Invincible Purpose of God

If God established the Law with no expectation of it ever being obeyed, why did he establish a penalty for failure to obey?

He certainly expected His law to be obeyed just as you expect your children to obey your rules, which by the way if they fail they are "disciplined" are they not? If not, you'll never get compliance from them.

 

I think "cause and effect" are extemely important standards by which we are to interpret God's intent and supposed expectations.

Without them we have nothing but vanity. A vanity which says things like:

Emphasis mine.

 

"Expect" is often interpreted to mean "require" but I assumed the definition "to consider probable or certain". I assumed people were using it in the latter sense, and in that case, IMO God did not think it probable or certain that people would obey the law. If I was mistaken about how others were using the word, I apologize.

 

Regardless, there is still abig difference between Law ang "grace"

It's not God wouldn't command anything unless we were able to comply. That's your side's [straw man] paraphrase of our position; none of us ever said that. The point is, just because God commanded the Law that way, you cannot then say faith works like that as well. That is what we were saying god wouldn't command if we couldn't comply; and this is precisely what makes the age of grace different from the Law.

How is is out of context from the the point I was making? I think you're challenging "free will" suggesting that God's determining of where and people live yields unconditional election that is quite a contextual stretch.

To the so-called "non-elect", who He does not give this "gift" it is like that, (this was the point)and to them, Christ might as well have not come, and there really is no good news to all men. (Luke 2:10) Once again, God could have given a "gift of Lawkeeping", and there would have been no essential difference.

It's our fallen [depraved] nature, which we inherit from Adam that "binds the will" with regards to keeping the Law. You simply take this and extend it to having faith, (creating the same dillemma for man, except that now God gets only some around it), but precisely the difference between Law and grace was faith, which anyone could have.

 

If your insinuating that I'm thinking something along those lines, that is not at all what I was saying. I was challenging the idea that Rom.9:17-23 is teaching that God raises each "non-elect" person and "leaves them in their sinful state" in order for us to witness His wrath on them to "glorify" Him. It was just a side point in the argument anyway.

 

I don't know if anyone has phrased it exactly the way I have, but the same principle has been stated in other ways over and over again.

I'm not saying that. I'm simply saying that it is false to assume that because one is given an instruction, command, exhortation, choice, etc., that the presence of this language necessitates (or even implies) the ability to comply of our own free will. The law proves that this principle is true. I never said the law proves that the inability to comply is true of all commands., including faith.

To apply the commands of the law to faith makes no sense, and it is totally unnecessary. Jesus said that no one is able to come to Him unless the Father enables him to do so. That settles the matter right there. If you cannot "choose" Jesus without the enabling power of God, then it doesn't matter how many commands, instructions, or exhortations to believe you can find in scripture. They cannot possibly imply that we have the ability to comply of our own free will.

[ January 27, 2003, 03:33 PM: Message edited by: npetreley ]

 

Actually Eric, a number of people have said just that. Perhaps you missed it but it was said and we reacted against it them. It is not a straw man; it is at the heart of some people's theology.

 

Actually Eric, a number of people have said just that. Perhaps you missed it but it was said and we reacted against it them. It is not a straw man; it is at the heart of some people's theology.</font>[/QUOTE]Indeed Larry. I think it was Finney who basically said that God would not tell the Israelites to get a new heart for themselves if he didn't think they could do it.

 

A friend of mine on another BBS said,

I replied to him thusly.

 

I don't know if this was a direct quote from Rev. Charles Finney. Someone said that he said, 'God would not tell the Israelites to get a new heart for themselves if He didn't think they could do it.' He probably meant that all of the Old Testament prophets commanded all the Israelites turn to the Lord to get a new heart. God surely wasn't only calling an alleged elect to respond to His call, otherwise, He would have said just that. The 'if they could do it' meant that Finney believed that any Israelite could have called on the Lord and been saved. Their wills were unfettered by God [Isaiah 65:2 & Romans 10:21] and only the 'evil one' wanted to keep them in his ranks. [I John 3:8] 'He who practices sinning {the sinner} is of the devil.'

There is no Biblical or theological problem here except those who believe the theology from Geneva who like Augustine tried to set up a theocracy in this world.

 

Well, maybe people said things pretty close, as I remember, and I can't really speak for them, but I don't think they meant God would command absolutely nothing man couldn't comply with. That statement was probably just a unthinking generalization, and when you all first mentioned the Law, I remembered, that yes, God did command somthing man couldn't do, but still, that doesn't prove that faith itself is like that, because the Law's inability to be kept is precisely what made it "the Law of sin and death", and now in the new covenant, the "good news" is that God has provided a way for us to be declared righteous even though we are unable to keep the Law perfectly.

Well, to this, we believe that the Father is calling everyone now. You don't, but this all of is why people say "God doesn't do that", even if such statements ignore that it may not have always been that way.

 

Well, to this, we believe that the Father is calling everyone now. You don't, but this all of is why people say "God doesn't do that", even if such statements ignore that it may not have always been that way.</font>[/QUOTE]Aside from my previous points about the difference between calling and enabling power, I can't imagine how you can miss the broken logic in your conclusion. Look at the context of the verse (emphasis mine):

If it was to be granted to every living soul to come to the Father, then the above explanation makes no sense whatsoever. Jesus is explaining, among other things, why some do not believe. He doesn't say, "Therefore you can see that people reject me because, after my Father has given unto them the ability, they still choose to reject me of their own free will." He says, "Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My father."

I fail to see how anyone can manage to turn that into "Therefore My father grants this to everyone".

 

As a follow-up, I did notice that you created a time barrier in your logic. (I assume you mean that what Jesus said was true at the time, but not anymore.)

Again, that is totally unscriptural, as is demonstrated by the many verses that confirm exactly what Jesus said, well after Jesus died and was resurrected. "It has been granted unto you (the readers of the letter) not only to believe" -- "Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the utterance of God" -- "It is not of him who runs or him who wills but of God who shows mercy" -- "You are saved by grace through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God so that no one can boast" and so on. Yet not a trace of "It used to be granted unto some of you by the Father but now the Father has granted it unto everyone so they can do it of their own free will."

 

Yes, I believe that God was begining to open up the calling with the Disciples who were called first. The Pharissees were't called then, but later in Acts, many of them did repent (so once again, you cannot take "not called" in that respect as an eternal decree of preterition, because once again, those who are now saved at one time did not respond, and a person could have judged them as "not called".
In Phil.1:29, the emphasis is on "not only". "Not only to believe, but also to suffer for His sake. (It was not granted everyone to suffer). The other scriptures quoted do not necessarily imply preterition either, as has been shown repeatedly.

[ January 28, 2003, 02:51 PM: Message edited by: Eric B ]

 

IMO you can't draw a conclusion from that either way. Were the Pharisees who were later saved elect? Certainly the Bible says there is a remnant of Israel that would be saved even from that generation. But the verses don't tell you one way or another, except that Romans 11 does hint at election for some and predetermined hardening for others:

To this very day. Is Paul referring to a day in the past?

Has the full number of Gentiles already come in? No. So it is not in reference to the past.

Again, God has commited them over to disobedience for the duration of the time of the Gentiles. That does not rule out a universal call of the kind you're talking about, but it implies that if there is a call, God also has already given them over to disobedience as part of a larger plan to have mercy on them (as a people, not all the individuals of the day).

Yes, and it is plain about both. God ordains and gives both faith and suffering, yes even to His beloved. And although this is my opinion, I believe it is borne out in scripture -- the foreordained suffering is very much part of God's method of increasing our faith. I wish it weren't true, because I'd sure love to be spared the angst. But IMO it is not only true, it works.

Yes, it is perfeclty true that the fact that God gives us our faith as a gift does not prove preterition. But there are two problems with coming to any other conclusion:

1. If we cannot choose Jesus unless it is given to us to do so by God, then we cannot choose Him of our own free will.

2. The fact that Jesus uses the above to explain why some do not believe tells you that there is a division - those who do believe are those to whom it has been given to believe by God. Those who do not believe are those to whom it has not been given to believe by God. Otherwise there was no point in Jesus saying what He did.

3. Given that the above are true, then the fact that some are not saved tells you that there are those to whom it is not given to believe. If it was universally given, and one keeps the above consistent, then all would be saved.

Your only "out" is that the above was true once, but is no longer true. But then the burden is upon you to provide scripture that says this has all changed. Thus Romans starts to cause problems and we're back where we started.

 

Once again, the hardening is talking about the group. A remnant had gotten saved, but it doesn't mean God had shut off salvation to every other individual. V. 6 once again compares grace with works, not with free will. (once again, if they were already fallen and prone to sin, God would not have to "harden" individuals to leave them that way).

They were hardened both around Jesus' time and those who didn't believe then remained hardened afterward.

As I have said before, I think we are looking at this too much through the eyes of earthly time sequence-- a follows b. People argue about "foreknowledge" as if God's realm is just a backwards extension of our cause and effect world of time. Most of you want to say that God is genuinely offering everyone savation, and even
"anybody can choose Christ, if they want to", "God is not stopping anyone" etc, but some "freely choose to reject it" and that these people were really the [eternally decreed] "non-elect" (and thus don't "want" to). But if you really want to maintain any real "single predestination", and that God's offer of salvation to those who will in the end be lost is not some farce, (or more coals of hell fire on their heads), or a just a script being played out, then you have to admit that at this point things do not flow the way we are accustomed, and that at least in our time frame, anyone can be saved if they will believe.

[ January 30, 2003, 09:40 PM: Message edited by: Eric B ]