Why so difficult?

yes God so loved the world this is true.

can you answer some question with just a yes or no?

are those who do not believe already in condemnation yes or no

can a person gain saving faith without being drawn by God yes or no

is Gods mercy owed to everyone yes or no

is God being unfair if He shows mercy to just some and not everyone yes or no

if God wanted to could He destroy satan this second if He chose to yes or no

next look up pro 3-5

 

Actually, Helen, the command to believe and you will be saved would not be nonsense simply when salvation is understood to be eternally won by Christ for the elect and conditionally received as a blessing to the elect receiving and believing the word of truth.

This would mean then the Primitive Baptist position on soteriology and conditional time salvation are more nearly true than any conditional eternal salvation regardless of how explained by men.

BTW, here is something I have been reading concerning Biblical Hermeneutics. I have not finished it yet, but so far I am fascinated by what I have read. Concerning logic, this is a must read

the link:

web page

Now, you know what Bro. Larry means when he uses scripture to show the elect will believe the Gospel. This is the balance of it all. The elect alone will be drawn to Christ, the elect alone will meet the so called 'conditions' you perceive to have been placed on scripture by Larry's position.

In truth, there are no conditions placed there regarding eternal salvation; these conditions relate to the peace of God in Christ the elect enjoys in this world. At the same time Christ declares himself to be the door by which believers will enter. Therefore, there is no way around the truth that the elect shall know Christ in this world. By this I mean I do not believe that those who never recognize the voice of their shepherd will ever be with Christ in eternity.

May God Bless All
Bro. Dallas Eaton

 

those yes and no answers remind me of a liberal democrat during a debate.
anyway i do know where you stand. i believe you are focusing mostly on Gods mercy not believing He is also a God that will do justice too. it would be easy to be an arminian if you could explain why some people die never hearing the gospel. i would guess your answer would be that God looked into the future and seen that person who never heard the gospel would of rejected it anyway.

 

I haven't seen you do this yet.

You have yet to show this for a fact. You have made some false representations in your efforts but haven't shown that we actually twist any words or meanings.

I think we agree about that, so you can stop repeating it.

What kind of love is it that lets them die without ever hearing teh gospel?

Hunt has been shown to have been plain wrong in his methods and conclusions. His book should not be regarded as worthwhile.

You have said a lot of things that are just plain wrong. This is yet another. Come on, Helen. Please make a reasonable attempt to talk about what we believe. You keep repeating this nonsense in hopes that we might all of the sudden admit it's true. Well, we won't because it isn't. So stop.

 

I guess people generally ignored my posts because they sounded flippant. That's fine, but I assure you they are not, but they were done with a smile on my face. I find it very interesting how some will argue that God ultimately foreordains everything, and yet try to convince others of Calvinism, or even ask them to do anything - for if Calvinism is true, we cannot accept it unless we are foreordained to. If Calvinism is true, we cannot even respond to you in any other way than we are foreordained to. You act as those being against Calvinism is somehow being against God's will - when it would be God's will that we are not Calvinist! The mere fact that Calvinists try to convince us of the error of our ways, as if we had the choice to thwart what God has already foreordained for us to believe, is proof in itself that their understanding is wrong and hypocritical.

And don't get mad at me for saying that - it was foreordained by God that I should say that!

 

What is being discussed in a portion of this thread is absolute predestination. That is something that is very different that being elected unto salvation.

BTW, Brian, I also enjoyed your posts and found them humorously refreshing.

Bro. Dallas

 

Ahh....but that's because even though you becoming a Calvinist might be foreordained, it has to be worked out in time. And God works out what he foreordains in time using human beings (and other things) as instruments to accomplish his foreordaination. So, if you are really foreordained to be a Calvinist, it just may be that my arguing for Calvinism might just be one little cog in the wheel that pulls you over the fence.

And if your not foreordained to be a Calvinist, then so be it. Maybe someone else reading here is, and I can be a cog in their wheel. Maybe you are a cog in their wheel, too, asking the questions that ellicit my answers.

Just being instruments. Always a good thing to be working on the side of truth. (Don't get mad, I was predestined....)

It's as if you think predestination is like a computer running a certain program or something, churning out preprogrammed results. It's not. God accomplishes his plan through constant active intervention and decisive inaction. He uses means to accomplish all of His plans.

Let me ask you a question. Did God decide ahead of time that He would cause the scriptures to be written?

 

You talk as though I, or someone else, may eventually *choose* to accept Calvinism, once enough background work has been done to convince me. I'm saying such a "choice" is an illusion if it was foreordained. Any thoughts or logic or reasons or decisions or emotions that go through my brain in the meantime that would eventually cause me to go "over the fence" would also be foreordained.

And it's "not good" to work against your position? If your position is true, then logically I only work against your position because *it is God's will for me to do so*, and thus since it is God's will that *oppose* Calvinism, it is also "good". In fact, *nothing* can be "bad", for nothing happens outside of God's ultimate will and foreordination.

Since we both understand programming concepts, active intervention an decisive inaction are simply variables inputted and evaluated at runtime, instead of compile time. The user can affect the running program, if the program accepts input at runtime. Just because the program accepts runtime input does not mean the program itself gets to "choose" anything - it just executes an if/else branch based on current conditions.

Calvinists deny the "robot" analogy, but I don't see it any other way. If Calvinism is true, God pushes buttons that inputs specific thoughts in our heads, pushes other buttons to cause us to reach certain conclusions, and other buttons to trick us into thinking we made a "choice" on our own.

Sure. He decided a lot of things "ahead of time" - because God is *outside* of time. Time is an aspect of the created universe. I believe that God "knows the future", not because he "foreordained" it an no other outcome is possible, but because he's already at the future. As he is outside of the limits of time, I believe his omnipresence is not just in relation to the 3 dimensions, but also to the time dimension: God said "I am" - he is, eternally. He "currently" exists at all points in time, from eternity past to eternity future, because he is above time. He knows if I'll be a Calvinist when I die, not because of a predestination to be a Calvinist, but because he currently exists at the moment of my death, and thus knows what I chose (as in a *real* choice) before I got there myself.

 

Helen said:

You can't have it both ways, sir. If you were predestined to be saved, then your believing or not believing has nothing to do with the matter.

Nonsense!

I defy you to find me a Calvinist who does not affirm that verse. Believing is part and parcel of the effectual call.

If your believing has something to do with the matter, then you were not predestined.

Non sequitur, and contradictory to the Bible, which says that preaching, hearing, and believing are also ordained by God as the means by which the elect are brought to faith at the appointed time. He doesn't just snap his fingers and poof, there are believers created out of thin air.

I'm sure there are plenty of legitimate challenges to Calvinism, but "believing has nothing to do with it" ain't one of them. Sorry.

 

I'm short on time, so I'd like to just concentrate on this. (This is in response to my question "Did God decide ahead of time that he would cause the scriptures to be written?"

What I'm trying to pin down is whether you think God just knew ahead of time (or outside of time) that the scriptures would be written, or whether He decided that this is something that He would accomplish. Was writing the scriptures a decisive act of God?

 

I think their point, though it is not often clear, is that yes you must believe, but God arranges things (your experiences, your thought processes) so that you have no alternative but to believe. Your very belief is also foreordained.

 

The problem is that if God is outside of time, then terms like "ahead of time", "would be", "would accomplish", etc, don't exactly work, for they are time-related. Imagine a timeline, that starts at day one of creation, and ends at the end of Rev 20 (for lack of a more specific place). On this timeline, there's Adam, Noah, Moses, etc. There's the birth and death of Christ, his resurrection, the writing of the scriptures, and even today. Now imagine a tick mark that moves along the timeline as time goes by. From our perspective, the tick mark has already passed through all of our past, and is sitting on today, right now, where we exist having this discussion. Where on the timeline does God exist? Does he only exist with us, only on the tick mark marking the precise place called "the present"? I don't think so. He, being above time, exists not only at the tick mark of "the present", but also exists ("present" tense, not past tense - i.e. "I am") at ever place on the time line, and every place off the time line. From *our* perspective, looking back in time, there was a time before the scriptures were written where we would say "God knew at that time he would cause the scriptures to be written" - but from *his* perspective, he's "currently" at that moment in time and every other moment in time. He's at right now, he's at creation, he's at when the scriptures were written, he's at the "end" of time.

He knows what color of shirt I'm going to choose (truly choose) tomorrow, not because he foreordained it and he's manipulating everything so that I have no alternative but to choose any particular shirt, but rather because he "currently" exists at the moment in time where I make the choice, even though I haven't got there yet myself. He doesn't foreordain which shirt I will wear, yet he still knows which I will choose in the future because he exists there!

Similarly, I don't believe he foreordains certain individuals to salvation and others to hell (directly, or by default) and/or causes things to happen to us that provide us with no alternative but to choose what has been foreordained, but rather he knows in the "present" who will be saved in the future because he exists at the time of their choice, and their death, even before they are born. This allows God's ultimate sovereignty and ultimate omniscience and omnipresence to exist alongside our *real, independent* choices.

And if you didn't fully understand my computer programmer comments, I apologize - when I wrote that I thought I was responding to npetreley, who is a computer geek like me and also has made similar comments to me in the past. Sorry.

 

whoops, double post.

 

I don't think we have to get into the eternality thing for you to answer my question. It's really rather simple. Were the scriptures written by way of God's knowledge or active choice?

(I'm not trying to be rude--I'm just really short on time and trying to hone in on one point as that's pretty much all I can deal with right now.)