I have long been an advocate of careful defining of theological terminology. These days words such as grace, faith, worship etc are bandied about but they have all lost their predication. People talk about God being Almighty or Sovereign yet they strip Him of sovereignty over man's will. They talk about grace but their free-will theology has reduced the term to almost nothing. The word worship is used for any religious activity, some of them downright blasphemous.

This shows that you do not understand grace, for you see God responding to man rather than man responding to God.

The Bible clearly teaches man's total inability and our total dependence on God. Unless He converts us, we will not be converted. Unless He regenerates us we will not hear His call. You cannot escape the clear Biblical teaching of man's condition because of sin. There is none who seeks after God, NO NOT ONE!

But you would have man still seeking, still calling out to God, still able to respond to His call. The Word disagrees with you. We are truly dead in sin, spiritually dead, blind and deaf to the things of God and our hearts are made of stone; hard, unfeeling and not at all worried about our eternal state.

The Bible is unique in its authorship. Holy men wrote as they were moved by the Spirit of God. It is totally of Divine authorship yet simultaneously of complete human authorship.

I also prefer the received text over the butchered Nestle version. I find more and more instances where the NIV has either cut out, mutilated or extracted the teeth from a text.

They see it as a threat to their independence and ability, we see it as the only grounds for our total assurance, both in our own salvation and in the garuantee of conversions.

Michael Hranek wrote:
Dr. Phil
Know nothing about? I don't think so first I or anyone else who is willing to can read the Bible for themselves and surprisingly in it God Himself tells me about His Only Begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, the One who ever lives to make intercession for those who drawn near to God through Him.
and second Calvinists have repeatedly told myself and others what they believe and especially how Calvinists who have seen men and women saved have preached the Lord Jesus Christ and how He died and willingly shed His blood for sinners not the God hates everybody but the elect 5 pointism that we non-Calvinists supposedly know nothing about.
btw Somehow I just don't see Moses as making himself into a Protestant POPE who must be bowed down to and mindlessly obeyed. Moses in a figure of speach had the "goods" that Calvinist's only imagine they have. Somehow I've never heard of the "5" plagues God infliced on the RCC to let 'my elect' go free.

The Churches of the Reformation are drowning in a swamp of their own making. They talk like Arminians and worship like neo-pentecostals. The few that are crying out for the Old Paths are being politically side-lined or hushed up altogether.

Casob wrote:
2 Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits:
3 Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases;
_
I hope you do not have a cold when you are writting your comments or have never had one since it was made known to you that you were elect, otherwise you are in B-I-G trouble... with a capital "B"!
I hope you die as healthy as a horse (when it is your time to die) and it will prove this passage is written with you in mind!

Nice! I think your true colours are starting to shine forth Casob. Not only is your thinking warped, but your attitude towards your fellow-believers is decidedly unChristian.

Your dispensensationalism is not your problem, your problem is you think you are the fount of all knowledge and wisdom and God's special gift to the church.

Casob wrote:
The disciples that traveled with him for 3 years and who listened in to his sermons and preached the same message themselves were quite surprised when Jesus was arrested and crucified and they thought all hope was lost because of it. Two disciple were travelling down to Emmaus, for crying out loud.

"For He MUST reign till He has put all enemies under His feet." I Cor 15:25.

It is essential to the survival of Dispensational Premillenialism that Christ be seen as one who primarily came to reign in Israel as the descendant of David on a literal throne. But read His response to Pilate regarding His kingship and you hear it from Jesus' own mouth.

Dispensationalism, is dying the death it deserved. It was founded not 200 years ago by guys who hardly knew the Bible to begin with and then set themselves up as experts - much the same as Jospeh Smith and Charles Taze Russell.

Michael Hranek wrote:
"A Story to Consider Regeneration BEFORE Faith"
Mary, I heard you got married.
That’s right.
Who is he how did it happen?
Well I just woke up one morning and my husband was sleeping there in bed besides me and I was married.
What! Didn’t he propose to you or anything?
Oh No! My husband explained it to me this way, that I so dead to him that I would have never even noticed him let alone desire to be his wife if he hadn’t reprogrammed me and that is what he did before I even knew he existed he picked me and reprogrammed me so that I would want to be his wife and nobody else’s.
But he didn’t propose.
Oh No! It had to be reprogramming that way I wouldn’t have any choice whatsoever to turn him down, and he so wanted me to be belong to him that he couldn’t trust me to have the least say in the matter.
But didn't you have a wedding ceremony and have witnesses of your marriage and all?
Silly, don’t you understand, this way my husband gets all the credit of why we are married and everybody can know he is such a good husband for reprogramming me to love him before I even knew he existed and if we had a wedding and all somebody might think I deserve credit for marrying him.

But don't the Free-Willers believe that God wants everyone to be saved? Don't they say that it is our decision whether or not we want to respond to the gospel? So those who are saved are those who chose to be saved. Therefore there is no election, unless we elected ourselves by our decision. Forget "From the foundation of the world." Forget "According to he pleasure of His will." We are elected the moment we decide for Jesus and it is according the pleasure of our will. God has nothing to do with our election. How can He, as He stands by waiting for us to make that all important decision.

I have not commented on this thread a while, just followed the mounting frustration of those who try to reason and debate with you. But I want to ask you - do you do this deliberately? Do you intentionally debate in this confused and non-sensical way? Do you purposefully describe yourself as the great all-knowing prophet and teacher while deriding, ridiculing and belittling those who dare to disagree with you? Do you really read your own (and other's) posts? If you do, then you must know that you change tack faster than a rabbit being changed by a dingo.

I have come to the conclusion that either you do this on purpose because you enjoy winding people up and laughing at them or you really are as confused as your many posts reveal you to be. Either way, trying to reason with you is one of the most excruciatingly frustrating experiences in all my long years and I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would waste their time.

Many see "foreknow" as if God is a foretuneteller, someone who can see into the future, predict outcomes and thus makes plans accordingly.

The God of the Bible does not predict the future, He creates the future. He decrees and declares and does as He pleases. Nothing is outside of the scope of His sovereign will.

This has impact not only on election, but also on what is termed "natural disasters". Did God foresee the horrors in Burma and China but was powerless to stop them, did He foresee them but allowed them to happen or did they happen because He ordained it so?

Either God is Sovereign over all things at all times or He is not. Take one iota away from His sovereignty and He ceases to be Almighty God; He becomes half-mighty or mostly mighty.

Or do you suppose that God awakens a dead sinner, allows him to make a choice, to accept or reject the gospel and if he rejects it then thrusts him back into the darkness of spiritual death? Isn't God also the Finisher? Does He not say that He will complete that which He began?

I have said it before - read those comforting words in Romans 8, how God works all for good for His people, and then the following verse which explains how and why.

Casob wrote:
God has emotions? Please provide info on what kind of emotions...
____
You fellows cannot comment on the topic of this thread because you don't know anything.
Now why would a man not know what happened to Jesus Christ after he died? He went to hell but he did not go to torments like the rich man of Lk 16 did. He went to paradise like Abraham. It was in the same place but a great gulf divided it and one was comforted and the other tormented.
_

Jesus did not go to hell after He died. Where on earth did you dig that up from? Hell is the total absence of God's love and the total presence of His wrath. When Jesus cried out, "My God why have You forsaken Me?" He was literally in Hell.

It matters not if Calvin was 100% correct on his theology. Just because people used his name to attach to the findings of the Synod of Dort, doesn't mean you have to attack their findings by attacking Calvin and co.

What does the Bible say about these things, that is our final authority. And the Word is exceedingly crystal clear on God's Sovereignty, man's total inability, God's election and predestination etc. These are the issues, not whether John Calvin was a nice man, or whether people persecuted each other 500 years ago.

The debate centers around one issue, and one issue only - is sinful man in his natural state able to choose to do good, and to perform that good, ie, to recognise his sinfulness and choose Christ as Saviour. That is the question, man's ability. And the answer from the Bible, very clearly, is NO! Man is not able to do anything but sin and until his sinful stony heart is removed by God and replaced with a living heart of flesh, he will not respond in faith to the gospel.

Casob wrote:
You greatly err in your misuse of this great Psalm of David! Be ashamed!

You will not find it, for the Bible is full of man's total inability, his total enmity against God, his total sinfulness.

You want to cling to your precious doctrine of free will so badly, that you will deny the very Scriptures. If dead in sin means anything other than dead in sin, then Jesus' death could be something else. Then Jesus' words, "Unless you are born again you cannot even see..." become meaningless. For you would have natural man, before the Spirit's raising him from the dead in regeneration, seeing and wanting to enter the kingdom of God.

This is why you can not have a reasoned and systematic debate on the topic, for you have no Scriptural support for your position. This is why you and others like you resort to ridicule, sarcasm and personal abuse because you have no other way of making an impact.

The true Calvinist is truly evangelical. He believes in the universal offer of the gospel, in the universal call that God is commanding all men to repent.

He knows that God has His elect, but does not know who they are. Therefore the gospel is indiscriminate; in the same way that the sower sows indiscriminately, not knowing the condition of the soil.

What one cannot escape is the Bible's clear teaching on man's condition prior to conversion. Just because God commands men to repent and believe does not mean they are able to. There is none who does good, none who seeks after God, we are dead, deaf and blind to spiritual things etc. To distort this is to distort what salvation really is.