Does God know everything without exception or does God not know everything without exception.
It's that simple.
Your doctrine is always structured around rejection of Catholic Doctrine. Even in rejecting us you use our authority. Interesting, no?
Chuck Smith does NOT agree with the Catholic position expressed at the Council of Trent. The Catholic position confesses that God is the ultimate creator of all things, including the human desire to choose God.
I hope Smith was just being sloppy, his analogy is so poor. God doesn't choose us because he knows we will choose him. Just the opposite: we will choose God because it is a characteristic of the way God has created us. God knows who will respond to his call not only because he can foresee the future, but because he knows what he has created.
The Catholic position is not, like Smith's appears to be, a rejection of the fact that God is the author of all first things, but merely that our acceptance of God is not alien to us, which would make our obedience a bondage, but essential to us, which makes our obedience a liberation.
The difference between Calvinists and Catholics is largely a difference over the MEANING of what it means to have free will. Catholics do not use free will to mean that God is not the author of our decision to embrace him!
The Catholic position is that we are created good, and corrupted by evil through original sin. Thus, once the stain of sin is removed, our inherent goodness shines forth. But that goodness is made visible by two things, which both are miraculous: Our goodness depends solely on having been created by God, and the continuous grace through which we resist concupisence. Words that inidicate that we are created good include "purification," and "restored."
What is rejected at Trent is, in part, passivity of the will. Luther was encouraging people to indulge their evil desires, insisting that by doing so, they could experience that God loved them unconditionally, and would grow in their faith which would result in their evil desires being stripped away. The Catholic Church was asserting that doing God's will required struggle, an active resistance against evil through resisting temptation and seeking grace. Luther rejected this as "salvation through works."
That's not how synergism works. God makes the first move, always. We either let Him in or we shut the door.
So I am a winner because I chose Him first? Hmmm, lets follow this logic ... In other words then, according to Smith's analogy, God only chooses the one who has physically trained himself better, or is naturally stronger than the one who lost the race, so to speak. Or, to bring this same analogy into the spiritual realm, God chooses the one who contributed more towards his/her salvation - One man, while still in his old nature, either created a right thought, generated a right affection, or originated a right volition that led to his salvation while the other man, did not have the natural wherewithal to come up with the faith that God required of him to obtain salvation (to "win the race').
The quote taken by the author here is taken in a dishonest manner in my opinion. The concludions he draws from tht analogy are dishonest as well.
If you read the whole sermon it is clear that Smith is confessing that it is God who does the choosing yet man is responsible.
Chuck Smith preaches 15,000 sermons and this guy gets a transcript of one paragraph in one of them to try to accuse Chuck Smith saying something he simply did not say. The author's conclusions about the meaning of what Chuck Smith said are either wholly ignorant or wholly dishonest or both.
Gamecock, you can do better than this article.
Mongergism.com is an amazing site. My favorite (other than A Puritan's Mind) on the net.
No question that Arminianism and other forms of semi-Pelagianism are works-righteousness based.
It's easy to see the theological failure of Arminianism just by how many times they get tripped up when they resort to such nonsensical illustrations and analogies.
"What the Arminian wants to do is to arouse man's activity: what we want to do is to kill it once for all---to show him that he is lost and ruined, and that his activities are not now at all equal to the work of conversion; that he must look upward. They seek to make the man stand up: we seek to bring him down, and make him feel that there he lies in the hand of God, and that his business is to submit himself to God, and cry aloud, 'Lord, save, or we perish.' We hold that man is never so near grace as when he begins to feel he can do nothing at all. When he says, 'I can pray, I can believe, I can do this, and I can do the other,' marks of self-sufficiency and arrogance are on his brow." -- C. H. Spurgeon
According to Spurgeon, the Arminian needs to get people to work harder and train better in order to win Smith's hypothetical race so that God's bet will pay off.
Free Willy?
Crappy movie--not a basis for theology....
God never loses his bets cause he always knows the sure thing ...LOL
It is rather like the definition of election, we are the elect cause we voted for him ,twist and turn and make the scripture fit what you want.
Regarding King Saul and King David:
1Sa 13:14 But now thy kingdom shall not continue: the LORD hath sought him a man after his own heart, and the LORD hath commanded him [to be] captain over his people, because thou hast not kept [that] which the LORD commanded thee.
This statement is B.S. When someone says "I accepted Christ" at a particular time, they are merely identify the time when they became a child of God by accepting Christ as their Savior. It is disingenuous to read anything else into such a comment.
But the reality of the matter is that God accepted us. We were a loathsome stench in His nostrils but the blood of Christ made us clean and a sweet aroma to Him so that He might have fellowship with us. So perhaps we should try to be more biblical when conversing about salvation by speaking of it in a more God-centered manner.
The reality is that God first loved us. When a person responds to the Gospel message and accepts Christ as their Savior, they become a part of the family of God. how much more god centered can it get?
Without being legalistic about this, for instance, instead of "I accepted Christ ten years ago…" perhaps it would be more effective to listeners to be speaking like this: When God called me to faith in Christ; When God opened the eyes of my faith or understanding (as he did Lydia in Acts). When God turned my heart of stone into a heart of flesh; When God turned me from darkness to light; When God made me alive in Christ. --- The work of salvation is the work of the Trinity: God the Father elects us, Jesus the Son, purchases our redemption (those the Father has "given Him.") (John 6:37,39) and the Holy Spirit applies the benefits of Christ's redemption to the same.
This is great. Hendryx says "Without being legalistic..." and then gets legalistic. The fact that he even qualifies his following comments indirectly acknowledges he is being legalistic.