This post hasn't nothing I can see to disagree with - other than the free will being an illusion.
Where we disagreed was in the "intervention" part.
If I understand you correctly, some are picked for intervention and some are not, and this choice is, as I put it, capricious - no difference in elect/non-elect in any way.
And I believe in your view man has no choice even to resist being intervened with (if that's proper grammar).
I see your subtle difference here, but I still think you end up forced to have the whimsical God in the end. And free will but an illusion.
It is an illusion to the man. He thinks he is free, but he's gone and put shackles on his own wrists and in his perversions parades them around as bracelets. His freedom is a god in his life. No "God" will tell him what to do, or he is free to choose to worship the god of his own choice. I make that small g god because, what he always chooses with his "freedom" is a god that looks just like the god he wants rather than the true God. He wants a god who is permissive, gushy with love, never angry, and thinks he's a swell person. He has bound himself up with a delusion that he is exercising free will. In reality, he is very unfree.
Can we who have been chosen go against God in the matter of salvation? Well, since God gives us the faith, I don't see how we can - but again, it isn't God saying "you can't turn back." It is more that we won't once we have been quickened by the Holy Spirit and graced with faith to believe. ALL that the Father giveth me SHALL COME - and of He who comes I will in no wise cast out.
There are some tensions in Scripture, but not insurmountable. I know that there is a balance between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility so that lost man dying and going to Hell is truly responsible for his own condition. He isn't going to Hell because God didn't choose him. He's going to Hell because he wants nothing to do with God and His revelation.
Evangelistically, I believe we should make no distinctions. I have no idea who God elected. For all I know, everyone living today has been elected. God called me to teach. God called us all to tell. I do my job and leave the salvation business up to God.
What the doctrine of election does for me is really a blessing. 1) I know that ALL credit goes to God. 2) I know that He will never cast me out. 3)I am humbled that I was chosen and awed by God.
Just a thought. Maybe not a great one here, but something I was thinking of. I'm sure you believe in the basic concept of our judicial system. You have someone guilty of a crime, the evidence of the guilt is made apparent and then they are found guilty. The judge then makes a choice. What should the guilty party's sentence be? For many, a righteous judge will give the most just punishment the law allows. For others, he gives a suspended sentence with no punishment.
That is like what God did in this way. All of us were guilty as charged. If given a choice, we would always turn back at some point to sin. It is just our nature.
We violated God's righteous standards. His law. But He being the chief legislature had two requirements 1)The crime must be punished; 2)The price was death.
Yet, out of His mercy and love, the judge chose to send His son to pay the penalty by dying on the cross.
Well, here we are, still as sin bound as ever. Loving every moment of it. Blind. Worthless. Miserable. And we defiantly will not even acknowledge the gift.
But God has a desire that we know Him. The only way he can do this is by electing some to salvation. From this, they can see his mercy and grace as well as justice and wrath.
I don't know the mechanics of it all. But it is what the Bible teaches that God did.
He paid my sentence and then changed my heart. Others were not so blessed - as he didn't change their hearts. He didn't say they couldnt come. They just never would. And so, they remain guilty and the crime ends up being paid for in their own spiritual death rather than the substitutionary atonement of our Lord's own life.