Further, whose decision comes first: the decision of God to free the enslaved, dead sinner and give him the ability to believe,
If you are saying election is first then election determines the rest, they are conditional upon election.
the free-choice decision of the sinner that then makes him or her one of the elect?”
If grace is irresistible, there is no other choice possible, election then grace/faith/salvation; no election, no grace/faith/salvation.
If the middle two events cannot vary, must always occur, then they are irrelevant, we could substitute any other event in the causal stream.
You have election>salvation and supported the doctrine of salvation by election.
No. You have FAITH>salvation. It is by His Grace that He gives the GIFT - It is by FAITH you RECEIVE it.
You can only have what you RECEIVE. Another way to say it is, if you 'ELECT' to RECEIVE it.
No sir, it does not, but rather points towards the ill-applied descriptions on either side of the fulcrum as they are incomplete on both sides of the balancing point upon which they are weighed, one against the other.
You have election>salvation and supported the doctrine of salvation by election.
And the problem with this is...? What? It doesn't give man enough credit when he hears God and believes, thus earning (in part) salvation, when we can see from the beginning of the Judeo-Christian construct that righteousness was said to be "credited" to Abram not of or by his own get-go.
Christ is the author and finisher of faith (belief) not we as man filling in the blanks. No, whenever the latter (man scribbling in that context) can be seen to have occurred, there is sin as result.
On the other hand, in objections to Calvinist views, there seems to be need for strenuous emphasis acknowledging man be part of his own condemnation, when all along (at least since the fall of Adam) man was dead already.
Jesus was not sent to the world to condemn the world...for it was condemned already. THIS is significant. What choice can a dead man have(?) I ask you. Is not the answer painfully obvious? Does man answer God from his own grave? Or is it life sourced from the beginning from the Creator Himself which answers? We, being formed but of the dust of the earth, are not "life" any more than the dust is.