Replies

Sorry, but man has free will to accept or reject God. God does not force himself on anyone.

You are missing an important point. You are missing everything in the discussion, in fact. You need to think again about what free will is and what it is not.

More to the point, perhaps, you need to think about what the will is. It is not something divorced from the person. It is an expression of the person himself. If we consider the will as a faculty, it is the choosing faculty. The person himself exercises his will. The will is actually the person's choosing.

This creates an enormous mess which you have overlooked, I think. The problem is, fallen sinners are EVIL.

***

Augustine first, then the Scholastic theologians, then Calvin--then all of the rest of the Reformers and the majority of the Anabaptists!--all correctly pointed out that the will is NOT SUSPENDED ABOVE THE PERSON.

The Jesuits argued this idea of "the suspension of the will" when they tried to defend the Papacy against the monumentally serious charges brought by the Protestants, but the Jesuit position is actually patently stupid.

My point is that the will is obviously not a neutral faculty. It is an expression of the sinner.

As I said earlier, fallen sinners are evil. They love darkness rather than light. Apart from supernatural regeneration, they will not receive Truth in a saving way. They will freely chose not to do so.

In other words, their free will is their disaster, because their free will, although free in obvious respect of responsible choosing, is a will bound to their natures. And they are by nature only evil.

Apart from sovereign regeneration by the Spirit, their free will is oddly but necessarily enslaved in their own evil. Apart from supernatural regeneration, they are doomed in unbelief. The problem is, they prefer unbelief. They are hardened idolaters. They are under Satanic power.

What is even more important, the Lord Jesus Himself clearly condemns the notion that evil folks can/will chose the good in a saving way. He says that they WON'T.

So, the idea that man has free will is true. A man will always do as he pleases. But an unregenerate sinner will never be pleased to choose from the heart that which is contrary to his Christ-hating, Creator-hating, Truth-hating heart!

The sinner has to be supernaturally given a new nature before he will repent and believe the gospel. Thus, regeneration has to precede conversion, not follow conversion.

(This is why we pray to the Lord for the conversion of sinners!)

Check me out on this. This historic Protestant perspective is taught practically everywhere in the Bible.

In other words, the will of man is not free in the sense which people thoughtlessly assume for it!

God does not force himself on anyone.

You mean, like He didn't force Himself on Moses or Abraham or upon Jonah or Noah or upon Saul as he travelled to Damascus?

The Bible has a great many instances of God "forcing" Himself on people. You need to understand that no one ever truly wants to obey God. It is only if God quickens your spirit, raising you from spiritual death, you that will ever know Him and serve Him. And that life is granted us, both Jews and Gentiles, through the blood of Christ and His Intercession with the Father and Christ's sanctification of His flock, the flock given to Him by the Father. The Father chooses and elects those who will be in the flock of His Son. It is plainly stated many times. What the_doc has so patiently and eloquently described above is that we do, of course, have complete free will. But our nature is such that we will never choose to serve God. We may claim that and we may try to do good. We may attend church and enjoy a considerable reputation for holiness. But none of that means anything to God unless we do all things for Him and through Him. It's very very easy to stray off into doing what we think we should do instead of simply doing what God commands. Errors of this sort are at least as often in doing more than we are allowed as in neglecting to do the least commandments God has given.

You pro-choice types are very enamored with your own goodness and your supposed ability to "choose" God. It's all very pleasing to hear but it is in direct conflict with the plainly written and often-repeated scriptures that deal with the innate evil of man and the necessity of God to intervene to save any. You should go back and review some of the free-will verses the pro-choicers use to support their position. You'll find that those verses apply to those who are already believers, not to the spiritually unregenerate. To God, our choices mean nothing until He has intervened to quicken our spirits and to regenerate us. Without that saving grace, we are spiritually dead and lost. When the Biblse speaks of the unsaved as being spiritually dead, it means it. Dead is dead. And the dead can't make a choice for God or for anything else. An unregenerate person can be the worst criminal or the most benevolent humanitarian. Both will end in hell. But for the grace of God, so would we.

There are no righteous men, only a righteous God who redeems those whom He wills. This is God's plain Word. I won't tell you that you don't know the Christ shown us in the Word or imply you're not Christian. But I'd say that you should be thinking about how your supposed "choice" for Christ has robbed God of His own glory in the redemption of sinners, including you. And, yes, the Bible also tells many many times of how God does things for His own glory. Those are not idle words or some mere literary construct.