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To: Dionysiusdecordealcis; HarleyD
The very nature of a gift is that it can be refused. You left out the fourth point: God can give a gift but a gift is not truly a gift until a recipient accepts it. If someone forces something on you it ceases to be a gift. If the Bible truly means "gift" then it has to mean a refusable offer.

I strongly disagree. The very nature of a gift has ZERO to do with whether or not it is accepted. The very nature of a gift is that it is something a value, given voluntarily, with no expectation of something in return. That is what a gift is. The nature of the gift does not change based on what the recipient's reaction to it is.

God gives His gifts of faith and grace to His elect. They are accepted in every case, as God already knows that they will be. From another POV, why would God bother to offer a gift to someone whom He already knows is going to ultimately reject it? Wouldn't that be a waste of time? What use could that have, since the rest of us wouldn't even know about it? There's nothing we can learn from that pointless exercise.

1,294 posted on 01/12/2006 8:05:38 PM PST by Forest Keeper
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To: Forest Keeper; annalex; jo kus; Kolokotronis
Can't you read? I said, the nature of a gift is that it can be refused. The anti-free-will folks deny that we can refuse God's gift. Your response is to a different question: whether a gift having been refused remains a gift. On that point I said that a gift must be accepted in order to complete the gifting process, in order for it to be a gift in the full sense. A refused gift remains a gift in a crippled sense. So you are wrong to say that a refused gift is a full gift regardless whether it is accepted or not.

And in your answer to the wrong question you implicitly concede my point, though you didn't realize it. Your answer presumes that a gift can be refused because we all know that gifts can be refused and that a "giver" who will not permit his gift to be refused is not truly a giver but a raper, an imposer, someone who does not give generously and give without caring whether his gift is refused but a "giver" who rapes the freedom of the recipient of his "gift." A "giver" who will not let his "gift" be refused is no giver at all but a tyrant. Your answer to the wrong question gave away the anti-free-will case and concede our free-will point.

1,331 posted on 01/13/2006 6:57:01 AM PST by Dionysiusdecordealcis
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