Well, of course what I meant was "except for the Mosaic Covenant". Didn't you infer that from my post? :)
I mean that God respects that we have free will and can choose to reject or accept Him. If God did not respect our free will, then He would force all men to "choose" Him. Some don't.
I suppose I disagree that you cite the only alternative, although I would agree that God has the sovereignty to create us as robots if He so chose. I would say that God, knowing that our natural choice would be to reject Him, disrespects our free will and therefore installs grace and faith in those He so chooses. This is done out of His love for us.
However, since God is righteous, we believe that He will fulfill His promise of eternal life to us when we obey His commandment to love others.
As I know you know, plenty of lost people love others. If you tie salvation to following any commandments, how is that not living under law?
God desires that we persevere. Thus, if we say the sinner's prayer in 1995, but then fall away from our Christian walk, what then? To say "he never meant the prayer" or something to that effect is bogus! Who are we to judge another person's inner motives when they call upon Christ the first time?<.i>
Thanks to Harley turning me on to the doctrine of "perseverance of the saints", I now understand that perseverance is necessary. In your example I don't think we need to judge anything, we only need look to God's promises. If someone says the sinner's prayer and then falls away, and I assume you mean on some sort of permanent level, without making any judgment, we are only left with two choices. Either the original prayer was insincere, or God is a liar. God promises us that He will carry on the good work He began in us to completion. If the person fell away, it would mean that God bailed. Can't happen.
That's based on a mistaken concept of how God operates regarding time. To God, time does not move. He sees all of time as one NOW. Thus, what happened at creation and what happened yesterday is part of God's eternal present. He then doesn't need to "make sure" that the coin flip turns up heads to fulfill a prophesy. He sees the prophesy and its fulfillment simultaneously.
But, the whole point of this segment was whether God causes things or stands back and allows them to happen, already knowing the outcome. If God gets everything He wants, and if God sees all time (I agree to both), then how can it be that random chance favored God's desires in every case? Did God mold His nature and teachings simply around His foreknowledge of time? Or, does God cause what He wants throughout time?
Because God desires that we love as Christ did - not to obey an external law or an obligation, and certainly not to earn salvation. Here is the problem. We are required to perform certain acts - obey the Commandments. However, God does not desire that we account our obedience as our own works, nor does He desire that we do them out of some obligation to earn something. God desires that the inner disposition is pure - that we give of ourselves totally in love to the other. Christ NEVER abandons the moral law. He criticizes the Pharisees because their interneal disposition to WHY they obeyed the Law was not what He wanted.
If someone says the sinner's prayer and then falls away, and I assume you mean on some sort of permanent level, without making any judgment, we are only left with two choices. Either the original prayer was insincere, or God is a liar.
That is a false dilemna. There is a third option that you overlook. When a person falls away from Christianity, it can also mean that that person is freely choosing to return to his former life. Since God loves us, He allows us to have what we want, even if this means eternal separation. God is not a liar. And a prayer made 20 years ago has very little effect on our walk in Christ today, quite frankly.
God promises us that He will carry on the good work He began in us to completion. If the person fell away, it would mean that God bailed. Can't happen.
God's promise presumes that we DESIRE to unite with Him. There is a cooperation between God and man. If a person fell away, it meant that the PERSON bailed, not God.
how can it be that random chance favored God's desires in every case? Did God mold His nature and teachings simply around His foreknowledge of time? Or, does God cause what He wants throughout time?
I don't believe in "random chance". If God's plan and its execution happens simultaneously FOR HIM, then it is not random. Certainly, He is molding things. But He also is able to take our actions into account. What I must say, though, about this subject is that we will likely never discover the interaction between freedom and grace completely. It is one of those things that Catholics call "a mystery". This means we can never plumb the depths of this subject and we just accept what the Church teaches, ensuring that our opinions on the matter remain within the broad bounds of the teaching that Christ left to His Apostles. Quite frankly, I don't think our rational thought will ever successfully figure this out.
Regards