Which event occurred first?
did God place within my heart the desire to know him in the first place regardless of my upbringing? And again, I will say yes.
So much for your "free will". If God places a desire for Him in your heart, then it is not your will, but God's will that is being done.
Some will reject it due to any number of reasons
I think objectively the main reason why someone would reject God is because God did not put a desire in his heart to accept him. God put that desire in my heart and he put it in yours. Why you? Why me? Why not Christopher Hitchens?
A bit late for me, but until tomorrow...
“If God places a desire for Him in your heart, then it is not your will, but God’s will that is being done.”
God calls most, but most reject his call. God draws, but man is not compelled to accept.
Why do I say that?
Jesus also told them other parables. He said, 2 “The Kingdom of Heaven can be illustrated by the story of a king who prepared a great wedding feast for his son. 3 When the banquet was ready, he sent his servants to notify those who were invited. But they all refused to come!
4 “So he sent other servants to tell them, ‘The feast has been prepared. The bulls and fattened cattle have been killed, and everything is ready. Come to the banquet!’ 5 But the guests he had invited ignored them and went their own way, one to his farm, another to his business. 6 Others seized his messengers and insulted them and killed them.
7 “The king was furious, and he sent out his army to destroy the murderers and burn their town. 8 And he said to his servants, ‘The wedding feast is ready, and the guests I invited aren’t worthy of the honor. 9 Now go out to the street corners and invite everyone you see.’ 10 So the servants brought in everyone they could find, good and bad alike, and the banquet hall was filled with guests.
11 “But when the king came in to meet the guests, he noticed a man who wasn’t wearing the proper clothes for a wedding. 12 ‘Friend,’ he asked, ‘how is it that you are here without wedding clothes?’ But the man had no reply. 13 Then the king said to his aides, ‘Bind his hands and feet and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
14 “For many are called, but few are chosen.”
While God calls all - ““God overlooked people’s ignorance about these things in earlier times, but now he commands everyone everywhere to repent of their sins and turn to him.” Acts 17 - not all are willing to be clothed in his righteousness. So yes, God calls. We can refuse.
“I think objectively the main reason why someone would reject God is because God did not put a desire in his heart to accept him.”
Jesus gave several reasons why people rejected his calling. They include wealth - a love of the things of the world - and caring more for the opinion of man than of God. There may be others, but Jesus specifically gave those two reasons.
It isn’t that God didn’t call, but men refused to come. “...you refuse to come to me that you may have life...How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?”
That isn’t my opinion, but the words of Jesus.
As to which event occurred first, of course God sought me and then I responded to his revelation of the truth. I still fail to see how God overrode the free will he endowed me with.
So tell me, what would be the point of Jesus commanding his disciples to "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to EVERY creature?" if God will only grant faith in a chosen few? Did he just want us to have some "busy work" to keep us occupied until he returned? And, Mr. Hitchens isn't dead yet, so you never know. :o)
AMEN! "Who made thee to differ?"
To come to this realization that God set His love on us and dragged us to Him only because it pleased Him to do so is an astounding, liberating truth that actually fills our hearts and minds with the very best response a human being can give to God -- gratitude.
Calvinism is the casting of the soul wholly on the free grace of God alone, to whom alone belongs salvation. And, such being the nature of Calvinism, it seems scarcely necessary to inquire why its fortunes appear from time to time, and now again in our own time, to suffer some depression. It can no more perish out of the earth than the sense of sin can pass out of the heart of sinful humanity—than the sense of God can fade out of the minds of dependent creatures—than God Himself can perish out of the heavens..." "...For Calvinism, in this soteriological aspect of it, is just the perception and expression and defence of the utter dependence of the soul on the free grace of God for salvation. All its so-called hard features—its doctrine of original sin, yes, speak it right out, its doctrine of total depravity and the entire inability of the sinful will to good; its doctrine of election, or, to put it in the words everywhere spoken against, its doctrine of predestination and preterition, of reprobation itself—mean just this and nothing more. Calvinism will not play fast and loose with the free grace of God. It is set upon giving to God, and to God alone, the glory and all the glory of salvation. There are others than Calvinists, no doubt, who would fain make the same great confession. But they make it with reserves, or they painfully justify the making of it by some tenuous theory which confuses nature and grace. They leave logical pitfalls on this side or that, and the difference between logical pitfalls and other pitfalls is that the wayfarer may fall into the others, but the plain man, just because his is a simple mind, must fall into those. Calvinism will leave no logical pitfalls and will make no reserves. It will have nothing to do with theories whose function it is to explain away facts. It confesses, with a heart full of adoring gratitude, that to God, and to God alone, belongs salvation and the whole of salvation; that He it is, and He alone, who works salvation in its whole reach. Any falling away in the slightest measure from this great confession is to fall away from Calvinism. Any intrusion of any human merit, or act, or disposition, or power, as ground or cause or occasion, into the process of divine salvation,—whether in the way of power to resist or of ability to improve grace, of the opening of the soul to the reception of grace, or of the employment of grace already received—is a breach with Calvinism.