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These are all personal objects, n...
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The relationship is so personal, so intimate, that it is proper to speak of it in the sense of foreloving.
all who are foreknown are predestined.
The introduction of human autonomy into the passage disrupts its message and coherence.
If the “calling” here is but a wooing, a general call to salvation that is rejected by many, the chain is broken.
Saving faith is not the offspring of an autonomous will but the renewed ability and natural desire of a changed and regenerated heart, that of the new creature in Christ Jesus.
We persevere because it is God’s will that we do so.
Those who truly follow the biblical mandate to “examine all things” in light of Scriptural teaching should be the first to place their own traditions under the microscope of God’s Word.
God the Father decreed the salvation of an elect people, Christ died with the intention of redeeming those people through their union with Him and accomplished that task, and without fail the Holy Spirit brings that accomplished work to fruition in the life of the elect at the time and in the manner determined by God. It was God’s intention that
the Son redeem His people by His death, and since salvation is of God and therefore not subject to failure, the Son accomplished that task.
If Christ died in the place of every single individual human being, He was dying for many who had already died in rebellion against God and who will experience God’s wrath for eternity.
If Christ died in the place of every man and woman in all of history (universal scope and intention), the atonement must be limited in its power and efficacy, for it does not actually result in the salvation of many of those God intended it to save.
The only way out of the dilemma is to abandon the idea of truly penal substitution.
are we truly to believe that in eternity the denizens of hell, while screaming out their hatred of God, will be able to say with the apostle Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20)? Surely not!
Christ, by His blood, redeemed men from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation (Revelation 5:9);
Christ saves His people from their sins perfectly and fully in His death. His death does not bring about a theoretical redemption that requires man’s actions to be effective.
faith is not the human “capacity” that makes man’s will the ultimate decision maker in salvation. Christ’s substitutionary death in behalf of His people is a real and finished work: It is not dependent upon the human act of faith for success or failure. When the time comes in God’s sovereign providence to bring to spiritual life each of those for whom Christ died, the Spirit of God will not only effectively accomplish that work of regeneration but that new creature in Christ will, unfailingly, believe in Jesus Christ (“all that the Father gives Me will come to Me”). Hence, we are not saved
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when God chooses to move in the lives of His elect and bring them from spiritual death to spiritual life, no power in heaven or on earth can stop Him from so doing.
grace. It is simply the confession that when God chooses to raise His people to spiritual life, He does so without the fulfillment of any conditions on the part of the sinner.
One cannot claim to practice sola scriptura and allow tradition to rule over the text of Scripture,
As my positive presentations of the doctrines of grace prove, I believe what I do because of the text of Scripture, not because I follow a particular individual’s teachings.
the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the victory of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the church.
From a biblical perspective, the two theologies are contradictory.
The “Roman Catholic” church did not exist in Augustine’s day, and he would never have understood the term “Roman Catholic.”
let us both come to common ground, the testimony of the Holy Scriptures
No matter how often Arminian tradition repeats its mantralike chant that God is not free to love a particular people redemptively, the Bible is plain on the matter. God loved Israel with an undeserved love that He did not show to any other people. And the love God has for His own people, the elect, is different than the love He shows to the creation in general or to rebel sinners outside of His grace in particular.
The positive choice of a people in Christ Jesus is according to the kind intention of His will. The punishment of deserving sinners glorifies Him in
the demonstration of His holiness and righteousness.
If God’s decree does not include the evil of mankind, that evil has no purpose,
God’s sovereign decree and man’s creaturely will coexist (compatibilism) and that since God judges on the basis of the intentions of the heart, there is in fact a ground for morality and justice.
God ordains both the ends and the means.
He uses the preaching of the gospel to bring His elect unto salvation.
the fact that those who are condemned never so much as desired to repent, reveled in their sin, and will stand upon the parapets of hell screaming their hatred of God in eternity to come, proving the justness of God’s condemnation of them.
The elect do repent and the nonelect do not desire to do so.
to convey the idea that the nonelect may desire to repent but that God somehow keeps them from doing so. That is utterly untrue.
the message preached to all men has two effects: When joined with the work of the Spirit, it is the very means of salvation for the elect; in all other cases, it brings judgment to the glory of God. God is glorified when His justice is done, and when men show themselves to be rebel sons of Adam in their hatred of the proclamation of His truth, His just condemnation of them is honored.
If God’s foreknowledge is perfect, does it not follow that the future is, in fact, fixed?
All the passage is saying is that all the ones who believe will have eternal life. It does not even attempt to address who will believe or any of the related issues like human ability or inability and the nature of saving faith.
World does not mean “every single individual person” and whosoever does not in any way mean “universal ability.”
Those who limit God’s freedom through asserting some form of libertarian free will are completely inconsistent in claiming that once a person “accepts Christ,” he somehow loses the free will that got him to that position in the first place and is now “secure” from falling. If Christ’s work of salvation is dependent upon our cooperation to be effective, there is no reason to believe it is eternally secure at any point.
All the religions of man require the creaturely will of man to stand sovereign over God, so that no matter how much weight is given to God and His grace, in the final analysis, it is man who is in control of the final decision regarding his salvation.
All systems that deny the perfection of Christ as Savior and present any form of works-salvation likewise hold to this view.
The person who does not know he has traditions is the person most enslaved to them.
