Featured Do these scriptures deny human RESPONSIBILITY?

Are the dead responsible for their rotten smell and inability to move even if where they are is about to catch on fire ?

Did Lazarus know he was dead, saw he was dead, and said, "okay, it's up to me to bring myself back to life" ?

Is God such a monster that you would have Him requiring accountability and responsibility from those who are spiritually dead and detached from Him, the source of life, when He Himself knows they cannot and then chastise them for their unrepentance and disobedience ?

Take a look at the scriptures you say require responsibility to God, and see that they are addressed to ISRAEL, the ONLY PHYSICAL NATION on earth to whom God revealed Himself and to whom God gave His oracles, His words.

Did He reveal Himself to the Jebusites ? Or all the other ITES in the Old Testament other than to prove there is a God in Irael, among Israel, and who fights Israel's battle for them ? Even the imprecatory psalms indicate that.

Even to Nineveh, He sent His prophet, an Israelite. Did He reveal Himself to the Babylonians ? No. But He did use, again, Israelites.

If there is responsibility that is being unheeded, that blame belong to those who name the Name of Jesus as their own. Are Christians, the ones who live both in Spirit and in Truth, living up to what they are supposed to be on earth, that is, a people separated unto the Lord God their Creator so that the crooked generations they live among in this time world know that ''there is a God in Israel" ?

 

This thread and post does not answer the new thread I provided. It only ignores the real contextual issue, the issue that my new thread emphasizes. Please attempt to respond to my thread and the numerical steps that, I believe demand the conclusion I drew. In your thread, you remove the problem by simply not quoting Ezekiel 36:27. If you had included it then you would have to deal with stated cause and effect relationship that is plainly stated.

Taken by itself, Ezekiel 36:26 is mallible in the hands of the interpreter to make of it what they will. However, when verse 27 is include then we have a complete cause and effect relationship which directly contradicts how you are using the text. However, when verse 27 is included then giving the new heart in verse 26 provides ability to do what is described in verse 27 just as Deuteronomy 5:29 and 29:4 explicitlly declares is inseparable from the new heart, without which there is no ability to perceive, to see or to hear. You just eliminate the relationship and so manever around the whole issue.

Other scriptures equally call on sinners to circumcise their own hearts, not because they have ability to do that, as it is a creative act of God that only God can do, but because it is their duty to do so even though they are without the ability to perform that duty.

By insisting on your definition of "respons-ability" you effectively deny it is possible for anyone to be judged by God for forfeiting any kind of ability, and so abilties once convyed are eternal without the possibility of any kind of loss or forfeiture that they can be justly held accounted for. So I will drop the term "responsibility" and "accountability" and simply say they are to account for their own forfeiture or loss of ability when they acted in unison as one insepable human nature in the person of Adam so as to willfully forfeiture their ability to "perceive, and eyes to see and ears to hear" due to sin.

Here is the real issue! By omitting Ezek. 36:27 and ignoring Deuteronomy 29:4you effectively ignore the very stated reason why the new heart is essential because without it there can be no ability to "perceive, eyes to see and hears to hear" and thus no ability to obey (Ezek. 36:27). Instead, you reverse the cause and effect relationship and make the ability to perceive, eyes to see and ears to hear the cause for the new heart instead of the consequence of the new heart.

Now, that I have addressed your thread, Please attempt to go back to my thread on Deuteronomy 5:29 and point out any error in my logic and application of those two scriptures. I made it easy as I gave a numerical sequence of my logical steps. Just point out any of those steps and demonstrate why it is error.

 

God enables all the lost to respond. One person calls that "natural" another (like me) calls it supernatural

But I think it happens because of God "Convicting the WORLD of sin and righteousness and judgment" John 16 and it is "Drawing ALL men unto Me". John 12:32.

Yet even so - if a man can harden his heart - it means the starting point for man cannot be "fully hardened". Though man may be in need of that "Drawing of ALL mankind to Me" even in his not-fully-hardened state - it still tells us that there is a change over time.

A change toward fully hardened.

Or a change toward the Gospel.

And that is what probationary time on earth for mankind is all about.

Not God "sabotaging His own will that there should not be any who perish - but rather all come to repentance".


in Christ,

Bob

 

That is the subject of our debate and thus to use it as an argument to prove is circular reasoning. There is not one scripture in the entire Bible that states that God enables all men to respond. That is a theological presumption based upon nothing but wishful thinking.

Calls what "natural"????? We do not call it "natural" but we deny it even exists as the fallen nature "is" a STATE of enmity and a STATE of enmity cannot be subject to the law of God and neither indeed can be and that is precisely why all who are "in the flesh CANNOT (not "may not" as your theory demands) please God - Rom. 8:7-8.

Conviction is one thing, ability to respond is quite another and salvation as a consequence is completely something esle.

Before I left I provided a contextual based exposition that proved your interpetation of this verse is impossible. Your interpretation is historically false as we have historical evidence of missionaries bringing the gospel for the first time to cultures where their former generations had no knowledge of Christ, the gospel or the Bible. Their fathers and grandfathers now dead did not know of the gospel and it was completely absent from their culture when these missionaries came to their culture.

No one argues that fallen men come into the world "fully hardened" and all sides admit it is a process. The argument is what aspect of human nature is bieng hardened. Is it a "new" heart? Hardly, because those "in the flesh" do not have the "new" heart and so the only source for hardening is the old heart or fallen nature. The natural conscience of the fallen nature has ability to recognize light but reacts to light as clearly described by Christ in John 3:19-20 because of its actual CONDITION or STATE described in Romans 8:7-8.

All lost men disobey God's revealed will continually including His revealed will that all should repent and believe the gospel due to their own sinful resistant fallen nature. God does not have to sabotage what sin has already sabotaged.

 

Romans 1:18 also infers but one response of the fallen nature to exposure of light and that is it is "held down" and thus resisted. Can you find any other response in Romans 1:18-32?

 

You are missing the obvious point. Spiritual ability is inseparably connected with the new heart not with the old and the only heart possessed by the lost is the old heart.

Actually you have diagnosed your own problem. You make the old heart capable of spiritual discernment when the Scriptures attributes that ability only to the "new" heart - Deut. 5:29; 29:4; Ezek. 36:26-27.

Spiritual life is inseparable from spiritual knowledge (jn. 17:3) which is given only to "as many as" the Father has given to the son (Jn. 17:2). Hence, there is no chronological order between spiritual life and faith but one cannot exist apart from the other any more than repentance can exist without faith as they are two sides of the same coin and inseparable graces.

There is a clear distinction between spiritual life due to new birth and judicial eternal life due to justification.

You state our position in the terms of your own choosing in order to draw your own predetermined conclusions.

No, the cure is not the issue but the issue lies deeper in the willingness of the cancer patient to submit to the cure. Curing him of cancer also cures the deeper problem of the will.

 

Brother Skandelon, neither side of the debate denies human responsibilty in reagrds to salvation. Here's a blog that I wrote awhile back concerning this very subject:

http://hardshelloldregularbaptist.w...-must-i-do-to-be-saved-luke-1818-acts-162930/

 

:wavey::applause::thumbs::love2:

 

The "Will" ...... I fail to understand how this addresses the Will.

Earlier, LUKE had a thread where he emphasized "Persuasion" as a ground braking event in a new believers life. This is something I questioned because persuasion is a tool to get someone to buy into something.....I called it a "Salesmans" tactic. But when I examine my own regeneration I have to comclude that George Whitfield's Sermon "Method Of Grace" became a persuasive tool in my conversation. But brother, there was another element unearthed......ENLIGHTENMENT.

An excerpt if you will permit me is below:

And now, my dear friends, examine your hearts, for I hope you came hither with a design to have your souls made better. Give me leave to ask you, in the presence of God, whether you know the time, and if you do not know exactly the time, do you know there was a time, when God wrote bitter things against you, when the arrows of the Almighty were within you? Was ever the remembrance of your sins grievous to you? Was the burden of your sins intolerable to your thoughts? Did you ever see that God"s wrath might justly fall upon you, on account of your actual transgressions against God? Were you ever in all your life sorry for your sins? Could you ever say, My sins are gone over my head as a burden too heavy for me to bear? Did you ever experience any such thing as this? Did ever any such thing as this pass between God and your soul? If not, for Jesus Christ"s sake, do not call yourselves Christians; you may speak peace to your hearts, but there is no peace. May the Lord awaken you, may the Lord convert you, may the Lord give you peace, if it be his will, before you go home!

But further: you may be convinced of your actual sins, so as to be made to tremble, and yet you may be strangers to Jesus Christ, you may have no true work of grace upon your hearts. Before ever, therefore, you can speak peace to your hearts, conviction must go deeper; you must not only be convinced of your actual transgressions against the law of God, but likewise of the foundation of all your transgressions. And what is that? I mean original sin, that original corruption each of us brings into the world with us, which renders us liable to God"s wrath and damnation. There are many poor souls that think themselves fine reasoners, yet they pretend to say there is no such thing as original sin; they will charge God with injustice in imputing Adam"s sin to us; although we have got the mark of the beast and of the devil upon us, yet they tell us we are not born in sin. Let them look abroad into the world and see the disorders in it,

 

Brother, find anyone who God isn't dealing with, and present the gospel to him/her and see what kind of a response you will get. My mom and dad, especially mom, kept telling me I needed to go to church. I knew that, I admiited that, but I wanted to live a worldly life. I had no desire to go around the churches they went to to hear them shout, preach, praise God. I wanted to run the bars, chase the girls, go to the chicken fights, etc. It was when God truly shook me to the core, that I truly saw how wicked, how vile, how putrid I was. I then fled to Him for salvation. Man in a fallen, dead state, has not the faculties to come to God. After regeneration, we now have these faculties to come to Him in faith believing......