Featured God made them the vessels of wrath !

On the political forum @KenH has aptly demonstrated the problem with how this issue is often taken.

He believes that the elect can support a sinful environment (a situation that encourages sin) because they are the elect and will recieve no reward in heaven (other than getting there) and no accountability for their actions (because they are elect).

This applies here with "vessels of wrath". If we take this to mean God has determined their lost state then the church - and Christ Himself - can have no meaningful impact on the World.

Just like Christ has no meaningful value to the elect (they were chosen by the Father who used Jesus to take the punishment of the elect) Christ can also have no potential value to the reprobate.

The reprobate should be focused on their own desires because they have no hope. The elect are not wrong to seek out the desires of the flesh because it doesn't really matter.

 

No, not a personal attack. That is a stupid claim.

You stated that a Christian can support anything in politics they want (the example was supporting the government requiring hospitals to perform abortion as birth control and allowing parents to gender transition pre-teen children).

You stated that the reward of the elect is Christ, that they will not be held accountable for how they conduct themselves during the time of their stay on this earth.


If the reprobate does not have an opportunity to be saved (no legitimate offer of salvation) then they should live their lives accordingly to their own desires.

 

Good question.

But you do take kinda a philosophical bent (God responding to is God being subject to).

This could be asked another way - will God judge the wicked? If so, does this mean God is subject to the wicked?

 

I am less concerned about feelings than you, apparently.

You offered a perfect example of my point, so I used it here.

If men are decreed by God to be elect or reprobate, and there is no accountability for our actions, then our decisions do not matter.

The elect are free to condone, participate, and support the demonic and the reprobate are free to practice evil without repercussions for their actual actions.

 

Another related issue is how we know that we are "vessels of mercy" rather than "vessels of wrath".

One way is discipline when the "vessel of mercy" behaves as a "vessel of wrath".

A Christian may support ungodly things, but God will discipline them to correct the sin. Absence of discipline indicates one is Illegitimate (not truly a child of God).

 

And you me .

I was trying to work through your statement that if God created men as vessels of wrath because of their sin it woukd make God subject to man's actions.

It seems this would also mean that if God punishes men for sin it makes Gid subject to man's actions.

Just trying to think that part through.

 

Does Ephesians 2:3 apply (that we were once by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind)?

 

I may have misunderstood you. This was what I was trying to work out:

 

I have not seen a passage that states that. Maybe it's the wording.

I do see that we were enemies of God, and that in Christ we escape the wrath to come (which seems to indicate we were facing that wrath....otherwise we wouldn't need the escape).

In other words, we cannot have be saved from something we were never endanger of facing.

 

Nah. I'm not interested enough to study a post in order to discover a meaning.

 

Yes. I know the passage very well (the whole passage, not just what you take out here).



"So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires."

This part of the passage very strongly points to sin being the cause of the "vessels of wrath" and those remaining as such due to a "hardening".