The offering of a “choice” doesn’t mean the hearer has the ability to make the choice. I understand that you believe that means the person isn’t responsible for rejecting the truth of the gospel, but that is applying secular reasoning to God’s Word.
Hebrews 3:7-15
7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says, “Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness,
9 where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years.
10 Therefore I was provoked with that generation, and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart; they have not known my ways.’
11 As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’”
12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.
13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
15 As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
I cannot see, given what the WofH wrote in this passage, that he thought his readers had no capacity to choose to hear and positively respond to his exhortations. And it is to those who have already "heard" that he is writing and warning about unbelief and hardness, which seems to me very suggestive of the fact that the WofH did not think his readers were "locked in" to an over-riding divine ordination.
I don't know how you arrive at your "secular reasoning" remark. The capacity to reason is given to us by God; the laws of logic and principles of sound reasoning are His. When I apply these God-originating laws and principles to Calvinism, the systematic is shown to be contradictory, absurd and highly denigrating toward God.
Jesus told the rich young ruler that if he wanted to get to heaven he should keep the commandments.
We know from scripture that no one is able to keep the OT Law in such a way as to warrant heaven. Did Jesus lie to the RYR? No, of course not.
Jesus was speaking to RyR within the Old Covenant context. He had not yet atoned for sin "once for all," through his sacrifice on the cross making a "new and living way" by which all could come to God for forgiveness, cleansing and reconciliation (See:
Hebrews 7-10). And so, Jesus could not advise the young ruler to trust in himself as Savior and Lord, nor could he speak to the young man of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the "second birth." So, no, Jesus was not lying to the RyR; he was speaking to the RyR within the only covenant that there was between Man and God at the time. It was a law-based covenant that served only to condemn, but had the RyR been able to keep it perfectly, he would have been accepted by God. As Jesus demonstrated to the young man, however, mere external obedience to God's laws was not enough; God looks upon our hearts and doesn't tolerate in them "gods" of selfish desire (eg - material wealth).
God knew no one would keep these commandments. He held them accountable for the failure to do so and many are burning in hell because they chose to disobey God’s commandments.
By your logic, that makes God unjust. Like many others, secular reasoning replaces scripture and the human concept of “free will” is lifted above biblical reality of God’s will in the salvation of the elect.
Was there not the Old Covenant system of atoning sacrifice? Yes, there was. So, the inability of His Chosen People to keep His commandments was accounted for by God, a way to maintain good relations with Him through animal sacrifice instituted by Him. If they chose not to avail themselves of this method of dealing with their sin, that was on them, not God. So, no, I don't think God unjust, as I read how He acted in the OT.
I think God would be unjust if, as Calvinism asserts, God decrees the basic desires of every person and then, when they make choices in expression of the desires
He's given them, He makes
them responsible for their choices. Thinking this Calvinist idea of God's "justice" very perverse isn't a challenge to God's sovereignty, but to the ugliness of Calvinism's theistic determinism.
God no more needs to order every facet of His creatures' lives in order to be sovereign than a chess master needs to order every move of his opponent in order to win the match. It is a very poor chess master who can only win when he controls everything on the chess board and it is a very weak God who must control everything in Creation in order to see His will done. This isn't "secular reasoning" but the obvious conclusion of anyone who hasn't thoroughly imbibed the "Kool-Aid" of Calvinist thought.
