Clearly my post upset/annoyed you. I apologize for that.
I will respond to your post and then finish here. Cal vs. Arm debates usually end badly. I think it would have been better if this thread had been placed in the appropriate section.
If you purchase a gift for a friend and they don’t accept it does that mean you obviously didn’t purchase it for them?
If you purchased the gift with the intention of them receiving it, clearly you failed in your intention.
the inhabitants of the earth, men, the human family
If 'world' means what you say it means, then clearly Christ failed in the task given to Him by the Father in 1 John 4:14, because not all the inhabitants of the earth are saved.
You are talking in circles.
They are not sheep because they are not following Christ. They are not following Christ because they are not sheep. Which is it?
I am not talking in circles. Read John 10:26-7.
"But you do not believe, because you are not of My sheep as I said to you. My sheep hear My voice and I know them and they follow Me." They do not cease to be Christ's sheep because they do not believe; they do not believe because they are not Christ's sheep. Had they been His sheep, they would have heard their shepherd's voice and followed Him QED.
I can also suggest as gently that your objection to an actually free gift rather than a coerced gift is built on your aversion to it rather than on Scripture.
I'm not quite sure what a coerced gift is, but it seems to me on my understanding of Scripture, that the gift of eternal life is only the gift of eternal life if the recipient receives eternal life. If he rejects the gift, he doesn't have it, so the gift, under your system, is not free, but conditional upon acceptance. The Lord Jesus says of His sheep,
"I give them eternal life...." He does not say, "I offer them eternal life."
But since these are speculative statements about how we perceive each other to think, it amounts to nothing better than a post that says nothing more than “I think you don’t believe the Bible.”
This does nothing for the conversation but make me not want to read your posts and you not take any interest in mine. So let’s dispense with the “your opinions are wrong because you don’t believe the Bible,” type statements.
I am sure you are right and I apologize again
You can’t believe that. Everything you post says you don’t believe that.
What I said was that God loves people enough to save them. If you are asking me if God loves all people in the same way, then we need to look at the Scriptures.
God makes His sun to rise on the evil and the good (Matt. 7:45).
He sends rain on the just and on the unjust (ibid).
He is kind to the unthankful and evil (Luke 6:35).
He endures with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction (Romans 9:22).
But
'having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end' or
'to the uttermost' (John 13:1).
And He does save sinners. Every one who comes to God by Him. And He doesn’t save those who don’t come by Him.
That is true.
That doesn’t mean He is not able or did not intend to.
It does mean that He did not intend to. "
My counsel shall stand and I will do all My pleasure" (Isaiah 46:10). Or it means that He does not love anyone enough actually to save him.
If God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and He created the wicked for His pleasure, He must not intend for them to remain wicked. Or He must do things against His desires.
What it comes down to, eventually is that you must not believe that God has given man his own will. If God is orchestrating everything, and man has no choice in the matter, then there is no disobedience, culpability, guiltiness, or sin. It is all happening exactly the way God decided it should happen and God is no longer a Judge, just a facilitator. Just the mastermind of a Calvinist simulation that we think we make choices in.
I’m not so much of a quack as to believe we are merely a simulation or that reality is just some kind of play thing like what a young child does with their toys.
You have it quite wrong. As I swrote earlier, all the Reformed Confessions agree that man has free will. As I wrote in reply to
@Ascetic X, the Lord Jesus tells us,
"And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than life, beause their deeds were evil" (John 3:19). They freely
prefer darkness to light, and exercise their free will in refusing Christ. They need their heart changed and their eyes opened before they will come to Christ.
There is no such thing as free grace in Calvinism. If it were free, it would be available. Since it is forced, coerced, channeled, inevitable, or whatever you prefer to call it, it is not free. It becomes mandatory.
In Calvinism, grace is absolutely free; it is also sovereign.
No one is born a sheep. The sheep hear and follow because they are made new creatures. They are made new in Christ. They were unrighteous and now they are righteous.
Yes, yes, yes! The sheep don't hear and follow and then, as a reward, become new creatures. God makes them new creatures and then they freely hear and follow. They were unrighteous and now, through the blood of the Lord Jesus they are regarded as righteous.
I would ask you if you consider God to have failed because He made people who you don’t consider able to be made new?
God doesn't fail (Psalm 115:3; Isaiah 46:10 etc.).
You are more than welcome to reply, but I shall not be making any more posts on this thread.
If there remained some people who were not cured of cancer for any reason, one could not say that the medicine had cured all cancer QED. However, contact me again when the drug appears and we can discuss it further.
