Featured The Sovereignty of God is Absolute

Neither Dave nor I have said God is not sovereign. Austin it seems you have this strange idea that God can only be sovereign if He adheres to your version of sovereign. From what I have seen of your comments that would require Him to be absolutely totally sovereign. Have I got that right?

I can not speak for Dave but I think he would agree with this definition of sovereign as it relates to God:
Sovereignty of God in Christianity can be defined primarily as the right of God to exercise his ruling power over his creation

What I do find strange about your view is that you have actually placed limits on God. You claim that God is sovereign and controls all things but then you say that He can't give man the ability to exercise a true free will. Why is that Austin? Do you really think that would make Him less than sovereign and if so how?

 

What's with the 'finally'? I have argued this consistently on the board for years. You are getting me confused with someone else.And I agree that God is very active in reaching out to mankind and sovereignly drawing them to Himself.

So God's doing His best, is He; but somehow He can't quite save everyone? Poor God! I would not agree. God is active in His creation to accomplish all His will in His own time throughout the whole world.
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You seem to imagine that these verses are somehow proof texts for Arminianism or whatever it is you believe. They are not.

You like half the Gospel, but you do not appear to be ashamed of the fact that the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Romans 1:16).

God is sovereign; He does not have to do anything. He could have left us dead in our sins. 'But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)....' (Ephesians 2:4-5).

"This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day" (John 6:39). "Father, I desire that they also whom You have given Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory...." (John 17:24).
Now try answering that without all your pontificating.

 

Titus 1:2-3. '....In hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began, but has in due time manifested.....'
God does not respond to what man has done. Man responds to God when He sovereignly calls him (Luke 5:27-28)..

 

This is the box that God has been put into and imprisoned in by those who refuse to believe the words in the scriptures. God is the creator and he could act under his attribute of sovereignty in the affairs of men if he chose to. The fact is that he has not chosen to. To deny that fact proves that the hypers have put him in their box. It is not so much that men are not free to choose in their perverted system, but God is not free to choose.

If someone could make an accurate list of the ten most insulting and perverted and God dishonoring doctrines that have ever been hatched in the minds of men who teach under the umbrella of so called main stream Christianity, then the sovereignty of God would top the list, hands down. That is if sovereignty is defined in the narrow view of men like KenH, which is all actions of all creation has been previously determined by God and everything that is done is by his appointment and direction and mandate. Sovereignty = Determinism.

Why are these men taken seriously, especially by Baptists?

 

Sliverhair theology: "Man must, before God can.,"

I should have said Sliverhair as I misread that you were speaking to Dave and wrote the garbage you wrote.

It's funny how you make claims that are false. Tell me where do I agree that "Man must...before God can",which is your graceless mantra.

My question has and is one that you refuse to answer.

Who causes a man to believe? Is it God or is it man?

It is quite obvious you have embraced open theism where God simply doesn't know and therefore reacts to humans whom he cannot cause to do anything. In your world, humans determine the destiny of the world and God must react in order to try keep his plans in track.
Such a god is not found in the Bible, yet your demand for free will requires you worship the god of your imagination.

 

Your comments actually point to the difference in how we see God's character. You require God to be in total control of all things to the point that man is unable to make any real choices. Whereas I see God as one that loves His creation and desires to have a real relationship with them. God wants His creation to love Him and want to worship Him but that can not be forced as Calvinism would have it. To truly love requires a free will which means the ability to also reject that love.

Whether you run to your WCF, LBCF, DoG or TULIP they all point to the same thing, POWER. Calvinists require God to be in total control. Even your understanding of the sovereignty of God points to that. For the Calvinist God has to decree all things or He has to use Irresistible Grace to force people to love Him and logically what kind of love is that?

Martin it really is to bad that you will not just trust what the bible says
Rom 1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.

I know this is going to sound strange to you but the ones that God gives to the Son are those that believe. Calvinists seem to think God can force people to believe, sorry but that does not happen. That is why God is actively working in and through His creation, our conscience, His bride, His Holy Spirit filled followers, and His Word to aid humanity in their conversion.

There is a “drawing” or “preparing” which precedes our actual conversion. The Bible is full of injunctions to act—people are called G2564 to repent G3340, to believe G4100, to come G2240, to decide G1252, and so forth.

You do not seem to know what I believe, well that should be clear from my answers to you. The BIBLE.

 

God calls us to Him but man has to respond.

Joh 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
Joh 3:17 For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.
Joh 3:18 "He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

How can you miss the choices shown in these verses? Are you so locked into your Calvinist theology that you refuse to trust what God has said?

 

“But,” asked Christian, “will your custom stand up in a court of law?”

They replied, “This custom of entering the way by taking a shortcut has been going on as a long-standing practice for more than a thousand years and would be ruled as a legal practice by any impartial judge. And besides,” they added, “as long as we get into the way, what does it matter how we get in? If we are in, we are in. You came into the way through the narrow gate, and we came tumbling over the wall, and since we are both in, who is to say that your chosen path is better than ours?”

Christian told them, “I walk by the rule of my Master; you walk by the rude working of your own notions.

Formalist and Hypocrisy Taking a Shortcut

 

You do love to throw around baseless pejoratives don't you. You are acting like the average troll that we find online. What I have found in dealing with various Calvinists on this and other boards is that you love hyperbole and seem to have a very loose relationship with reality.

You Austin seem to spend most of your time engaging in ad hominem attacks. That you do not like an answer does not mean that an answer has not been given but this is a concept that has escaped you.

 

When is anyone ever ashamed to advance a doctrine like that?

 

Who causes a man to believe? Is it God or is it man?

 

Do you have a auto responder to my posts?

 

Do you have an answer to the question?

*Ephesians 2:4-5*
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—

Who causes a man to believe? Is it God or is it man?

 

So what we have here is called an antinomy, referring to “a real or apparent mutual incompatibility of two laws.”

“What should one do, then, with an antinomy?
Accept it for what it is, and learn to live with it.
Refuse to regard the apparent inconsistency as real; put down the semblance of contradiction to the deficiency of your own understanding; think of the two principles as, not rival alternatives, but, in some way that at present you do not grasp, complementary to each other.
Be careful, therefore, not to set them at loggerheads, nor to make deductions from either that would cut across the other (such deductions would, for that very reason, be certainly unsound).
Use each within the limits of its own sphere of reference (I.e., the area delimited by the evidence from which the principle has been drawn).
Note what connections exist between the two truths and their two frames of reference, and teach yourself to think of reality in a way that provides for their peaceful coexistence, remembering that reality itself has proved actually to contain them both.​

Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. by J. I. Packer. 1961. p.21
​

Rob

 

How many times now Austin? What's that old expression " only a fool keeps asking the same question over and over expecting a different result" Are you a fool Austin?

 

At the end of the day, God is the uncaused cause of everything. Now to the question did God compel by predestination our acceptance or rejection of Christ? That answer is no.

Were we saved by grace? Yes, salvation is a gift from God.

Were we saved by grace through faith? Yes, God utilized our faith in His sovereign decision to save us or not. This is the truth, found over and over in scripture that Reformed Theology denies. They read saved through faith as meaning saved, then given faith. I kid you not...

 

They certainly do!

Actually, God requires God to be in total control of all things.
Isaiah 42:8, 16. 'I am the LORD, that is My name; and My glory I will not give to another. ............ I will bring the blind by a way they did not know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight. These things I will do for them, and not forsake them.' Your problem is that your god is too small and self-effacing. 'I, even I, am the LORD, and besides Me there is no saviour' (Isaiah 43:11). And that includes man himself.

On the contrary, man makes real choices, but because of his fallen nature, man is not able to do real good in God's eyes Please take time to read Genesis 8:21; Isaiah 64:6; Jeremiah 10:23; Jeremiah 13:23, and of course Romans 3:10-18. But, though man makes real choices, in all things God is utterly sovereign. A man's heart plans his way, but the LORD directs his steps' (Proverbs 16:9). I praise Him that He directed mine, when my free-will was inclined quite the opposite direction.

Oh! Poor God! He so wants to be loved and worshipped, but He can't seem to manage it. Maybe your god, Silverhair, should join a lonely hearts club.. This bears no resemblance to the true and living God, who has made all things for Himself. He has opened the eyes of the spiritually blind to see Him in all His beauty and glory; He has unstopped the ears of the deaf to hear His gracious words of salvation; He has strengthened the legs of the lame so that they come to Him in repentance and faith, and given life to those dead in sins so that they will live in Him forever. And the proper response to this is not to cavil about free-will but to worship and adore!

I'm done here. I have a life outside this forum and I can't be doing with this sort of argument any longer.

 

Your comments just point out the error of Calvinism. Like many Calvinists you do not want to admit that the bible does not support your view so you attempt to belittle anyone that shows you how failed your theology is. I have pointed out on this board that the root of your theology is the pagan ideas that Augustine brought into the church and which Calvin carried forward. I know others on here have denied these truths but it does not take much time to prove what I have said.

Calvinist's require God to be in total control of all things but balk at the logical outcome of that view which makes God the only cause agent and thus the author of all sin and evil in the world.

Funny how you make ta long speech about what God has done so that man can respond to His invitation but under your Calvinist theology man does not have that ability to do so. Then you add that man is just to worship and adore Him but how truthful would those be coming from the all controlling Calvinist God. It would not be true worship or adoration would it?

The only true worship and adoration can come is from those that freely do so.