The same crew, quantumfaith, winman, DHK, benjamin, and others come out, almost immediately after I post to find some fault in what I've said, to twist somehow to this "so what you're saying is..." putting words in my mouth relentlessly in hopes something will stick. This is truly shameful behavior.
The only thing I have said is that the scriptures have many examples of men who sought God and therefore your interpretation of Romans 3 cannot be correct.
Now, I would argue that when the scriptures say no man doeth good or seeks God it is speaking of doing good 100% of the time and seeking God 100% of the time. If this is the criteria, then yes, no man does good or seeks God.
Where you misunderstand me is that when I say man is capable of doing good, you misrepresent me as saying man can earn salvation. I believe no such thing. I believe all men have sinned and come short of the glory of God. My disagreement is with Total Inability, not salvation through grace. I believe man can do SOME good, and I have shown scripture today that says that. The scriptures say both king Jehoshaphat and king Asa did good things and sought God.
Man can do good, although no man except Jesus did 100% good. To earn heaven you would have to be perfectly righteous, never sinning once. This is true, no man but Jesus has ever done 100% good.
Calvinism goes to the extreme and says unregenerate man can do no good. This is easily proved false, unregenerate man can tell the truth and often do. Telling the truth is not a sin, to say otherwise is absolute nonsense and makes God's commands meaningless and nonsensical. If everything the unregenerate man does is sin, then the law would not have been necessary as our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. God could have simply said we are sinners
regardless of what we do. But that is not what God says. God says to bear false witness is sin, but to tell the truth is good.
Man was not so disabled in the fall that he cannot do good. He can still tell the truth at times. He can be honest at times. And man can believe when he is presented with the gospel.
But no amount of good works can save any man. Even if you were to be good all your life and only sin one single time, that single sin must be paid for, and the wages of sin is death.
It is like our law. You could be an honest citizen all your life, but one day go in and rob a bank. Could you argue to the judge that you have been an honest citizen all your life and have only broken the law this one time and should therefore be found not guilty? Of course not, that is ridiculous. If you robbed the bank and the jury found you guilty, you are a convicted "bank robber" and must pay the penalty of the law. We are not on some sort of scale that balances our good works against our sins.
This is how God's law works as well. If you sin even once, that sin must be paid for and the penalty is death, separation from God forever.
So, I have never argued man can earn salvation, I simply disagree with Total Inability that man is unable to do any good thing. And this thread is more evidence of what I contend, there are many examples of men doing both good and seeking God in the scriptures. Don't take my word for it, look in your own Bible and see if I have misquoted any of the verses I have submitted.
