Acts 7:51
51 “
You stiff-necked people! Your hearts and ears are still uncircumcised. You are just like your ancestors:
You always resist the Holy Spirit!
The proud, self exalting freewill believers, do think that this verse supports The God Hating views that man, by his powerful freewill doth resist the Holy Spirits work of New Birth or Regeneration, but the verse teaches no such abomination. Stephen here recognizes that he is preaching to those who are dead in sin, those who are void of any Life of God in them, for those he knows that have not been born again, like those Peter spoke to in Acts 2. Those who have been born again, they are provided with a circumcised heart and ears by the New Covenant Blessings through Christ's Blood. and that they were not True Jews according to God's Standard which is
Rom 2:28-29
28 For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh:
29
But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly;
and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.
Notice, Stephen calls them uncircumcised heart ! How does one become circumcised of heart ? It was a Promise that God gave to a certain seed !
Deut 30:6
And the LORD thy God
will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live.
So the resisting in the text is not a resistance of New Birth, but a resisting of the word of God, its truth as it is Preached, and reveals the enmity of the heart of the natural man against it, who opposes its sacred doctrines. New Birth takes place in the inward man, and man has no power to resist a New Birth, he is totally passive therein, and its like he had no power to resist his natural birth, which also is according to the purpose of God
Ecclesiastes3:1-2, and man's will is not relevant in either case, but only God's Will
James 1:18
18 He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.NIV
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