Is God free to love anyone He wants?
edit to add: Yes
Barbaric Baptist
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About Me
- WatchingHISstory
- Collierville, Tennessee, United States
- New Years eve 2005 God healed my personality and released me to be the kind of person he wants me to be. This was not a born-again experience because I had become a Christian at age 10 and was baptized in water, trinitarian, as an outward sign of an inward work of grace. During forty seven years I had stumbled through Church experiences seeing the humiliation that God himself endures because of the faulty theological views of Christ's atonement. God is mocked from the pulpit. Preachers have the audacity to obligate God to be a God of love. They rule by their own self-determination. Their behavior reflects their arrogant self-centered theology. While He is a God of incomprehendible love, He is also a God of wrath far greater than the human mind can understand. God is mocking American fundamentalism and it's lukewarm gospel. He is spewing it out of his mouth.
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6 comments:
He is free to love all those He gave to Christ, in The Covenant of Grace.
Dr. Paul W. Foltz
"Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?" Matthew 20:15
God gave free will to Adam and Eve to choose to eat freely of the trees of the garden, with the exception of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
After the fall the objects of free choice were removed. They were expelled from the garden. They surely did die as a result and we have inherited that state of death.
God had said the soul that sins shall die.
God has free will and He himself is the source of free will. Adam and Eve had free will and God was the source. The characteristics of these free wills are different.
God was sovereign and his will issues from this. Adam's will was gifted without sovereignty. God has foreknowledge as to all choices. Adam did not have foreknowledge and was surprised by his own actions. God was not surprised nor caught off guard by Adam's choice. Adam had free will and God has absolute free will.
It is wrong to think that we are robotic creatures of God. The whole tone of scripture is that we are responsible and accountable for our own actions. We have Adam to blame for our nature and ourselves to blame for our conduct and behavior.
Part of this responsibility is to recognize that we as the elect are undeserving of God's grace because of the extent of our sin.
When Adam fell, he died spiritually, and the free will he had became enslaved to his sinful nature. Since then he chooses what his old nature wants--Sin.
His will is renewed in regeneration
''Thy people shall be made willing in the day of thy power'' [Psalm 110;3] so he will embrace Christ in Conversion. Dr. Paul W. Foltz
Paul
"...so he will embrace Christ in Conversion." Dr. Paul W. Foltz
just so we are on the same page (no pun intended) are you saying a person at this point in regeneration could refuse to embrace Christ and not go on to conversion?
My belief is that grace is irresistible through out regeneration. From the very outset of the Holy Spirit's work (Monergism) there is no stopping him in accomplishing salvation.
Now once we are saved we can insult the Spirit of grace who has given us free will and we will be disciplined either in this life to be corrected or the life to come to loose our rewards. We are responsible for good works and can fail in that endeavor yet not loose our salvation.
We are never in a position to say they were never saved in the first place. That is a judgment we can never make. IMHO
Charles,
When God regenerates or awakens the elect sinner, he or she will ultimately be saved.
God's Grace is irresistible.
When He begins a work, He will finish it.
One can be regenerated and ultimately saved years later, or immediately after being regenerated.
There is no set experience, God does as He pleases With Whom he pleases.
We are saved not by our will but by God's -John 1;13.
Dr. Paul W. Foltz
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