I remember the good old days when God meant what he said in Eph 2,
The word of God shows me that the starting point IS faith since you CANNOT please God without faith. SO ALL I do is turn to God for forgiveness because of what he has done for me in Jesus Christ and he freely saves me by his finished work in dying on the cross for my sins. I DO NOT see a bunch of “graces” in the word of God BUT I do in Calvinism.
“8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:
9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.”
He said that before the reformed church comes along and gives us more graces to confuse us. NOW they have in the paragraph above “prevenient grace, the justifying grace is called irresistible grace”. I know that Satan is the author of confusion and this is getting confusing and we just started. So I looked up just the basic definition of grace which is: “approval or kindness, especially (in the Christian religion) that is freely given by God to all humans:” NOW that definition lines up with the word of God all through it without NEEDING any more graces.
II Corith 8:9
9 For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.
I see scriptures like the one above all through the epistles and ALL they are talking about is God’s unmerited favor on a world that rejected him SO God in his mercy took the first steps in bringing mankind back to himself and that is God’s grace in action. We did NOT deserve God’s mercy or love but God bestowed it on all because God so loved this whole stinking world that he came in human flesh to free us.
Romans 9:19-21
"19 Thou wilt say then unto me, (1)Why doth he yet find fault? (2)For who hath resisted his will?
20 (3)Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? (4)Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?
21 (5)Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"
COMMENT:
(1)Because of sin in our lives
I dealt with this in a pamphlet I wrote on Romans 9 so I clipped the part above from that pamphlet. I said the above BUT my focus was on the whole chapter SO I will talk about resisting his will MORE here.
Read Acts 5 dealing with Ananias and Sapphira his wife and it is easy to see that they resisted God’s will and they were killed for it OR in II Samuel 11,12 tells us about David and Bathsheba’s sexual encounter since he was having sex with another man’s wife and later having her husband killed so he would not find out about what David did with his wife while he was in battle.
SO did David, Bathsheba, Ananias and Sapphira resist God’ s will OR were they doing God’s will? Many Calvinists have told me that God is sovereign so he is the one who had Ananias and Sapphira lie about the price of land they sold BUT by reading Acts 5 in the bible, I see that Satan filled their hearts to lie to the Holy Ghost so Calvinists attribute to God what Satan has done. SAD!
Let’s look again at David and Bathsheba. By reading II Sam. 11,12. I see that David tried different ways to get Uriah to sleep with his wife so Uriah would think that he got his wife pregnant and NOT someone else but he would not since he figured that he should be out in the war zone with the others and NOT at home having a good time with his wife while they were dying fighting for the king. So David took his last resort and had Uriah killed by putting him on the front lines of the battle.
God sent a prophet to David to tell him that the baby that Bathsheba was pregnant with would die because of his evil ways and so it was BECAUSE David resisted God’s will and grace. David is punished for having Uriah killed and committing adultery with his wife by having the baby killed that David got Bathsheba pregnant with. SO if God sovereignly did it then he is the murderer BUT God cannot sin so it wasn’t him.
SO we see from these two examples that God’s will can be resisted and has been many, many times in the word of God and it everyday life. OR as many Calvinists I have talked with or debated say that God is the one who was in control of everything that the people did. If that is true then God is the author of sin, there is not any way around it UNLESS you play mental gymnastics with yourself.
God puts all kinds of situations in our lives and lets us see how we would behave or act, either righteously or in an evil manner. Both of the situations above they resisted God’s grace, mercy and will by their acts of defiance.
(2)Many do but are never left unaffected or unharmed
(3)I wonder that too
(4)We as the ones that He formed shouldn't but we do at times
(5)Yes, read about King David and also John the Baptist.
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