God is not "making" you believe against your will. He changes your will so that you willingly (voluntarily) believe with 100% of the time.
IF God is CHANGING my will, HOW is that not tampering with my free will?
As you so often say....GOD IS SOVERIEGN.
Right. He can do anything He wishes to.
He's all-powerful.
Omnipotent.
So, if this all powerful being is CHANGING my desire....
Me,,,,a lowly creature,,,,
HOW IS THIS ME
DOING WHAT I WANT TO DO???
If I offer you $1M then I will change your will and you will willingly (voluntarily) take the money. Same idea.
Definition of "make": To cause to exist or happen ... Gods causes (makes) us believe. We do it willingly (voluntarily).
You could give me all the millions you want....
I will NOT be DOING your wish because I WANT TO....
but to get the money.
For an intelligent type, you don't seem to grasp that your example IS FLAWED.
Plus, could you PLEASE STICK TO THE BIBLE AND WHAT IT STATES without injecting all these personalized examples that MEAN NOTHING.
giggle**
Similarly, Romans 11:32 For God has consigned everyone to disobedience so that He may have mercy on everyone.
Everyone willingly (voluntarily) disobeys and the cause is God. You never self-determined that your will would have a sin nature. You were given a will that is naturally disobedient. It is not as if you created your own will out of nothing Nothing is what you once were.
Please exegete the above.
Romans 11:32.
To follow your lead:
We must have the same understanding in mind or speaking is useless.
IOW, I don't read anything about the sin nature up there.
I don't read anything about God being the cause of our sinning....
And wow. Yeah. There's a thought for you.
GOD, who spends most of the NT telling us not to sin...
MAKES US SIN.
!!
And I learned that Christianity is a reasonable religion.
You have not bible verse to back you up. You make God into a puppet when it comes to salvation. You say, "I read the rule book (bible) and it says I can control God to the extent that He must adopt me as His child if I just push the right buttons". You control God; you make Him adopt you because of what you think you did independent of God.
Cute FF.
But I don't have much time and the above is ridiculous and I'm not replying to it.
If you think this is a game of words.....you're sadly mistaken.
Our souls are at stake here.
As with your definition of Free Will you don't go deep enough into the concept to understand it.
It seems to me that everyone understands it but YOU.
You do seem to have a big problem understanding words.
Maybe this is why you have to read all those systematic theology books.
Maybe you just don't understand THE BIBLE??
I agree it is our choice to be part of the Kingdom ... the crux of the disagreement is "what is the cause of our choice".
Your crux FF.
I know the reason:
GOD LOVE ME AND ALLOWS ME TO KNOW HOW TO BECOME SAVED.
God does not love the world according to the reformed....
Man does not have the ability to come to God on his own...
If the NT is correct, then
The CAUSE OF MY CHOICE is my FREE WILL to want to spend eternity with God and to learn from Him how to go about doing this.
Want some verses?
Let's see.
I do believe THE ENTIRE NEW TESTAMENT speaks to his.
You never dive that deeply into the process. Your like a hammer and take credit for the carpentry, never realizing a Carpenter has been causing you to to the carpentry.
Right. I'm such a puppet.
It's just that I don't know it yet.
But didn't you explain that we ARE puppets because God CHANGES us to do what HE wants us to do?
This could be confusing...
Take a deeper dive into the thought process:
God could not foreknow that things would be, unless he had decreed they should be.
God is so dumb.
He only could know what He decrees.
HOW could He, a soverieng and all powerful and all knowing God, EVER know what was going to happen?
IMPOSSIBLE!!!
Whew. I thought YOU believed in a sovereign God.
Maybe it's been ME all along!
Did you learn the above in systematic theology?
Get me one of those there books.
Maybe it could also convince ME that God is just not sovereign enough....
He cannot “look into the future”, so to speak, to find out what will happen for that would be knowledge acquired from learning; God is immutable and omniscient and therefore cannot learn.
What page was the above on?
Furthermore, from nothing nothing comes and since before creation nothing existed, all knowledge must come from God and the source of His knowledge is His wisdom and ability to cause all things. If God's knowledge of his creatures were derived from the creatures by the impression of anything upon him, as there is upon us, he could not know from eternity, because from eternity there was no actual existence of anything but himself; and therefore there could not be any images shot out from anything, because there was not anything in being but God. Stephen Charnock
Predestination or GoodLuck
Huh?
Bill, where are you when we need you?
Craig, that would be.