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Or Just stick With what the Lord said...umm...my CHOICE is to stick with God almighty, but thanks for the advice 
But if you want to talk about Calvinism, you must know Calvinism, sorry.
You can start there:
http://christianchat.com/bible-disc...ding-misconceptions-about-reformed-faith.html
P
Ok I am not a Calvinist but I do not see free will like some do. I think free is the deception of the enemy.
Free will in my way of thinking is a 3rd option. Which the serpent introduces in genesis.
By design God shows 2 only life or death. Hell or heaven. Anyone choosing death or hell is out of there mind.
Freewill to me is saying I don't want to serve God, I dint want to die but I do want to...bla bla bla.
Which is exactly what Satan introduced (be like God) which I the third option.
If you don't believe in God does that make God non existent? No it doesn't.
Free will in my way of thinking is a 3rd option. Which the serpent introduces in genesis.
By design God shows 2 only life or death. Hell or heaven. Anyone choosing death or hell is out of there mind.
Freewill to me is saying I don't want to serve God, I dint want to die but I do want to...bla bla bla.
Which is exactly what Satan introduced (be like God) which I the third option.
If you don't believe in God does that make God non existent? No it doesn't.
D
What did Jesus call us?
Child of God.
Servant of God.
The Bride.
Now what did that mean back in those days?
What child chooses his/her parents?
What servant chooses his/her master? (Servants back then were slaves, not butlers or maids that chose who they would serve.)
What bride chooses her husband? (In those days, marriages were set up, and the bride married whoever she was told to marry.)
Did that mean no child, no servant, and no bride had choice? Of course not. It meant they didn't have that choice. I suppose the choice remained to either do as they were told, run away, or kill themselves, but they just got the absolute best father in the universe, the absolute best master in the universe, and the absolute best husband in the universe, so who would make those last two choices?
Child of God.
Servant of God.
The Bride.
Now what did that mean back in those days?
What child chooses his/her parents?
What servant chooses his/her master? (Servants back then were slaves, not butlers or maids that chose who they would serve.)
What bride chooses her husband? (In those days, marriages were set up, and the bride married whoever she was told to marry.)
Did that mean no child, no servant, and no bride had choice? Of course not. It meant they didn't have that choice. I suppose the choice remained to either do as they were told, run away, or kill themselves, but they just got the absolute best father in the universe, the absolute best master in the universe, and the absolute best husband in the universe, so who would make those last two choices?
D
And in context,[FONT="]8 Accordingly, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, 9 yet for love's sake I prefer to appeal to you—I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus— 10 I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment. 11 (Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.) 12 I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. 13 I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel,14 but I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own accord. 15 For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever,16 no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother—especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.[/FONT]
[FONT="]17 So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. 18 If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. 19 I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it—to say nothing of your owing me even your own self. 20 Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord. Refresh my heart in Christ.[/FONT]
[FONT="]21 Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say. 22 At the same time, prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that through your prayers I will be graciously given to you.
[/FONT]
So, he made clear he wanted them to choose to receive Onesimus back, not as a bondservant, but as a brother. Nice game taking partial sentence out of context. It doesn't prove free will as part of the gospel.
[FONT="]17 So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. 18 If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. 19 I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it—to say nothing of your owing me even your own self. 20 Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord. Refresh my heart in Christ.[/FONT]
[FONT="]21 Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say. 22 At the same time, prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that through your prayers I will be graciously given to you.
[/FONT]
So, he made clear he wanted them to choose to receive Onesimus back, not as a bondservant, but as a brother. Nice game taking partial sentence out of context. It doesn't prove free will as part of the gospel.
D
We did have free choice. We chose to sin. We chose to hide in the darkness to keep our sin. (John 3:18-20.) All choice there.
And, no free will means if we will it, we do it. Will yourself to fly to the moon. Will yourself to swim through the Mariana Trench. For that matter, will yourself to have that life you wanted when you were 8. Why can't you do any of that? Because your will is governed by your nature.
And, no free will means if we will it, we do it. Will yourself to fly to the moon. Will yourself to swim through the Mariana Trench. For that matter, will yourself to have that life you wanted when you were 8. Why can't you do any of that? Because your will is governed by your nature.
F
"If God is not love but only knowledge, then it is difficult or impossible to see how human free will and divine predestination can both be true. But if God is love, there is a way.
Freedom and predestination is one of the most frequently asked questions among my students—partly because of modern man's great concern for freedom, but also, I think, for the largely unconscious reason that we intuitively know both these things must be true because they are the warp and woof of every good story. If a story has no plot, no destiny—if its events are haphazard and arbitrary—it is not a great story.
Every good story has a sense of destiny, of fittingness as if it were written by God. But every story also leaves its characters free. Lesser writers may jimmy and force their characters into molds, but the greater the writer the more clearly the reader sees that his characters are real people and not just mental concepts. The more nearly the characters have a life of their own and seem to leap off the page into real life, the greater a writer we have. God, of course, is the greatest writer of all. Since human life is his story, it must have both destiny and freedom.
Let's look first at the side called destiny. Predestination is a misleading word, I think, for it concedes too much to our temporal way of thinking. God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything. God does not look down rows of dominoes or into crystal balls. He does not have to wait for anything. Nor does he wonder what will happen. Nothing is uncertain to him, as the future is uncertain to us. There is not predestination but destination, not predestiny but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity.
But our free will follows from the divine love. To love someone is to make them free. To enslave them is always a defect of love.
Now since divine love is God's very essence, while omniscience and omnipotence are only attributes of that essence, therefore if one of these two truths had to come first—in the sense of being more primordial and non-negotiable than the other—it would have to be freedom.
I do not think either truth needs to be compromised. I think we can do as much justice to the sovereignty of God as a Calvinist and as much justice to the free will of man as a Baptist. Yet it would not compromise the very essence of God to deny predestination. Arminianism, the theological viewpoint that denies predestination and emphasizes the role of man's free will in receiving grace from God, may be wrong. But it is wrong at a relatively technical, theoretical level. Denying human free will, on the other hand, would cut out something immediately essential to the Christian life: personal responsibility. If I am a robot, even a divinely programmed robot, my life no longer has the drama of real choice and turns into a formula, the unrolling of a pre-written script. God loves me too much to allow that. He would sooner compromise his power than my freedom.
Actually, he does neither. It is precisely his power that gives me my freedom. Aquinas reconciles freedom with predestination by saying that God's love is so powerful that he not only gets what he wants but he also gets it in the way that he wants. Not only is everything done that God wills to be done, but it is also done in the way he wants it to be done. It happens without freedom in the case of natural things like falling rain and freely in the case of human choices. A power a little less than total may get what it wants without getting it in the way that it wants it. But omnipotence gets both. And the way omnipotence wants human acts done is freely.
In other words, freedom and predestination are two sides of one coin. The omnipotent author chose to write a story about free human beings, not just trees or machines. That means we are really free. We are free precisely because God is all-powerful."
Peter Kreeft, Ph.D.
Freedom and predestination is one of the most frequently asked questions among my students—partly because of modern man's great concern for freedom, but also, I think, for the largely unconscious reason that we intuitively know both these things must be true because they are the warp and woof of every good story. If a story has no plot, no destiny—if its events are haphazard and arbitrary—it is not a great story.
Every good story has a sense of destiny, of fittingness as if it were written by God. But every story also leaves its characters free. Lesser writers may jimmy and force their characters into molds, but the greater the writer the more clearly the reader sees that his characters are real people and not just mental concepts. The more nearly the characters have a life of their own and seem to leap off the page into real life, the greater a writer we have. God, of course, is the greatest writer of all. Since human life is his story, it must have both destiny and freedom.
Let's look first at the side called destiny. Predestination is a misleading word, I think, for it concedes too much to our temporal way of thinking. God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything. God does not look down rows of dominoes or into crystal balls. He does not have to wait for anything. Nor does he wonder what will happen. Nothing is uncertain to him, as the future is uncertain to us. There is not predestination but destination, not predestiny but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity.
But our free will follows from the divine love. To love someone is to make them free. To enslave them is always a defect of love.
Now since divine love is God's very essence, while omniscience and omnipotence are only attributes of that essence, therefore if one of these two truths had to come first—in the sense of being more primordial and non-negotiable than the other—it would have to be freedom.
I do not think either truth needs to be compromised. I think we can do as much justice to the sovereignty of God as a Calvinist and as much justice to the free will of man as a Baptist. Yet it would not compromise the very essence of God to deny predestination. Arminianism, the theological viewpoint that denies predestination and emphasizes the role of man's free will in receiving grace from God, may be wrong. But it is wrong at a relatively technical, theoretical level. Denying human free will, on the other hand, would cut out something immediately essential to the Christian life: personal responsibility. If I am a robot, even a divinely programmed robot, my life no longer has the drama of real choice and turns into a formula, the unrolling of a pre-written script. God loves me too much to allow that. He would sooner compromise his power than my freedom.
Actually, he does neither. It is precisely his power that gives me my freedom. Aquinas reconciles freedom with predestination by saying that God's love is so powerful that he not only gets what he wants but he also gets it in the way that he wants. Not only is everything done that God wills to be done, but it is also done in the way he wants it to be done. It happens without freedom in the case of natural things like falling rain and freely in the case of human choices. A power a little less than total may get what it wants without getting it in the way that it wants it. But omnipotence gets both. And the way omnipotence wants human acts done is freely.
In other words, freedom and predestination are two sides of one coin. The omnipotent author chose to write a story about free human beings, not just trees or machines. That means we are really free. We are free precisely because God is all-powerful."
Peter Kreeft, Ph.D.
D
Let me fix that for you:
"Of course God created us with the ability to chose freely whaty we believe and who we will trust.."
John 3:[FONT="]18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.
And, to be clear. I agree with you. God does create us with the ability to choose freely. And we do choose freely. And we choose the darkness each and every time, just like Romans 1-7 says.
And then he fixes that for his chosen.
John 3:21 [/FONT] [FONT="]But whoever [/FONT][FONT="][/FONT][FONT="]does what is true [/FONT][FONT="][/FONT][FONT="]comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.[/FONT]
"Of course God created us with the ability to chose freely whaty we believe and who we will trust.."
John 3:[FONT="]18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.[/FONT][FONT="] [/FONT][FONT="]20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.
And, to be clear. I agree with you. God does create us with the ability to choose freely. And we do choose freely. And we choose the darkness each and every time, just like Romans 1-7 says.
And then he fixes that for his chosen.
John 3:21 [/FONT] [FONT="]But whoever [/FONT][FONT="][/FONT][FONT="]does what is true [/FONT][FONT="][/FONT][FONT="]comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.[/FONT]
K
It wouldn't have matter what I opened with,it was still going to be dismissed,that is the BDF. I was opening the subject and the first thing people demanded a def. of "free will" and I know as soon as I did I would be called Arminian,or however you spell it and people will walk away saying they won the debate. So before we jumped into all that I wanted to use some quotes and videos to start a convo. Bible verses mean nothing in the BDF and they'll be discounted just as quickly.
[FONT="]There are serious problems with the dogma of “theistic determination,” i.e., the notion that God orchestrates the choices we humans make.[/FONT]
[FONT="]First, there is the difficulty this theory creates for the biblical affirmation of the goodness of God (Romans 2:4). Jehovah is a being of absolute holiness (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8), thus he is too “pure” to tolerate evil (Habakkuk 1:13). Any dogma, therefore, that casts a reflection upon the goodness of the Creator is corrupt. One Calvinist argues: “f a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the will of God that he should do it” (Clark, 1961, 221). What conclusion necessarily follows from that statement? Whose fault is it when men do wrong? Can there even be any “wrong,” if there is no free will? How can God possibly condemn human beings for evil (e.g., murder, adultery, etc.) if he himself “determines the choices” they make? This ideology makes no sense.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Second, the denial of human free will is in conflict with multiple biblical texts of clearest import.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Third, beyond explicit statements of human free will, numerous texts logically imply both the ability and the urgency of man to exercise his personal will power in submitting to divine authority through obedience. Note:[/FONT]
[h=2]Biblical Determinism[/h][FONT="]There is a legitimate biblical “determinism,” and it stands a universe apart from the perverted ideas surveyed above. The term “determinate” translates the Greek word, horizo (8x NT), meaning “to set a boundary.” It is used in connection with Christ in the following senses.[/FONT]
the Christian Courier
ps. the article mentions Calvinists,I understand not all Calvinists would agree with the comment sited. [/FONT]
[FONT="]There are serious problems with the dogma of “theistic determination,” i.e., the notion that God orchestrates the choices we humans make.[/FONT]
[FONT="]First, there is the difficulty this theory creates for the biblical affirmation of the goodness of God (Romans 2:4). Jehovah is a being of absolute holiness (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8), thus he is too “pure” to tolerate evil (Habakkuk 1:13). Any dogma, therefore, that casts a reflection upon the goodness of the Creator is corrupt. One Calvinist argues: “f a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the will of God that he should do it” (Clark, 1961, 221). What conclusion necessarily follows from that statement? Whose fault is it when men do wrong? Can there even be any “wrong,” if there is no free will? How can God possibly condemn human beings for evil (e.g., murder, adultery, etc.) if he himself “determines the choices” they make? This ideology makes no sense.[/FONT]
[FONT="]Second, the denial of human free will is in conflict with multiple biblical texts of clearest import.[/FONT]
- Christ personified Jerusalem as one who had persecuted the Lord’s prophets. He had sought to rescue them from a coming destruction, but they “would not” (Matthew 23:37). They did not will to change their lives!
- In one of his parables, Christ pictured rebellious sinners as a “prodigal son,” yet who eventually declared: “I will arise and go to my father ... I will say ... I have sinned” (Luke 15:18). If man is void of free will, this illustration is woefully misleading.
- In John’s Gospel Jesus declared that the OT Scriptures pointed the way to him; but, he cautioned, “you will not come to me that you may have life” (5:40). Does language have meaning?
- He later announced that if anyone “wills” to obey his teaching, he can know whether his message is authentic or not (7:17).
- The NT concludes with this gracious invitation: “[H]e that is thirsty, let him come; he that will, let him take of the water of life freely” (Revelation 22:17).
[FONT="]Third, beyond explicit statements of human free will, numerous texts logically imply both the ability and the urgency of man to exercise his personal will power in submitting to divine authority through obedience. Note:[/FONT]
- Every command from God implies both the ability and necessity for the recipient to submit to the divine injunction. It is nonsense to suggest that the Lord commands a duty to which the subject cannot possibly yield.
- The Bible overflows with warnings for those who neglect to “give earnest heed” to divine obedience (Hebrews 2:1ff). Why caution a person against doing what he could not do even if he so wished?
- If man cannot exercise his will in obeying (or disobeying) the Creator, why should he ever feel a sense of guilt—as did Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:7-8), Judas and Pilate (Matthew 27:4, 24), or Paul (1 Timothy 1:13)?
- And what shall be said of the numberless texts that contain either “curses” or “blessings” in response to human activity (cf. Deuteronomy 27:12-13), if indeed a man cannot “incline himself either to good or evil,” as Calvin alleged (op. cit., 1.229).
[h=2]Biblical Determinism[/h][FONT="]There is a legitimate biblical “determinism,” and it stands a universe apart from the perverted ideas surveyed above. The term “determinate” translates the Greek word, horizo (8x NT), meaning “to set a boundary.” It is used in connection with Christ in the following senses.[/FONT]
- In the eternal counsel of God, the death of Jesus as the atonement for sin was a divine “determinate” (Acts 2:23; cf. Luke 22:22).
- By his resurrection from the dead, Jesus was “declared” (horizo), i.e., determined to be God’s Son in a uniquely powerful way (Romans 1:4). # God’s sovereignty over the nations of the world is emphasized in that he has “determined” the duration of their supremacy and the limitation of their dominion (Acts 17:26).
- Salvation from sin is “limited” (KJV) or “defined” (ASV; horizo – Hebrews 4:7) by a certain (symbolic) “day.” It is the “Today” when a person chooses to “hear his voice,” “hardens not” his heart, and “obeys” the conditions of salvation (as implied by “disobedience” v. 6b). The Lord has “determined” to save all who choose to do his will (Revelation 22:17).
- God has appointed a certain day on which he will judge the world in righteousness, and he has “ordained” (horizo) that the judgment will be rendered by his Son (Acts 17:31b; cf. 10:42), the guarantee of which was the Savior’s resurrection.
the Christian Courier
ps. the article mentions Calvinists,I understand not all Calvinists would agree with the comment sited. [/FONT]