7871	Forums / Theology Forum / Catholic Apologists	on: February 09, 2007, 04:30:01 PM
And that's the rub. God decreed that David would have an affair with Bathsheba and conspire to have her husband murdered. Sounds like it's God's fault, so why did God have David punished? Remember the original movie M*A*S*H? Frank tells Major Hot Lips that God brought them together that night. She responds, \"His will be done!\", and they proceed into the fires of passion. So with Paul's hypothetical questioner you must ask, \"Then why does He still complain? For who resists His will?\" Paul's answer of \"Oh, just shut up!\" doesn't cut it. God passively decreed that every thing that comes to pass. If God did not decree the sin then He could not use the sin for His glory. Gods hands would be tied. But the same passage you quoted from Paul in Rom. 9 also says that God used Pharaohs life to bring about His glory. Why? because God does what ever pleases Him, Who can resist His will? In Davids life Gods discipline was an act of love otherwise David would not be His child. God used the sin of adultery to bring about Davids growth and also so David would be able to pin the greatest confession that ever was recorded in history. Without davids sin we probably would not had Psalm 51. This psalm is almost like the water on the wicked witch to the devil. This Psalm is absolutely the medicine for the worst of sinners, with the most desperate circumstances, with the most despicable reputation. This Psalm of confession helps one to see that sin has been dealt a final blow, and that the saint is completely accepted before the throne of grace as a sinner. This Psalm is the Holy Spirits witnessing tool, to convince a sinner that all of the promises are yea and amen. In this Psalm we have the ultimate fellowship with the Father in forgiveness, by the crys, the confession, the doctrine of sin, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and the absolution to the bottom of ones soul. It is a cleansing creed!
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7872	Forums / Main Forum / Large Crowds Were Traveling With Jesus	on: February 09, 2007, 12:01:30 PM
Thanks again for some great threads, wbennet, gman, ml, willis, an lm. Im glad that we do not all agree because we would all be in heaven rite now. But seriously, The freedom of mind and heart only come when we are totally dependent on Him. He is all in all. And unless we see that His mind offers us another dimension of reality. What dependence we have on Him is how we submit to the ways of God as they are what He desires to transpire in our finite realm. Unless we see that Gods design in the universe is what ever comes to pass we will never totally give over our minds to His mind. We will have some kind of independence in our thought life and we will not fully embrace the other dimension  of life. 7877  Forums / Theology Forum / Catholic Apologists on: February 09, 2007, 05:00:47 AM So whether we have free will or not, the Bible is adamant that we do have freedom to choose; therefore, if God chooses us, we can say Yes or No. Which simply is the clear indicator that every time we sin we are resisting God's grace, whether in New Covenant relationship or not.   Choice has a cause, it really is not inbetween yes and no. The cause is our desire . Its either yes or no at each object. So we really do not have the same veiw of freedom of choice. We sin because we are sinners.   Reply Quote Notify 7878  Forums / Theology Forum / Catholic Apologists on: February 09, 2007, 04:51:44 AM Consider a simple example: The Lord tells Isaiah to go to King Hezekiah and get his house in order because he is sick unto death. Isaiah exits Stage Left. Hezekiah cries out to the Lord, reminding Him that he has been totally faithful. God sends Isaiah back to tell him He is adding 15 more years to his life. . .Problem #1: If God foreknew Hez (who had done no wrong), then He had Isaiah lie to Hez. Indeed, the Lord, foreknowledeable, had also lied to Hez. Don't give me that garbage about God's ways being inscrutable and we won't know the reason till we get to heaven. The Scriptures don't say that and it is nothing but typical theological speculation. Further it becomes Problem #2 in that this god now closely resembles the Greek and Roman gods who were whimsical and totally unpredictable, to say the least; but more appropriately, such human postulating is chimerical -- a product of our fertile imaginations and completely out of accord with this and other biblical accounts. Now hold on here. Here chicky,chicky,chicky, The scripture says that God works all things for His purpose. He works directly as well as through the means, or second causes. So God worked through Hezekiahs prayers , in other words He ordained from eternity that Hezekiah would pray , and He answered Hezekiahs prayers as well in His decreitive will. If you look at mans choice as a long line then each movement would be decreed by God, even tho man had a free choice. History is all of mens choices bringing about a stated effect within the order of the universe. God holds all things together. God also has a disposition. He loves all men even tho He has not chosen all men, otherwise all men would come.  God is also longsuffering in His disposition yet He never changes in His decretive purposes. Reply Quote Notify 7879  Forums / Theology Forum / Catholic Apologists on: February 08, 2007, 03:20:37 PM Quote Quote God has chosen to give salvation to some men while choosing others to go to hell, before the foundation of the world. I sure hope for your sake that you are in the first group. How can you really know for sure? In the end we disagree on the matter of timing rather than the matter of choice. Since youall believe that in the judgement Christ will send a man to hell. So you do believe even tho a man knows he deserves hell at the judgement yet his own choice to go there would be different than were he is sent by Christ. Reply Quote Notify 7880  Forums / Main Forum / Large Crowds Were Traveling With Jesus on: February 08, 2007, 02:13:30 PM Quote MBG, That was extremely lucid and expressive. Did you write that?? Only paraphrasing the experience that i have had as a result of much meditation in the Psalms. As i write these biblical doctrines and concepts come to mind in my experience. Thanks ,Brother. Reply Quote Notify 7881  Forums / Theology Forum / Catholic Apologists on: February 08, 2007, 01:54:59 PM The catholics are semi plagenist. They believe in justification by faith, but they beleive that it is infused, and we beleive that it is imputed. The catholics see that he original infusion of justification by faith must be replenish by an ongoing participation of the sacriments and the mass. They believe that good works cause a new infusion of justification. Arminist believe that justification by faith as imputed, but a persons faith is the cause of the justification.  So they believe that the faith is by grace but the person has a self determined will and has the ability to choose whether to believe or not to believe.There is confusion in this position as to what the definition of grace which is unmerited favor because in arminism man is given an ability to believe which grace does not allow. We believe that there is nothing in man that can obtain salvation. It is all of grace, even the believing. We reject self determined will, we say that it is no will at all, it has no cause. We belive that you must be regenerated before you can believe. By regeneration we believe that man is dead in sins and trespasses, that a dead man cannot respond to the gospel, a dead man has not spiritual ability. We believe that a dead man must be made alive by and act of God in giving new life to the soul. This new priniciple is an application to the mind of divine knowlege, so that once a man knows who Christ is then He can rely apoun Him completely. We believe that the other side of faith , in obeying the gospel is an act of God in which God destroys the old will and gives a man a new will, causing a man to walk in His ways. We believe in soveriengn grace .God has chosen to give salvation to some men while choosing others to go to hell, before the foundation of the world.   God is fully present in every space in the universe. And what He has designed is fully present before our eyes in creation. We can see the mind of God by our spiritual eyes. In this dimension we experience a freedom because we are rejoicing in Him, as ever present in His design , what we see with our physical eyes. And yet His dimension goes far more than just His design in creation. He has designed and thought out whatever comes to pass in our lives.  So that His love is better than our lives. We are wrapped up in God in what He has designed by His thought of reality, and He is in us filling us with all that we could possibly hold. We could not hold the mysteries of Gods design. He is rite there responding to every intent of our hearts because He has thought before we think. He is there telling us when we sin, i will remember your sin no more. He is there when everyone turns their backs on us thinking in us that he remembers His love and His faithfulness to His people. He is intercepting the grief caused by our thoughts with His pre ordained design in the glory of our seeing Christ in a glass, and being changed by that glory. What He thought in eternity has been designed in our thoughts to bring us back from grief to rejoicing by the power of His thoughts interwoven with our thoughts to bring us to a rejoicing beyond our design. This joy far outweighs earthly happiness. Yes this is the dimension we are to live in. Do you think with your mind He has given in the new birth, do you see with the spiritual eyes, do you hear with the spiritual ears, to you feel with the spiritual sense? He is the author of all things! 7884  Forums / Main Forum / Humility on: February 07, 2007, 02:17:53 PM The spirit of humility is really the opposite of the spirit of independence. From our birth we have a really strong desire to think for ourselves, that is to have a knowledge of truth outside the paradigm of scripture. We do not think thoughts after God, but we think thoughts that are of a self gratifying nature. These thoughts really create their own reality. What happens is when we are meditating in this domain, we are in danger of a very earthy mindset. This mindset creates a life of fulfillment of our flesh, and creates an imagined world of self fulfillment. It is this natural process that is at rest in our thought life. Because of our fallen state we are blind in our thinking to any divine knowledge. The knowledge we possess is very limited in its scope. We only think in terms of fulfillment of our lust by a learned process that comes from our imagination of what is true. That is why our best thoughts are very limited because they only go as far as our imagination. And if you can accumulate enough human experiences so that the imagination is a complex maze of idol musings, then your only going to make a mindset a complete self aggrandizement. Once our minds are exposed to divine light, then we begin to see the real things. We were never created to have independent thoughts. We were never created to have independent solutions to problems. We were never created to solve things with our corrupted thinking. We were created to be taught how to think as well as what to think by a dependence on God at all times.By getting into the divine revelation we begin to have a spirit of humility. Our response in rejoicing  in divine knowledge is the natural way to fashion  a mind with a spirit of humility. Our minds should be saturated with the word of God so that the natural response should be a path way for further illumination. We are to meditate night and day, calling out to our Lord , nite and day. We are to respond to His word in the nature that His word comes to us. It is of a divine nature, and we are to rejoice in that divinity as if it were the most expensive jewelry of knowledge that we could ever possess. In  responding in like nature we begin to get our minds off of the earthly things and onto the eternal things. We begin to think correctly. In the mindset of eternal musing we develop a mind of humility. Because we begin to see ourselves in the mirror of His word and seeing ourselves as belonging to Christ we are seeing the face of Christ. We begin to see our real self in this glory to glory transformation of our minds. The more we respond to this illumination of Christ the more we will begin to think correctly and think humbly.  7888  Forums / Theology Forum / Catholic Apologists on: February 06, 2007, 04:18:20 PM Our present circumstances have very much to do with our views of the spirit of revival and our views of ourselves. We live in a day of confusion, were we are confronted with a spirit of treachery. How much of our present personal suffering is a result of strong delusions that come with this confusion. The diluted gospel has created a society of men who love the sentimental aspects of worship rather than the deep joy and excitement of new converts, and a deep focus on the power of God, in the face of Christ , and the glory of God falling on a people through the power of the Holy Spirit. In the  real presence of the Holy Spirit , He creates a thirst for the pure meat of the word of God, preached in power by an unfiltered message of justification by faith by grace alone. These truths preached with conviction and in a spirit of desperation bring a response of joy and praising that are only in God alone and not in man. The constant feeding in this kind of atmosphere of deep rejoicing makes the sentiment disappear. Then mens hearts are so moved to pray in the Spirit that they are lost in wonder and grace. These desires stir the sparks that undiluted mens minds. Rite now we are living on the foot hills of historical experience. There is so much delusion. Thank God for the books that come out of these times of revivals! In these books is the spirit of revival.The spirit of revival is anti sentimental. When the Holy Spirit comes in power He illuminates a persons mind in reading an Edwards etc, and the Holy Spirit witnesses with our spirits as if the writings were in the present day. We actually learn by experience the difference between sentimentalism and spiritual awakening. The Holy Spirit moved in the excitement of these men and in reading these men we are again revived from our state of lethargy. When we are revived we begin to love the truth. We begin to fellowship so much with the Trinity through the Spirit that we must get some physical rest from the experience so that we can again be over come by that Spirit. Once we begin to experience the Holy Spirits presence we begin to loose our sense of the religion of this age. We begin to morn over the state of people in this age. We begin to long for the revived unity that once spread across this country. Oh , in the illumination of that experience we live in a peace that passes all understanding. It really is not the present state of things that are going to delude us, it is what we experience as a result of seeing the glory of God in the face of Christ that will keep us from being deluded. In these books the Holy Spirit once again comes upon us so that we are brought back to the spirit of revival and our present day delusion is removed from our eyes.     7892  Forums / Theology Forum / Freedom Of The Will Jonathan Edwards on: February 05, 2007, 10:55:54 AM Quote Quote Unless God is free to act as He pleases so that He is the cause of whatever comes to pass then any other reasoning would put something else as the cause and thus God would not be free to act as He pleases. Then God would not be God, and the cause paradigm would be left up to what man thinks God is. I'm not following your reasoning on this.  One, God is free to act or not act as He pleases, and He is free to permit Man to be a cause of some effect if it so pleases him.  Two, if you're worried about God's reputation, as Creator of Man He is still "First Cause".  Is this what you mean by "passive cause"?  And Three, if you assign all effects to God's causing, you're making God the author of sin and originator of evil.     Everybody move back a couple hundred meters in case lightning strikes. One, God is free to act or not act as He pleases, and He is free to permit Man to be a cause of some effect if it so pleases him.  Two, if you're worried about God's reputation, as Creator of Man He is still \"First Cause\".  God choosing not to act, is no choice at all. The effect of choice points to the cause of choice. The choice is cause by the motive or the desire. If there is no effect then the desire does not exist. For God to choose to allow me to be in between two equal desires is the same as to say that God desires that i have no desire. Which is to say that God does not act at all in salvation. To give me the ability to have a desire to be saved that comes apart from Gods desire that i be saved is to say that God has no purpose in my desire to be saved. If i choose for myself to be saved then my my prior choice would determine my future choice. But what causes my first choice? Here is where we are today as a result of thinking that we have some kind of ability apart from Gods purpose. There is no one righteous, no not one, there is no one who seeks God. There is no one who has that ability. There is no one who has that strength. There is no one how has  that possibility. It is impossible for us to be the cause of salvation or to work out our salvation in our own purpose. Those who have not come to this truth are not going to call on God night and day. If there are more people who think that they are able then there will be more people who do not call on God. When we pray, we acknowledge that our salvation does not belong to us. We acknowledge that it was Gods power to save that we received a gift so that instead of being flattered we are always rejoicing in His wonders, in His miracle. If we understand that God is able and we are not, then our desire for His glory will be totally dependent on His work on our behalf. There will be no work done by us by our own ability. All the work will be done as a result of Gods power in our lives. We will begin to see that unless God does a work we will only be left powerless and defenseless. Because we depend on God to be our defense. There is no proposition that can be proposed apart Gods absolute declared word in every work in our lives.It is not in your selling books, its not in your displayed life in witnessing, its not in your going to church, its not in your mega ministry, its not in your distribution of books, its not in your prayers, its not in you ability to understand theology, its not in your ability to have a cushion in your later years, its not in the strength of government, its not in suffering, its not in your hatred, its not in your philanthropy, its not in your buildings, its not in your houses, its not in relationships, its not in your ministries, its being reduced to see that its not our salvation, its Gods. We are unable.   Reply Quote Notify 7893  Forums / Theology Forum / "scripture Alone " Not Biblical on: February 05, 2007, 09:38:12 AM Psalm 1.  How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, Nor stand in the path of sinners, Nor sit in the seat of scoffers! 2.  But his delight is in the law of the LORD, And in His law he meditates day and night. 3.  He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, Which yields its fruit in its season And its leaf does not wither; And in whatever he does, he prospers. 4.  The wicked are not so, But they are like chaff which the wind drives away. 5.  Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, Nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. 6.  For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, But the way of the wicked will perish. Well here the scripture and its propositions are against the opinions of men. The scripture is more than just an apologetic voice. It is the very words of God so that anyone who meditates on it will think thoughts after God. So that the scripture and the Spirit are sole agents of understanding truth in all of life, and are the only way to salvation. Without scripture man is lost in his worthless state. Any one who places scripture equal with any other proposition, shows that the idea is only from their own minds and is not revealed revelation. And so it is from their imaginations and is chaff.