Sunday, October 06, 2013

Free For All Q&A - Are some chosen to be saved and some not?

Predestined to Choose

Isn't it good news that we don't have a sadistic Creator that made some "un-chosen" humans for the soul purpose of populating Hell?

All Baptists should listen to this clip.




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9 comments:

SkyePuppy said...

That was great! Made me think, in a good way.

Malott said...

I've never heard that explanation for those very troubling verses.

Hope you're well, Skyepuppy.

SkyePuppy said...

I haven't either.

I'm actually home from work, since last Monday, with a herniated disk that's affecting my leg and foot. No real pain to speak of, but there's some impairment of function that's more alarming than pain. My at-home time has given me some time to do a bit of blogging, though.

I hope all is well with you, Chris.

Christina said...

Not meaning to butt in here (but I'm going to anyway), Skye, is your foot numb/tingly by any chance? Weird shocks in your leg? I'm dealing with something like that and have so far diagnosed myself with a herniated disc/sciatica. Just wondering if we're suffering together!

Oh....and hi Chris!! :)

SkyePuppy said...

Christina,

The top of my foot and front of my calf are numb. Also, when I try to lift the balls of my feet off the floor (stand on my heels), only the right foot comes up. My left foot stays on the floor, with my toes up. The MRI showed that the herniation of my L4/L5 disk is pressing on the L5 nerve. I'm just thankful it's not in the place that makes shooting pain. I had that last year.

Have you had back trouble over the years? Mine started when I was 20, and it has reared its ugly head many times since. If you've got numbness, see if you can get an MRI so your doctor knows what the problem is and can treat it.

I saw the specialist (pain management) today, and they're going to want to give me epidural steroid shot(s) to see if that reduces the disk swelling enough to relieve the pressure on the nerve. I'm in an HMO, so I have to wait for approval first.

Sounds like we're suffering together. All the best to both of us!!!

Malott said...

Any medical updates?

Christina said...

Wow...that sound not fun at all Skye! I can still move everything appropriately, it just feels really strange. Not completely numb, but mostly in my foot with little electrical shocks down the back of my thigh and calf.

I suppose I should get it checked out, but that just seems like a big hassle.

Did the epidural shots help? I'm having trouble picturing being able to walk at all after one of those, since the only time I had an epidural was when Ethan was born and I felt nothing for a few hours afterward even.

Hope you're doing better ASAP!

SkyePuppy said...

Christina,

That sounds like sciatica, the way I had it last year. My chiropractor had me use a TENS unit, a back brace like they use at Home Depot, and his ever-favorite treatment: ice. Not always at the same time. It took several months for the pain to completely go away.

Try a chiropractor, rather than a regular MD. MD's tend to prefer fun things like epidurals and surgery.

My epidurals will be with steroids for their anti-inflammatory effects, not pain-killers, so I should be able to walk afterwards.

I'm still waiting for approval from the HMO. My HR person said that she'd lean on the insurance rep if they drag their feet too long.

Grammy said...

I hold three principles to be incontrovertibly true: 1) God is completely sovereign, 2) God is completely good and 3) that salvation is attained by Jesus’ death on the cross PLUS NOTHING. I think it is possible for those three truths to appear to conflict in ways that I am just not capable of understanding. I think it’s fundamentally interesting and ignored that the fruit of the one tree that was forbidden to Adam and Eve was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are very bad at recognizing good and evil because we are not designed to be good at it. That’s why these things can appear to conflict to us in our limited nature. I once tried to search and list scriptures supporting both free will and election doctrines, but since serious scholars and thinkers throughout the centuries haven’t come to a consensus I decided there has to be merit in both lines of thinking and I was wasting my time. So I take the Psalm 131 approach – “I do not busy myself with great matters, with things too sublime for me.”

As a Catholic I have no problem believing that God raises some people up for very particular purposes according to his perfect will and that they have special relationships with God. I think Abraham, Pharaoh, Moses, Nebuchadnezzar, Mary, Judas, Peter and Paul are good examples. You can say all day long that they all had free wills and could have chosen differently, but I don’t believe for one minute there was ever any possibility that they WOULD have chosen differently. I believe God DID predestine salvation history. I can’t imagine that in His sovereignty he was waiting to conjure up and implement Plan B if Mary or any of the others had said “Uh, thanks but no thanks.” So, if you must say they chose by free will, then it was God who imparted something in them so that their free will would not possibly have led them in a different direction and that’s where it becomes a matter of semantics. I know people have a will, I just don’t know how free it is. All I know is that when I perceive a choice in front of me, I am always right to choose according to what I understand to be God’s will and wisdom and in order to do that I have to be prayerful, studious in his revelations and obedient – which I am not in all my ways.

All of this inevitably brings us to the business of Once Saved, Always Saved vs the possibility of losing salvation. There are so many very compelling scriptures in support of both doctrines and the argument hinges on free will vs election. It seems to me that if you believe in OS-AS you have to believe in election and various denominations often conflict on them. How messy is it to say that once you pray a prayer of salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus you then are an insider and can’t lose your salvation? If that’s the case, you are saying that at first you had the free will to choose, but lose your free will from then on. That’s the only way you can be OS-AS. The video alludes to that. Messy, messy, messy. Of course the fall back argument for OS-AS is that if you appear to accept salvation and then denounce it or behave horribly in spite of it, you were never really saved in the first place. I think that’s probably exactly true, and for that reason I think we have no business going around declaring people saved or condemned EVER. I think that’s what “working out our salvation in fear and trembling” is about. So, I am terribly embarrassed about the Catholic practice of declaring Saints, but I don’t think it’s nearly as embarrassing as the much more common Protestant practice of declaring all who say a prayer as Saints willy-nilly.