“The vast majority of those of us firmly combating cultural homosexualization hold no personal animosity whatsoever toward individual homosexuals. In many cases, they are acquaintances and even friends and colleagues. We treat them with the greatest respect and dignity, as fellow humans created in God’s image.”
Andrew Sandlin
Excerpt; Facebook post
Sandlin styles himself a cultural warrior reconstructionist. He views himself as someone seeking reformation along Biblical lines but here we see the lie given to that self understanding as he seeks to treat the wound lightly. Sandlin here is being nicer than God.
A few observations,
1.) Sandlin’s niceties towards individual sodomites goes a long way towards proving that Sandlin and our larger culture has already accepted sodomy as a way of life. I challenge anyone to replace the word “homosexuals” above with the word “necrophiliacs,” or “bestialics.” Would Andrew really have necrophiliac and bestialics over for tea and crumpets? Would Andrew really share with them a beer and a brat while taking in a ball-game? Would he really own those who make love to the dead and to farm animals as friends and colleagues? If not then why does Sandlin desire to own men who bed other men as friends and colleagues? Do you see Sandlin’s gross incongruity?
2.) Treating these people as those who share with us the “Imago Dei” is not to ignore their own desire to rip off the Imago Dei by exchanging natural affections for un-natural affections. Indeed, to treat them as Sandlin suggests is to show them hatred of the greatest intensity. These people need to be told, for the sake of their own souls, to repent. If that can be done over tea and crumpets then fine but tea and crumpets without a pressing for repentance is to treat them with hatred and not as friends.
3.) In my estimation part of the problem here is that we tend to view the sodomites in the same way that Jesus viewed the “sinners and publicans.” People like Sandlin fail to recognize that “sinners and publicans” that Jesus ate with were generally characterized as understanding their sin with a concomitant humility due to that sin. The “sinners and publicans” of Jesus day understood they were social outcasts. The “sinners and publicans” of our day are seeking to make Jesus and His people the social outcasts. The 21st century “sinners and publicans,” are the 1st century Pharisees. These sodomites are proud of their sin. They do not see themselves as the 1st century sinners and publicans saw themselves. Can you imagine any of our modern “sodomite sinners and publicans” crying out “God have mercy on me a sinner?” Can you imagine any our our modern flamers washing Jesus feet with their tears and drying his feet with their tears? No… the roles have been switched so that our modern Pharisees are at the same time an in your face defiant version of the 1st century “sinners and publicans.” Our modern sodomite “sinners and publicans” have absolutely zero sense of being “burdened and heavy laden,” and have no sense of the need for and so no desire to be forgiven. As such, treating them with respect and dignity does nothing but to feed their psychosis. Sandlin is compounding the problem and not helping his sodomite colleagues and friends.
4.) Of course Sandlin is in contradiction here. Sandlin wants to insist that he is a culture warrior fighting the general problem “cultural homosexualization” while at the same time embracing the particular people who are individuals of that very “cultural homosexualization” that he says he is fighting. This is a bit like saying that one is fighting forest fires while treating individual trees that are on fire with dignity and respect.
5.) Sandlin is caught up in the “hate the sin but love the sinner” wash cycle. We find him here divorcing the action of the actor from the actor themselves. This abstraction of the sin from the sinner has been taken way too far. Given the way we use this trope today one would expect God someday to throw only sin into hell while the sinner goes to heaven. The act of sin and the actor of that sin cannot be divorced from one another. We cannot find the sin disgusting and worthy of capital punishment and at the same time hold those involved in the sin to be friends and colleagues. Can we not see the incongruity.
Now, let’s be clear here. Should any sinner repent they should be seen as being part of the family of God but one simply cannot fight the “homosexualization of the culture” while at the same time feting individual sodomites as “friends and colleagues.”
In the end the question should be asked of Andrew … “Why do you own no personal animosity whatsoever toward individual homosexuals? After all, these are people who are in defiance of God and His commands and His order. These are people who are seeking to destroy your children, grandchildren and your neighbor’s children. These are people who would turn the whole world into a sodomite pride parade and a Queer library reading hour. Mr. Sandlin, do you think that somehow you get points because you don’t loathe them personally?”
Now, I quite get being as civil as is necessary in a given situation but having no personal animus? What’s wrong with you people? Such a lack of personal animus reveals that you are infected with the same kind of sickness as the sodomite in question.
Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Vision of the New World Order
“Notions of prisca theologia and philsophia perennis include the idea that there was a time before race, gender, and nationality; that sex was contained in an androgyne unity of opposites. If the process of moving to the perfected endpoint of history concerns the actualization of the perfected original form, then the process itself will demand a convergence of all things.
Think, for example, of the internationalist movements associated w/ the Left – the Communist International (Comintern), not to mention a global Caliphate. Perfectible futures that are equated with convergence demand that individual, individual groups, religious and national identity be converged (negated) as particular identities in order to realize the perfected universal form they will all find themselves sublated into.
This suppression (or sublimation, or negation) also includes the convergence of sex (genderism), race, religion (interfaith), and national identity (globalism — enforced mass-migrations that are destroying national identity) From the interfaith movement to the radicalizing activities directed at race, gender and the border, the dialectical engines are pervasively acting upon America in the form of operational plans from the Left oriented towards the negation of America through the destruction of identity that be purely sourced to the alchemical Hegel. For example, the multi-cultural concept of the ‘other’ (antithesis) is positioned against the ‘American’ (thesis) in a dialectical negation that claims to helically rise mankind to a new improved global citizenship (synthesis) when in fact the only thing that results is an impoverished national identity — like Venezuela.”
“Re-remembering the Mis-Remembered Left: The Left’s Strategy and Tactics to Transform America.” — p. 40
“The man of the distant future will be a hybrid. The present races and castes will fall prey to the overcoming of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid future breed, externally similar to the ancient Egyptians, will replace diversity of peoples with a variety of personalities. For, according to the laws of inheritance, diversity grows with the difference of ancestors, and with the monotony of the ancestors, the uniformity of descendants. In inbreeding families one child is like the other, because they all represent one common family type. In mixed-race families, the children differ more from each other; each forms a novel variation of the diverging parental and pre-parental elements.”
R. N. Coudenhove-Kalergi — Himself a child of miscegenated parents
Father — Pan European Movement
Praktischer Idealismus
Of Coudenhove-Kalergi, Whitaker Chambers once wrote,
“(Coudenove-Kalergi) is practically a Pan-European organization himself. “The Coudenhoves were a wealthy Flemish family that fled to Austria during the French Revolution. The Kalergis were a wealthy Greek family from Crete. The line has been further crossed with Poles, Norwegians, Balts, French and Germans, but since the families were selective as well as cosmopolitan, the hybridization has been consistently successful.” The Kalergis family roots trace to Byzantine royalty via Venetian aristocracy, connecting with the Phokas imperial dynasty. In 1300, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s ancestor Alexios Phokas-Kalergis signed the treaty that made Crete a dominion of Venice.” We would add that R. N. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s mother was Japanese. When Kalergi advocated for the amalgamated man he was advocating for kinism per his understanding that the alien and stranger were his kin.
The attempt to encourage by advertising and propaganda the increase of miscegenation is not accidental. The Left has a purpose in all this as we see from above and it is the Left that is pushing this. This idea of fusing all the elements goes back to ancient pagan notions of prisca theologia and philsophia priscas where mankind returns to a time when race, gender, and nationality were united in their primitive state. It is the pagan appeal for the unity of the opposites.
There is ZERO Christian thinking or reference in the idea of normalizing inter-racial marriage. The ideology of universal miscegenation is all coming from the Marxist left. Their words repeated over and over proves this. This quote from Kalergi is just one more example. Amalgamated man has been in their playbook from the beginning. Of course the Marxist left has co-opted much of the idiot Church who is completely unaware of this history of ideas.
The Constituent Elements of Man & Kinism
Appealing to Scripture we find in Church history that some have taught that man is dichotomous being (body and soul). This view finds its anchor in Genesis 2:7 where we learn,
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
Dichotomy teaches that the constituent nature of man is body (dust of the ground) and soul (breath of life).
Others have taught that man is trichotomous being (body, soul and spirit). They would appeal (errantly) to passages like Hebrews 4:12,
“For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. ”
In Church history Watchmen Nee was one of the biggest proponents of the idea that man is a tripartate being. This view has had some pretty bizarre (read Gnostic) interpretations — not least of which was Watchman Nee.
This post is not primarily about dismissing trichotomous thinking on the nature of man but allow me to quickly dismiss it by noting that Hebrews 4:12 is not teaching that soul and spirit are two distinct natures in man that are to be divided out. The Greek verb that is translated here as “piercing” is never used in Scripture for the sense of distinguishing two different things but instead is used when referring to distributing and dividing up various aspects of the same thing (see Heb 2:4; Lk 11:17-18; Mt 27:35; Jn 19:24).
Citing Kim Riddlebarger who is citing John Murray,
“The point is not that the Word separates two distinct things–soul from spirit–but that “The Word of God judges the thoughts and attitude of the heart” (Heb 4:12). The Word does not divide soul from spirit, as though these were two distinct entities, but the Word does divide soul and spirit in the sense of penetrating into our inner most parts.”
However there is another school of thought that doesn’t get talked about much and that is the idea that man is a modified unichotomous being. This views admits that man is body and soul but sees body and soul as so integrated that to over separate them in our thinking is a serious mistake. Modified unichotomy tips its cap to the idea that man is comprised of body and soul (dichotomy) but wants to emphasize that man as a creature remains a psychosomatic unity, so that while distinction between body and soul certainly must be made a divorce of the two in the creature is not allowed. The idea that man is a modified unichotomy seeks to embrace the organic integrity that is man.
The upshot of the modified unichotomy view is that man cannot be divided between his ideological self (soul) and his corporeal self (race / ethnicity) without doing grave and serious damage to the nature of man. The implication is that who man is racially and ethnically impacts what we think ideologically and what we think ideologically cannot be divorced from who God has made us in our racial – ethnic persons. It is merely to recognize that who we are corporeally impacts who we are as incarnated thinking beings. The brain and the mind are not the same thing but neither can they be divorced from one another. The body and the soul are definitely not the same thing but while living they cannot be divorced from one another.
We are whole beings. What happens at death is altogether unnatural and will be cured when we take on our glorified bodies. Until then, what we think, and who we are as corporeal being as the inheritance from our forebears are integrated.
Holding this view allows me to say “no” to both Darwin who was a materialist and to Franz Boas who wanted to completely ignore the corporeal aspect of man and so really was a high brow Gnostic. (Boas has done more than probably anybody in the 20th century to advance postmodernism through the back door of cultural anthropology.)
The person who embraces modified unichotomy avoids both the scylla of materialism which sees man only as matter in motion and the charybdis of man as merely a unembodied thinking mind as if who man is in his wholeness has no impact on man. What we are finding among the Evangelical and many Reformed is a verbal affirmation of man as bipartate but an unwillingness to embrace the implications of that so that there is hostility to the idea that the creaturliness of man in his genetic wholeness has any impact of the non-corporeal reality of man (i.e. — his thinking, his inherited disposititons, etc.). This has the surreal result that these folks who refuse the psychosomatic unity of man are constantly flip flopping like a fish on dry ground between practical Darwinism and Boasian Gnosticism. It’s the darndest thing to witness.
More From The NPR Lugenpresse Twins
“We can also see that family members of the Dorr’s have noticed. We know Ben Dorr has a Father-in-law — a reconstructionist Pastor — who has been following this broadcast closely. He’s taken to calling me (Lisa) and Chris the ‘Lugenpresse twins.’ ‘Lugenpresse’ means ‘Lying Press’ in German. The word was popularized by the Nazis and popped into American far right vernacular around 2016.”
National Public Radio
No Compromise Podcast
1.) There is irony here if only because during this very same NPR broadcast the Lugenpresse Twins tell us that they learned about Confrontational Politics. They learned that those who practice Confrontational Politics consider it a success when they get so under the politician’s skin that the politicians begin to assiduously ignore them but better still is when the politicians begins yelling at them and denigrating them. Having read Richardson’s book, “Confrontational Politics” well over a decade ago I can only revel in the success that my confrontational approach here at Iron Ink had with the Lugenpresse Twins to the degree they believed they had to give me 18 seconds of air time in practicing their Lugenpresse attack on me by way of lexical innuendo.
2.) The Lugenpresse twins flatter themselves by suggesting that I was “following their broadcast closely.” They produced a format. I listened to the format and wrote down my impressions and a rebuttal. If listening to the show constitutes “following their broadcast closely” then color me a NPR fanboy. What I see is a continued practice on their part of habitual hyperbole. I listened to the show and they call it “following their broadcast closely.” The people can’t help themselves in their attachment to hyperbole. Who knew NPR hired Drama Queens?
3.) They mention I am a “reconstructionist Pastor” almost as if that is worse than being a Nazi. What would they ever think if they knew that I preached that the God who is has just wrath against sin and sinners that can only be assuaged by trusting in Christ alone? They’d probably look to see if I was somehow related to Himmler.
4.) Would have the Lugenpresse Twins given me a pass if I had used the French language and called them “presse couchee,” or if I had used Dutch and called them “liggende pers,” or if I had used Xhosa and called them “cinezela cinezela?”
5.) But if I had done that then they couldn’t do what their whole six part series excelled at. If I had used any language but German they couldn’t have used innuendo to hint that somehow because I used German it proved I had Nazi sympathies. I also smoke Cuban cigars so that must prove that I have communist sympathies. (But then again, having Communist sympathies would likely be acceptable to the Lying Press twins.)
6.) Since I grew up with German Grandparents it couldn’t be that I still remember snatches of German that I learned from my Grandparents from 55 years ago. Ah no… I must be some kind of Nazi sympathizer since I used the phrase “Lugenpresse.”
Ahh, well, NPR has finished their irresponsible Christ hating hit piece. They have finished their attempted assassination of Character by way of innuendo and guilt by association.
Oh… and I just can’t resist. Earlier in their broadcasts they hinted at the idea that the Dorr brothers weren’t really lobbyists and yet in their final broadcast they explicitly say that the Dorr Brothers will often work with a few “champion” legislators to push the legislation the Dorr Brothers desire to see passed. You’ll excuse me if I note that sure sounds like lobbying to me.
Oh… and the closing with your false and insincere sympathy was a cheap shot. You used family tragedy to suggest, by way of innuendo, that you were correct on your analysis on what you consider their recklessness.
You people have neither any honor, nor any shame.
Calvinism & Insuperable Grace
When we consider our Preaching calendar we hope this week and next week on this current series. That will bring us to the 1st Sunday in November which Lord Will will be an Election year sermon. I may need one more week on the 2nd Sunday November to complete this series on TULIP. We shall see.
Currently we continue in our series on TULIP. This morning we will complete our discussion on Irresistible grace but first we will spend some time gathering some threads of where we have thus far been as well as teasing out some more significant implications.
What we are doing here is akin to what is done when a house is framed. I have a good friend in Idaho who frames magnificent houses. One can tell how majestic these house will be by just observing the framing of the house.
Well, in what we have been doing we have been framing this magnificent worldview of Calvinism. My friend in Idaho uses timber in his framing , while we – you and I – are using the Word and words to do the same kind of work in the realm of worldview / belief / ideology / theology.
And just as it is the case that people will dwell in those magnificent homes my friend frames so it is the case that we all live in our worldviews and if it is the case that people spend a great deal on their homes how much more should it be the case that we spend a great deal on a magnificent world and life view?
Instead people – including many who live in physical mansions — decide, by in large to live in shacks in terms of their worldviews. Like the hovel that Jane and I lived in during Seminary people spend their whole lives living in worldview homes that are garbage pits… indeed, to call these places homes is to do vast insult to the word “home.”
Choosing to reject Calvinism with all its worldview implications (only some of which we have teased out) people are living in fictitious realities. In rejecting Biblical Christianity and embracing religious humanism, Arminianism, Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism etc what people have done is they have chosen to live in false realities.
Josef Pieper was getting at this when he wrote,
“The Sophists he [Plato] says, ‘fabricate a fictitious reality.’ That the existential realm of man could be taken over by pseudo-realities whose fictitious nature threatens to become indiscernible is truly a depressing thought. And yet the Platonic nightmare, I hold, possesses an alarming contemporary relevance. For the general public is being reduced to a state where people are not only unable to find out about the truth, but also become unable to even search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language.”
Joseph Pieper
Abuse of Language – Abuse of Power — pg. 34
So, understand what is going on if we and Pieper are correct. We are living among a whole culture that is itself living in a fictitious reality…. living in framed houses crafted with skubala. In the words of Scripture they are houses built on sand.
We have observed some of these fictitious realities along the way. Here we have framed our house with the timber of Total Depravity. While those who are living in fictitious realities have framed their worldview house with either “man is only kind of depraved” timber or “man is basically good” timber. We have framed our worldview house with the quality lumber of unconditional Election which we saw – when teased out – means the worldview house we live in allows for a God who is discriminatory and gloriously prejudiced allowing us to embrace a biblical discrimination and a biblically based prejudice. Those living in a fictitious reality have framed their house with the trash lumber of a hypothetical Universalism where God loves everybody equally. Their fictitious reality … their worldview house does not allow for discrimination, prejudice and so pursue egalitarianism.
Along the way we begin to see that non-Calvinists are from Venus while Biblical Christians are from Mars. We are living in two different worldview homes … two different realities. The difference between us and them is the difference between Charlie Manson and Charlie Martel. They are living in un-real fictitious realities and we are living in real reality.
So, we see that holding to the Doctrines of Grace is not merely having a view on soteriology (salvation)… it is a matter of living in real reality and it sets us apart from those who have framed their houses with other words besides God’s Word and so are living in fictitious realities.
And we are now living in a time where the difference between those living in real reality and those living in fictitious reality is coming to a crescendo, which is to say, that we are living in a time where two vision of reality are in vicious conflict.
This sermon series then as not been merely about different ways on how to understand how we are saved. Our doctrines of Grace begin to frame for us a whole weltanschauung … a whole way of thinking about everything. Being a Biblical Calvinist who embraces the doctrines of Grace with all their implications means being self conscious about adopting a whole worldview home.
Secondly, along the way in this series we have tried to emphasize that what the Doctrines of Grace as properly understood teaches us is that Biblical Christianity is juridical and legal at its core and NOT relational except as by the Spirit’s work of uniting us to Christ we have a relationship with our advocate.
God gave His law. God’s Law was broken. The penalty promised for broken law must be paid. Man as creature broke the law… man as creature must pay the penalty. Man the creature cannot meet all that the penalty required. God, showing mercy meets His own requirements of His law and pays the law penalty for sin in our place. God then imputes (legally counts) the righteousness of Christ to our account and we have peace with God.
LEGAL … JURIDICAL … FORENSIC … JUDICIAL
LEGAL
LEGAL
LEGAL
LEGAL
Why do I hammer this so decidedly? Because at least since the 2nd great awakening these categories have been dismissed and replaced by relational categories. Jesus my friend. Jesus who meets me in the garden alone. Jesus whom I know lives because He lives within my heart. Jesus is my girlfriend type of worship songs. All this relational sentimentality has made the Christian faith insipid, sentimental and weak. And this is the karo syrup diet the Church has been on for several generations.
Not me… not here. I salute Gordon H. Clark who wrote two generations ago,
“As for having a ‘personal relationship’ with Christ, if the phrase means something more than assenting to true propositions about Jesus, what is that something more? Feeling warm inside? Coffee has the same effect. Surely ‘personal relationship’ does not mean what we mean when we say that we know someone personally: perhaps we have shaken his hand visited his home or he ours, or eaten with him. John had a ‘personal relationship’ with Christ in that sense, as did all the disciples, including Judas Iscariot. But millions of Christians have not, and Jesus called them blessed: They have not seen and yet have believed. The difference between Judas Iscariot and the other disciples is not that they had a ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus and he did not, but that they believed, that is, assented to, certain propositions about Jesus, while Judas did not believe those propositions.”
Look, I get it that there will always be a relational aspect to our undoubted catholic Christian faith but it should not be given its head so that the Christian faith becomes some kind of harlequin romance novel. The Christian faith is primarily legal and any relationship that exists, exists because of how our legal Advocate fulfilled God’s law in our place – obeyed all that God’s law required for us and received all the penalty that God’s law required as against our disobedience.
We have to understand that one reason that Calvinism has such rough sledding is that the Church has been taken over by those who argue for the necessity of a “personal encounter with Jesus” by which they are calling for the same kind of feeling for Jesus required in conversion that a 18 year old guy has when he meets the woman of his dreams. And if isn’t that kind of expectation unto conversion then we get the minister who preaches that Christianity is about trusting a person not believing a creed as if it were possible to Trust the person of Christ without having a Creed. Both of this bushwah ratiocination has just decimated the Church so that our Churches and pulpits are filled with the simplistic, the moronic, and the vacuous. Just see if you could join any other organization and be so completely brain dead about what the organization is all about as you can when being part of the modern Church.
As we have been looking at the Doctrines of Grace we have seen that Christianity has substance and that you can’t be part of Christianity unless you can affirm that substance. You can’t make up your own Christianity and if you do it is no longer Christianity. You can’t, in an epistemologically self conscious fashion, reject the Doctrines of Grace and be a Christian.
And irresistible Grace is an one of the pedals of our Tulip.
Insuperable grace explains how it is that in time and space the elect chosen by the Father and atoned for by the Son are delivered from their total depravity and intense Christ hatred. Undefeatable grace is what moves us from what the writer of Hebrews calls being spiritual bastards to being sons of God. (12:8).
Last time we considered this doctrine we looked at John 6 but let us see that we also find it articulated by the Spirit of God in Romans 8:29-30
29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. 30 Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.
To get this passage right we have to understand that the word foreknew means “knew before He knew,” or “knew ahead of time.” We could even say it means “foreloved.” Gen. 4:1 tells us that Adam knew Eve. In Eternity past God had an unique and special knowledge of His elect.
Secondly, the word “call” here refers to the effectual call and not merely what we have spoken of as the external call. This effectual call is another phrase for the Unconquerable grace we have been speaking of. It is what explains why a a totally depraved person comes to life and so trusts Christ.
So what we are seeing is the unity of the Doctrines of Grace. St. Paul states that there is an inexorable sequence of realities that begins with the eternal love of God (His foreknowing us) and our calling in space and time. Because God foreknew His elect there was a certainty they would be effectually called …. and conformed to the image of His Son.
This passage is often referred to as “the golden chain of salvation,” and the reason that the word chain is used is that each reality … foreknowing, predestining, calling, justifying conforming to the image of the Son and even our glorification are all links in one chain. There is a certainty to all this. God, even more than the Canadian Mounties, “always gets his man.”
Now of course I say again we Calvinists are alone in believing this. But that’s ok… Calvinists have broad shoulders and bright minds.
Our opponents on this score in the Church are everywhere.
The fight between Augustine and Pelagius that occurred in the 4th century gave us one the earliest conflicts on this in Church History. Augustine articulated the position on irresistible grace that the Bible sets forth while his sparring Partner denied it. Pelagianism taught that man was NOT totally depraved but rather sinned by way of bad examples around him. The problem was not man’s sin nature but man’s environment. As such Pelagius and his peeps denied denied that man needed Insuperable grace since Unconquerable grace presupposes total depravity. Per the Pelagians there is no need for the Holy Spirit to help man do good.
Another position raised up against the Doctrines of Grace was a mediating position between Pelagianism and Augustinianism. This position came to be known as semi-pelagianism. As its names implies it held the position that a little less poison in one’s doctrine than full poison would be delightful.
The semi-pelagians believed that man was not as evil as the Augustinians said but neither was he quite as good as the Pelagians said. So, they basically said man was sick but not dead and there byword… which remains the by word for Arminians and Roman Catholic is that man must cooperate with grace. God does his part and man does his part and between the two of them man can convert.
I heard this kind of thing growing up. The Evangelist would come to town and at some point along the way I would hear some version of, “There is one area of your life that God will never touch and that is your will. He will never cause you to believe. That’s your job. Only you can do it,” as if even God didn’t know which way one would choose. God wants you to choose for Him but there are some things that even a God can’t get.
This is why our standards can say, (Canon of Dort)
Article 10 –
But that others who are called by the gospel obey the call and are converted is not to be ascribed to the proper exercise of free will, whereby one distinguishes himself above others, equally furnished with grace sufficient for faith and conversions as the proud heresy of Pelagius maintains; but it must be wholly ascribed to God, who as He has chosen His own from eternity in Christ, so He confers upon them faith and repentance, rescues them from the power of darkness, and translates them into the kingdom of His own Son, that they may show forth the praises of Him who hath called them out of darkness into His marvelous light; and may glory not in themselves, but in the Lord according to the testimony of the apostles in various places.
Look, at the end of the day if your theology teaches that one can say “no” to God’s “yes” of irresistible grace unto eternal life you don’t believe that God is sovereign. That God is a weemus and like Elijah @ Mt. Carmel I mock him.
If like Lutherans, Pentecostals, and Arminians, and Evangelicals in general say we say that man can of himself accept or reject the gospel as he pleases, we have made the eternal God dependent upon man. We have then, in effect, denied the incommunicable attributes of God.
Evangelicals talk to us of a pleading God
As if man were the True inspector
As if man were casting the tiebreaking vote
To determine if God would be victor
As if God is submitting His career resume
For the position of our ‘Lord Protector’
And they wonder if God can secure the job
From those who are His electors
____