You are the one who adamantly desires to focus upon such things, not me. I will stick to what is clearly written in the scriptures and what the Lord has commanded of me. God commands all men to repentance and commands his children to proclaim the Gospel. In the end, God is holy and just and there will not be a single man who will be able to stand before God making the excuse that they didn't believe because God did not elect them!
So, in other words, “that question hurts my feelings and I don’t like the answer.” Got it! The reality is, not one person on this forum can answer the question without it ultimately leading to nihilism (that includes those on here who are ardent Calvinists, and a couple of you who are closet Calvinists).
No, I don't think so at all. They're just avoiding the issue. If they're not seeking, asking, and knocking, there is no work of grace in their hearts. They don't truly believe in the Judgment that awaits them.
No, ALL deserve death and eternal destruction in the Lake-of-fire (including myself). God is perfectly righteous and just to save nobody. That he has chosen to save SOME is all of grace and goes far beyond my ability to understand. I also believe such lines up with scriptures upon which I gladly stand. If you have a problem with this, your problem is with God, not me. You may take it up with him when you stand before him in judgment.
Fundamentally, it is a Person who saves, not a confession. We can talk till the cows come home about the sequence of events. I think it's spontaneous, like conception. A fully human life has come into existence, but there is growth and development that manifests itself in discernible stages.
By law, an illiterate peasant could come at his convenience to hear the word of God in his own language, and that was a bad thing?Cool. Let’s just go back to the Middle Ages and completely halt all basic education, including elementary grammar and reading, and we’ll keep a Bible chained to the church in the town square, and we’ll have the local priest read it once or twice a day to whomever is interested. Once again, he’ll be the only guy in town capable of reading.
An astute observation.
That's not true. Like I said, we preach because of love. Love for the Gospel and love for our fellow man. But God doesn't do things because of necessity. Preaching isn't necessary. It's God's chosen conduit. Was it necessary that God call upon the earth to bring forth the living creatures? Couldn't they have just popped into existence like the stars? Of course they could have. But God chose to call upon His creation to bring forth life. And that is what He is doing through preachers.
If I’m not mistaken, when you (re)joined the forum, you claimed you were a former non-believer in Calvinism, then slowly through the years —“kicking and screaming”—came to believe in it. So why would anyone believe that you, in all your infinite human wisdom, got it right now? Did you believe in the same God and the same Scriptures back when you didn’t believe in Calvinism?
The question is: Can God genuinely desire the salvation of those whom He, from eternity, unconditionally determined not to save, and is, in the words of Calvin, “pleased to exclude” and “doom to destruction”?
The question is: Can God genuinely desire the salvation of those whom He, from eternity, unconditionally determined not to save, and is, in the words of Calvin, “pleased to exclude” and “doom to destruction”?
So when the jailer asked what he must do to be saved Paul was commanding him to a “state of being”?
Muslims and Jews might have something to say about that. You do understand there are those who accept a historical Jesus but not as the son of God.
This answer is not universally agreed-upon by five point Calvinists. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and a host of other passages that speaks to some general sense that God does not desire for sinners to perish (and of course I don’t disagree with your statement about limited atonement in regards to a Calvinist perspective)