Freewill and predestination is a system of cause and effect. They are not two sides of the same coin. Understanding these truths as two sides of the same coin is a trap. We try to bottleneck doctrines that are perfectly in sync with each other. I don’t know why people pit two completely unconnected ideas against each other. The application to Salvation and life are so divorced and distant from each other. My proposal to solve this “paradox” is Cause and Effect!
Predestination is the cause, Freewill is the effect.
Do we have the capacity to exercise our wills freely without any external force acting on them? The answer is truly and simply, yes. Did I act on my will freely to write this article? Yes, absolutely! As human beings we have perfect freewill to desire to choose according to what we want to. We are not robots, computers, machines or cars! This is why some people wear Levi and others prefer Guess.
Do we have capacity to exercise our wills freely in desiring to become a Christian, Absolutely not? The reason for this is because without this intrusion (being predestined/cause) of our wills, nobody in any state of mind would ever want to or be able to chose Jesus. Think about it: He lives a sinless crazy life, walks on water, says crazy things, claims to be God Himself, gets the whole world united in a bid to murder him, they successfully kill him without cause having committed no wrong, 3 days later, he raises from the dead, walks through walls this time, starts a revolution, using 12 fairly incapable, unqualified, unprofessional, ordinary Jews to tangent the Jewish religious order into a branch that today is known as Christianity, tells his followers to go and tell other people, all other people for that matter that they are God offending sinners and they must stop it, deny themselves, assume personal death daily and follow him so that when they die, they will be with him in the presence of the glory of His father forever and ever clothed in immortality.
Now you tell me which human being will chose that without first being enabled? We do not have freewill to choose Jesus! Primarily because it is not a matter of choice or a decision, it is a functional capability! For the same reason why we cannot chose to fly, we cannot chose to be Christian. Our Christianity is a matter of being enabled, hence: Predestination= cause
Freewill applies to life and all its avenues! Predestination applies to exactly that... destination!
However we do have the capacity, the freewill to choose to desire spirituality in general or to desire other religious faiths. They are in sync with our natural selves, they comfortably translate into what we might already agree with and are willing to tolerate with a certain measure of sustainability. They do not have personal offense at a deeply intimate level embedded at the heart of the faith system like Christianity does. Jesus is highly intolerable, that’s why we killed him. His “sin” was that he was unlike us! He committed Holiness and we sentenced him to death!
Can a square be a circle at the same time? No! Can a square exist within a circle at the same time? Yes! Predestination is the cause, Freewill is the effect. Not two sides of the same coin, not a paradox!
Unbelievers disqualify the credibility of the bible, or they disqualify the God of the bible because they try to understand them as two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, Christians call it a paradox! And why they do that is a mystery to me. It is not a paradox and definitely not a contradiction. They are sweet doctrines of cause and effect that sustain my daily faith and preserve my intimate worship.
If you are a Christian it means that you were hunted and He caused (predestined) you to desire Him, the effect of that cause is today you freely and willingly chose to be Christian. If you are not a Christian, that’s normal! It means that you are being hunted, in the process of being pursued aggressively, intimately and desperately, and if predestined (cause) you will be enabled to make a decision to follow Christ. Predestination is the cause, freewill is the effect! Whichever way the predestination “dice” rolls, you are free to exercise your will within that defined space.
Predestination is the cause, Freewill is the effect
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