Cheryl Schatz

Mark,
I am just going through some comments/questions that I have missed catching in the last week.

You said:

Why stop at verse 27 Cheryl…let’s keep going
Rom 1:28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
Rom 1:29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips,
Rom 1:30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
Rom 1:31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
Rom 1:32 Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Surely you and I have both coveted, surely we have both been slanderers and gossips and boastful etc. This is the nature of humanity not just one specific group.

There is a huge difference between occasional sin and God “giving them up to a debased mind”. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a debased mind and God has not given me up to live out these sins.

Sexual sins are just one aspect of our fallen humanity. We are depraved creatures- totally.

No we are not. The fact is that the ones that God “gives up” to a depraved mind are much more depraved than the rest of us. In fact even your next door neighbour who is not saved is likely a really likable guy who doesn’t act depraved, and helps out the neighbours who are in need. Most people have unsaved neighbours like that. We are not “totally” depraved creatures and the Bible never says that although I understand that it is a “theory” of Calvinism.

Isaiah 53:6 sums it up nicely- we all like sheep have gone astray and turned to our own ways.

Isaiah 53:6 sums up my view quite nicely. It says that we have all sinned and gone to our own ways. It does not say that all of us are totally depraved people. Man, if all people were totally depraved you couldn’t walk outside your door in the day time, let alone the night time.

I can’t show you that Cornelius was born again- I don’t deny that. But not every conversion in the bible says ‘and they were born again before they believed’.

The fact is that there is not even one conversion in the Bible that says that the person was “born again” before they believed.

We don’t always have every detail for every occasion.

That may be so, but you’d think that such an important detail as being born again before faith would show up at least in one place. But it is never there in any of the accounts. It is just another reason to see the “born again before faith” as a “theory” not as a Biblical fact.

The problem is though to say that we don’t need to be born again contradicts Jn 3, and contradictions are not acceptable.

My friend, I never said that we don’t need to be born again. I said that being born again comes after faith. I believe that all of us must be born again to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

You have swept it away be changing what born again means and what the kingdom is.

It is not me who has changed the meaning. The classical meaning of born again means:

The phrase “born again” literally means “born from above.” Nicodemus had a real need. He needed a change of his heart—a spiritual transformation. New birth, being born again, is an act of God whereby eternal life is imparted to the person who believes (2 Corinthians 5:17; Titus 3:5; 1 Peter 1:3; 1 John 2:29; 3:9; 4:7; 5:1-4, 18). John 1:12,13 indicates that “born again” also carries the idea “to become children of God” through trust in the name of Jesus Christ.

Throughout the gospel age the term born again has meant that the person has received eternal life and has believed the gospel and has become a child of God. To have a person remain as an unregenerate person and without faith and without being a child of God and call them “born again” is completely foreign to Christian terminology. Calvinism has taken classical Christian terms and re-written their meaning. I find that incredibly sad.

More comments coming up.