Cheryl Schatz

Mark you said:

Second point, not all are ‘able’ to receive Christ. People are blind (2 Cor 4:4).

But people are blind for several reasons. One of the reasons is that they do not love the truth and another reason is that they love wickedness. These people do not come to the light to receive salvation.

2 Thessalonians 2:10–12 (NASB)
10 and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved.
11 For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false,
12 in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness.

God makes a difference between those who love their sin and those who practice the truth. Those who love their sin will never come to Jesus even though God draws them. Drawing is not the same thing as coming.

John 3:20–21 (NASB)
20 “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
21 “But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”

Only those God inwardly calls are justified (Rom 8:29).

Romans 8:29 does not say “inward call” and the washing by the baptism into Jesus’ death is our justification.

1 Corinthians 6:11 (NASB)
11 Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

It is Jesus’ blood that justifies and He freely gives His salvation by His death to all.

Jesus himself says that the crowd could not come because the Father did not enable, remember also that we agreed that ‘comes’ and ‘believes’ are synonymous. So only those that the Father brings to Jesus can come/believe. Jesus never says that all are able to come/believe.

We haven’t come to this part yet. We will deal with these verses in their context as we come to them. I look forward to it!

Give me one verse that says God enables ‘all’ to come/believe (remember they are synonymous) in John 6.

I just gave a bunch of verses in a previous comment that I did tonight. You will find the answer there.

It seems you are confusing a lot of different terms. All are enabled, but yet some refuse to believe and then they are not ‘drawn’ to Jesus. The Bible has a different order. We are all hard before regeneration (Eph 2:1, Rom 8:5-8),

Ephesians 2:1 doesn’t mention hardness and Romans 8:5-8 is not about all. Abraham and Noah and Job were not those who set their minds on the flesh. We can deal with this one further when we get to these passages.

then God draws/enables us (Jn 6:65, 37, 44) and then we believe.

You have the order right here. God always draws first and in His drawing He enables us to obey His command to believe. Since God first starts His work in us, it is His work first and then we believe.

You are making being ‘drawn’ to Jesus conditional on something we do (some sort of believing that is not believing in Jesus since it comes before being drawn to Jesus). I can’t accept that- it’s contrary to scripture.

No, not at all. There are many who have already been drawn to God and they now belong to Him. These ones who have been drawn to the Father and now promised to Jesus. They belong to the Father and are given to Jesus. The Father is not giving haters of God to Jesus. He only gives those who have heard Him and obeyed Him, to Jesus.

John 6:45 (NASB)
45 “It is written in the prophets, ‘AND THEY SHALL ALL BE TAUGHT OF GOD.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, comes to Me.

The Bible never says that those who are evil will be given to Jesus and neither are those who refuse to learn from the Father given to Jesus.

“And how can the “belief” of a person be their own choice if God gives faith as a gift?”

Easy the Bible says so. Faith is a gift (Eph 2:8-9, Rom 12:3) yet we are told to believe so it is something we must do.

Ephesians 2:8, 9 is not talking about faith as a gift because the term is singular and faith is said to be the thing that the gift (salvation) comes through. If faith were also a gift, then the Greek term would have been plural.

In Romans 12:3, faith is a genitive. “The genitive is the case that qualifies or restricts a noun by means of a specific characterization. “The genitive normally marks a noun as the source or possessor of something, or refers to the kind of relationship that noun has to another noun. It is typically expressed in English by the preposition “of”. For example, in the phrase “throne of the king” the noun “king” is in the genitive and qualifies the type of throne. In “blood of Christ,” Christ is the genitive noun which describes possession. The genitive case is also used for the objects of some prepositions.”

In C.E.B. Cranfield’s “A critical and exegetical commentary on the Epistle to the Romans” Cranfield asks and answers what kind of genitive “faith” is in Romans 12:3. It isn’t a gift but a measure of a standard.

What kind of genitive is (faith)?…Every member of the church, instead of thinking of himself more highly than he ought, is so to think of himself as to think soberly, measuring himself by the standard which God has given him in his faith, that is, by a standard which forces him to concentrate his attention on those things in which he is on precisely the same level as his fellow-Christians rather than on those things in which he may be either superior or inferior to them—for the standard Paul has in mind consists, we take it, not in the relative strength or otherwise of the particular Christian’s faith but in the simple fact of its existence, that is, in the fact of his admission of his dependence on, and commitment to, Jesus Christ.3 When Christians measure themselves by themselves (or by their fellow-Christians or their pagan neighbours), they display their lack of understanding (cf. 2 Cor 10:12), and are sure to have too high (or else too low) an opinion of themselves; but, when they measure themselves by the standard which God has given them in their faith, they then—and only then—achieve a sober and true estimate of themselves as, equally with their fellows, both sinners revealed in their true colours by the judgment of the Cross and also the objects of God’s undeserved and triumphant mercy in Jesus Christ.
Cranfield, C. E. B. (2004). A critical and exegetical commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (615–616).