TL

Mark,

”I appreciate your call for us all to be in continual repentance- i couldn’t agree more. But maybe you can show me if the Cannanites in the conquering were given that opportunity to repent and enter covenant with Yahweh? Like it or not, God has always chosen some and not others, both in regards to salvation and in regards to earthly purpose.”

IMO it paints a false picture of God to think that God flippantly chooses one over another for salvation not according to whether or not that person himself chooses to love God. This creates several problems.
1. love is not a choice if God chooses for us.
2. God is a respector of persons, since He prefers one over another not according to their choice of Him, and without their acceptance.
3. Without our acceptance of God’s choice, then we are not free people but robots destined according to our birth to follow a preplanned destruction, in essence some people were hated by God at their creation, while others were preferred.

On the other hand, if all people were given freedom to choose whether or not to love God, but salvation didn’t come until Jesus, then the Caananites and others overtaken by sinful natures from their upbringings would still have that opportunity during the 3 days when Jesus went below before He was resurrected.

As for 2 Tim. 2:25, my take at this point in time, is that yes God gives us all the ability to repent (and come to their senses and seek to escape the traps of the devil) when He sees in His perfect knowledge of our souls that our hearts desire is to know God and love Him. Often God knows this before we do. God sees our hearts in ways we do not.

God’s ‘choosings’ are not after the fashion of human thoughts of choosings. God is Love. God did not send His Son to die for a few of which He coerced to come to Him. God’s Love is so great that He sent His Son to die for the entire world so that WHOSOEVER chooses to believe may be saved. It is humanities choice whether to love darkness instead of light and truth. God does not program that into our psyche. We are all created in His image and have the ability to choose in our hearts one thing or another. While it is true that the power of sin entraps and prevents many from being able to exercise in life their true inner choosings, yet God who sees all and knows these things grants those ones the abilities to repent at the right time.