CHOOSING THE CALL:
Matthew 8:14
For many are called, but few are chosen.
Are you chosen? You are already called! Answer the call!! SIMPLE!
Romans 10:9,10
That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and
shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead,
thou shalt be saved [sōzō].
For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
Confessing with our mouths and believing in our hearts are decisions
we make. Without believing and confessing as stipulated in Romans
10:9, we would not receive the gift of holy spirit, we would not be
clothed with power from on high. The receiving of the gift of holy
spirit is entirely conditional on us carrying out the instruction
given in Romans 10:9. When we confess with our mouths Jesus as Lord
and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we are
saved (Greek sōzō), made whole, referring to once again being
complete, being whole, with body, soul and spirit.
Does God
force us to believe? No. God never forces anyone to do anything. He
gave us freedom of will and it is up to us whether we choose to believe
God and his word or not. Therefore, predestination here is simply a
reference to God's foreknowledge. He knew way back in the beginning that
we would believe, and so we were predestined, foreordained to become
sons and daughters of God.
The twisting of the meaning of
the word predestination was something that even affected Jesus
Christ's closest disciples.
John 9:1,2
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth.
And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
To understand this you have to ask the question, how could this
man have been born blind because of his own sin? Can babies sin in the
womb before they are born? No, that's ridiculous. The disciples
indicated that they believed that it was possible that a person could
be born blind because of his own sin. They asked this question because
predestination, and how it ties in with reincarnation, had been
engrained into their thinking through religion and culture. They
believed this man might have sinned in a previous life and
consequently been predestined to be born blind because of his
previous sins. They got this nonsense from the religious teachings in
their synagogues, which wasn't much different to the horseshit taught
in churches today. Predestination, where everything in your life is
beyond your control, which includes reincarnation, is unscriptural.
Note Jesus Christ's response.
John 9:3,4
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents
[there should be a full stop, a period here after the word parents]:
but that the works of God should be made manifest in him [insert a
comma here instead of a period].
I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.
Be careful with punctuation as the original texts had none. Every
full stop and comma has been added by the translators and they are
entirely devoid of any authority whatsoever. No punctuation is
God-breathed, therefore all punctuation has to fit within the context
of the bible. The comma after the word parents is clearly wrong as
the verse then depicts them as puppets whose son God made blind just
so Jesus could do a miracle. This man wasn't born blind because of
anyone's sins. He was not predestined by God or anyone else to be
reincarnated into a blind body. Look at how prevalent and insidious
this doctrine of predestination can be. People can only believe such
horseshit if they believe that when you die you don't really die. Do
you begin to see the power in that original lie with which the serpent
seduced Eve? Jesus Christ had to deal with this even among his own
disciples.
The following verse from Isaiah is a prophecy
regarding the physical beatings the Lord Jesus Christ endured prior to
his death.
Isaiah 52:14
As many were astonied at thee; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men:
What
this verse foretells is that the Lord Jesus Christ would be beaten so
badly during the time he was tortured before his crucifixion, that
his physical form, his physical body would be disfigured more than any
man in human history. His physical body was pulped during the forty
hours he was beaten, whipped, and tortured. Jesus Christ was so badly
beaten, he was unrecognisable as a human being as the Romans dragged
him to his crucifixion.
This was prophesied of hundreds
of years before it actually happened. So does that mean that those who
beat Jesus Christ to a pulp did not have freedom of will? Were they
simply puppets and robots doing what God made them do just so God
could bring his word to pass? Maybe now you can begin to smell the
real stink behind this word predestination as it is widely
understood today. Even though we see old testament prophesies coming
to pass in the new testament, all those responsible for the brutal
beatings of the Lord Jesus Christ, all of them, exercised their own
freedom of will. God may have known in his foreknowledge what would
happen and had it recorded centuries earlier, but that does not mean
that those involved were not exercising freewill.
Predestination
God knows ahead of time who is going to believe His
Word. Therefore, God calls them according to His eternal purpose (to
have a family).
God knew ahead of time (foreknowledge) that you
and I would believe. Consequently, God predestinated us to be conformed
to the image of his Son. Predestination is a very misunderstood
concept.
God does not pre-arrange what you and I are going to
do!!! God pre-arranged or predestinated that which HE was going to do
as a result of our believing. God decided (according to HIS purpose)
that HE WOULD GIVE US holy spirit making us His children.
Predestination in the Word of God is God deciding ahead of time what He
is going to do - not what we are going to do.
Again, God does not pre-arrange what you and I are going to do!!!
