Where We Stand 09: Wake Up
From MadPxM.com
Election is presented in the Bible as a dogmatic confidence. It is not complicated:
1. The entirety of mankind is bloodbought by the Almighty Creator God’s own self-sacrifice in the one man Jesus Christ.
2. This, as merit, is freely given as the “good spell,” as a promise made by Words that can neither lie nor fail.
3. The effect of this Divine Wind on the human heart, this Holy Ghost’s inspiration of the hearer, is entirely his prerogative.
4. All who find themselves impacted by such hope incarnating in them already thus experience eternal life as the downpayment of regenerated trust in God the Father.
5. This justification also sanctifies, “sets apart” the believer from the merely wicked.
6. You are thus oathborn (God’s oath, not yours!) to never stumble in such a manner so as to fall.
7. This knowledge is fueled by prayerful use of the Scriptures under tribulations.
8. This is God’s plan for you A. without your help B. with your participation C. to your glory D. in his glory.
All debates about the role of the will are a distraction from the power of the promise. But such distractions are bound to come because believing that salvation is not up to you, that there is nothing you can do about it, that you are entirely reliant on God’s good graces, is damned near the hardest thing in the world to do. In fact, “with man it is impossible” (Matt. 19:26.) That’s the point!
Evil cannot reform itself to be good. Death cannot renew itself to be life. There must be an inflection point, an intervention, a new creation. Only God can do that. The “good spell,” the εὐαγγέλιον, is the promise that such is his everlasting intent.
That such promise will only be believed on by a remnant is no counter-argument. This too is declared to us. Our need to ask “why?” is not wisdom but folly, not insight but pride. Bantering over words will not stop the reality that there is and will remain a people awakened by the story of Jesus in the midst of a world gone and going mad in their enmity with there maker up to the very Day of Judgment. Complaining about it, calling it “unfair,” or trying to make conciliatory apologies to justify God’s mysteries is to sacrifice the potency of his religion. Don’t do it.
You are born again out of the cowardly, self-justifying, excuse-driven sacrificialism into a holy mortification of the present, impassioned rages and hungers by the confident assertion in God’s own Name that whatever fiery losses my come, they are better-still subsumed in the saving flood of Jesus Christ’s incontrovertible resurrection from the dead to reign is GodKing.
For Christianity to survive in the west it is imperative that we remember this, and then with it the subsidiary reality: that if a man is not awake, he is most definitely asleep.