...salvation does depend upon the individual's will.
No, salvation depends on being one of God's elect, which depends on God and His mercy.
He has free will to believe or disbelieve.
I've never said otherwise.
God's will for whom He will save has been established and the conditions laid down in the form of a promise.
Sure. He has made promises, because the fulfillment of all those promises is His will. What He has promised He will surely do.
Even in cases of the apostles.
You mean the guys to whom He directly stated, "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide"...? Those apostles?
They had the option of accepting or rejecting as Judas Iscariot demonstrated.
This was long after they had been called. In every case, we see that Jesus said to them, "Follow me," and they just did, without any sort of reservation. Now, Judas betrayed Christ, but whether he was an actual believer in Christ is in question. And Judas committed suicide, which doesn't necessarily mean he was not a believer, but I would say he was not; Jesus Himself said of Judas,
“The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born” (Matthew 26:24).
Even Paul had three days after being personally and directly addressed by Jesus Himself to decide to accept or reject God's promise.
Paul just did what Jesus told Him to do. The only question he asked was, "Who are you, Lord?"
God's election for salvation is not to be compared to a potter molding his clay.
Both Isaiah and Paul were very clear in doing just that.
It is. :) We disagree.
There is God's election for service and God's election for salvation.
God elects, and there is only one election; it is of certain people unto His salvation. The service to God is a result of the conferring of this salvation.
His election for service...
No such thing.
The nation Israel was elected for service.
Well, God has surely shown us what is good, what is required of us, which is (in the words of Micah 6:8) "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with (our) God," but this is not an election of any kind. And service, along with several other things, is a gift of the Holy Spirit:
"Now there are
varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are
varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but
it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.
To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills" (1 Corinthians 12:4-11)
There is no connection of that with election for salvation.
There is no such thing at all. But it is good that you acknowledge God's election to salvation.
And that choosing was wholly dependent upon His foreknowledge of our believing in Him.
Ahhhh, "those He foreknew..." in Romans 8:30... Another poster brought that up just a few pages ago, so I'll cut and paste what I said to him/her here:
Yes, we should talk about that word 'foreknew' that Paul uses in Romans 8:30. You will agree, I'm sure, that we must understand Paul's context there. It is possible to understand 'foreknew' as a cognitive knowing beforehand; that is not an invalid understanding of that term in and of itself. If we are to understand it in that sense, though, that makes what Paul is saying to be nonsensical, even contradictory, because in that sense, God foreknows ~ cognitively knows beforehand ~
everyone and
everything. But Paul, in saying "those whom He foreknew," is very clearly referring to a limited group, and thus very clearly implying that there are at least some that He did
not foreknow. So, his use of the word 'foreknew' must have at least a slightly different... :) ...meaning, or connotation.
How then should we understand it? Well, I would submit to you, EG, that in various places in the Bible, knowing something or someone is directly said ~ both in the Old Testament Hebrew and the New Testament Greek ~ in the context of loving and serving someone... doing something for them and... causing something to happen. Consider Genesis 4, where we read that "Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain" (Genesis 4:1). We can assume the same is true subsequently of Abel because of the "And again" at the first of Genesis 4:2. Likewise, in Genesis 4:17, Cain knew his wife, and then in Genesis 4:25, Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth." So this knowing is in a very different sense, obviously, because, just woodenly speaking, of course Adam and Cain knew who their wives were, but knowing in that sense would not cause them to conceive and bear children, right?
But we should understand this 'foreknew' in Romans 8:30 in a very similar sense:
loved beforehand... and even
chose for Himself... beforehand. And that can ~ and should ~ take us back to what John says, as I cited above, that
"We love because He (God) first loved us" (1 John 4:19). Now, yes, God loves all His creation, but He does not extend His mercy to all, but only extends that mercy to those He chooses/elects. That might seem... unloving... but the fact is that He is not obligated to extend that mercy to anyone, as none are deserving of it, and in fact deserving of just the opposite. And Paul tells us why he extended this mercy to some and not all, and that he was wholly within his right to do so. The potter (God, the Creator) has every right over the clay (us, the created), to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use, and so to extend mercy to one but not the other.
There is only one baptism (Eph 4:5).
Well, we are not to baptize a second time those who may not think their baptism ~ and I'm speaking of the water baptism that we administer ~ was "good," or "stuck." If we received the outward sign of the covenant, that's good enough; a second is not needed. But again, John the Baptist says,
"I baptize you with water for repentance, but He Who is coming after me is mightier than I, Whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire" (Matthew 3:11). So there are two types of baptism spoken of there, the first being an outward sign, what we call a sacrament (like Communion in this respect), given to us by God through which we are all encouraged, and the second being the effectual one, the one that actually confers salvation upon a person. The first is a work of man, and it is a work of God.
One is the forgiveness of sin, i.e.., Justification, the other is the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit which I argue is one and the same as baptism in/with/by the Holy Spirit.
I agree, and this is the latter of the two directly above.
So long as the children are old enough to believe and be accountable for any disobedience.
Peter places no age minimum (or maximum) or any other prerequisite on his appeal. He says to the men of Israel, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you
and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to Himself." Presumably, many of these men who heard what Peter was saying had small children, even babies.
That most assuredly is not the case for an eight day old baby.
In the case of babies or children too young to express belief in Christ, the baptism is still about faith, that of their parents, who are trusting that God will, because the baby is the child of believing parents, call them to Himself at some point in the future... or may have already done so, as God can do anything, even extend His mercy and thereby change the heart from stone to flesh, even for a child of any age.
Grace and peace to you, ir cases,
