Personal Soteriological Convictions: For your critique
This is what I personally believe, you may call them my Top Ten Personal Soteriological Convictions.
1. God has exhaustive definite knowledge of past, present, and future. This knowledge includes exhaustive knowledge of all possibilities. This is what I believe as part of omniscience of God.
2. God according to the Scriptures has chosen those who will be saved long before they were born, he has chosen them by grace apart from what they will become or what they will do. In this respect God already has provided a way to salvation even before the world began. This is what I believe as predestination.
3. God did not speak of predestination of the rest to damnation but deducing from my statement 2, God has left the rest to their own devices and deducing further from my statement 1, God does so in righteousness and justice because of his foreknowledge and because God is not the author of sin and God does so because He is utterly sovereign.
4. God’s definite knowledge of the future does not undermine human free will, hence belief in fatalism is unnecessary even if one believes in predestination. This is how I believe omniscience is reconciled with free will.
5. God’s Sovereignty entails that He approves of whatever it is that occurs in the universe. Some He directly cause to occur, in this sense He authors them, the rest He does not directly cause them. But since it is He who approves, it goes without saying that this is, in a certain sense, part of His decree. If He approves it He decrees it because if He did not, He can put a stop to it. This is what I believe as part of omnipotence and sovereignty of God.
6. God is not the author of sin, He does not tempt man to sin. He hates sin. This is what I regard as part of God’s holiness and righteousness.
7. God leaving man to his own devices, means, that in his sin-marred free will, he is bound to sin more and bound to go to hell for it is sin that enslaves him and it is what he will desire. This is what I believe as the condition of man with respect to sin.
8. By God’s intervention, he regenerates man while he is yet in sin, this he has done according to his mercy that the purpose of election might stand not on the soul chosen but on the one who has chosen. Once regenerated, he is bound to personally desire God and serve Him. By this scheme man’s salvation is made secure because God is the author and finisher of faith. This is what I believe as Divine grace and eternal security.
9. God desires all men to come to the knowledge of truth–this proclaims the mercy and love of God and for that he also provided a way. But God also desires to punish the wicked but will endure them with longsuffering until the appointed time to judge them–this proclaims the justice, holiness and righteousness of God. This is how I believe Divine justice and love is expressed.
10. We have no way of knowing definitely who the elect are except for what we can discern–they bear fruit, the believe in Jesus, they hate sin, etc. We have no way of truly knowing who they all are until the appointed time, it is one of those secret things reserved only unto the Lord. This is an appeal to Deuteronomy 29:29.
Scripture?references: Acts 4:28; Romans 8:29-30; 1 Corinthians 2:7?; Ephesians 1:5, 11; 1 Peter 1:2
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