If faith was something that generated from the flesh and behaviour of man, then no Divine Promises could be sure to all the seed Rom 4:16
16 Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all,
No "Divine Promise" (why would those words need to be capitalized???) was ever sure in the idiotic sense that Calvinists want to pretend except to those who love God and respond to Him in faith. No, not even the nation of Israel was guaranteed anything.
In Exodus 32 God is set to destroy Israel for having set up and sacrificed to the golden calf but Moses talked God out of it and so God REPENTED of the harm He said He would do to His people....
Exodus 32: 7 And the Lord said to Moses, “Go, get down! For your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. 8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made themselves a molded calf, and worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!’ ” 9 And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and indeed it is a stiff-necked people! 10 Now therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them. And I will make of you a great nation.”
11 Then Moses pleaded with the Lord his God, and said: “Lord, why does Your wrath burn hot against Your people whom You have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians speak, and say, ‘He brought them out to harm them, to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from Your fierce wrath, and relent from this harm to Your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven; and all this land that I have spoken of I give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ” 14 So the Lord repented from the harm which He said He would do to His people.
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On a side note: If your bible says "relented" instead of "repented" in that last sentence its because the translators were Calvinists and they simply couldn't bring themselves to translated it correctly. The word used in Hebrew means "repented". Look it up if you don't believe me.
This, by the way, isn't the only time when God said He was going to do something and then changed His mind, (which is what the term "repent" means), the most famous of which is recorded in the book of Jonah. God's change of mind concerning Nineveh and Jonah's foolish response to that change of mind, is the major theme of that entire book. It was the anticipation of God repentance that made Jonah not want to go in the first place!
Jonah 3:10 Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it.
Jonah 4:1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he became angry. 2 So he prayed to the Lord, and said, “Ah, Lord, was not this what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarshish; for I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who repents from doing harm. 3 Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live!”
Okay, no back to the topic at hand...
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Notice how God could have utterly destroyed every man woman and child in Israel apart from Moses himself and still accomplished His ever goal. The promise made to Abraham would have still been intact and the pathway to the Messiah would have been still fully in view and on track. God, in no way, would have been defeated in regards to the goals He had set for humanity and the plan of salvation. The destruction of Israel would have been a significant bump in the road but nothing more than that so far as God's big picture plans are concerned but there would have been no such person as Jonah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel or Matthew or Mark or John or Peter or even Paul! There wouldn't have been any of the people that we're familiar with today who called themselves Jews. None of those people would have ever existed.
Now, don't take what I'm saying there too far. There still would have been a people of God and they still would have had the Law of Moses and the Messiah would have still come through that nation but the culture would certainly have been altered to some significant degree and it would have been different people with different names that filled the roles of the prophets and apostles that we are familiar with today.
The point here being two fold, that God is not dependent upon a particular person or group to get his goals accomplished and that just because God says He going to do something for or to a nation, doesn't mean that its set in immutable stone. So says God Himself....
Jeremiah 18:7 [God speaking]"The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, 8 if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will repent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it. 9 And the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, 10 if it does evil in My sight so that it does not obey My voice, then I will repent concerning the good with which I said I would benefit it."
Now that might seem harsh, and it certainly goes directly against anything Calvinists will tell you about who God is and how He works, but what also flies directly in the face of Calvinist's ideas about God is that He is LONGSUFFERING and is slow to anger, especially when it comes to Israel's unbelief....
Isaiah 5:1 Now let me sing to my Well-beloved
A song of my Beloved regarding His vineyard:
My Well-beloved has a vineyard
On a very fruitful hill.
2 He dug it up and cleared out its stones,
And planted it with the choicest vine.
He built a tower in its midst,
And also made a winepress in it;
So He expected it to bring forth good grapes,
But it brought forth wild grapes.
3 “And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah,
Judge, please, between Me and My vineyard.
4 What more could have been done to My vineyard
That I have not done in it?
Why then, when I expected it to bring forth good grapes,
Did it bring forth wild grapes?
5 And now, please let Me tell you what I will do to My vineyard:
I will take away its hedge, and it shall be burned;
And break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down.
6 I will lay it waste;
It shall not be pruned or dug,
But there shall come up briers and thorns.
I will also command the clouds
That they rain no rain on it.”
7 For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel,
And the men of Judah are His pleasant plant.
He looked for justice, but behold, oppression;
For righteousness, but behold, a cry for help.
What was it that God was looking for? What it His glory? What it is majesty? What it for someone to acknowledge His power, knowledge and great size? No, of course it wasn't any of those things at all. God wanted to see justice and righteousness and what He found was the opposite. Was this because God predestined injustice and unrighteousness? Certainly not! He wanted one thing and found its opposite
in spite of His efforts to the contrary. So says God Himself, through the mouth of His prophet Isaiah!
If anyone tells you differently, they are lying to you.
Clete
P.S. I just wanted to spend one more moment to point out the way I present scripture vs. the way b57 uses it. When was the last time you ever saw a Calvinist present to you a whole passage of scripture (i.e. more than one or two verses) in order to establish one of his distinctive doctrines? I don't recall them ever doing so. The larger the passage of scripture, the more problems it presents for the Calvinist's worldview. They can quote whole passages if you find one debating creationism and you can find them quoting long passages when writing about the relationship between a man and his wife and children. They'll quote large swaths of scripture when talking about loving your neighbor, witnessing, water baptism, the end times or any number of other topics that Christians commonly talk about but, when they get focused on their distinctive doctrines like immutability, predestination or the TULIP doctrines, all of a sudden, instead of whole passages its single sentences, instead of context it's pretext, instead of exegesis its eisegesis.
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