NJMARK50, I had all day a warm and fuzzy feeling in expectancy to your reply. For some reason I cannot explain, I was looking forward for your answer like a child looking forward to receive a precious gift. And you sharing your time and wisdom with me, and the others I guess, is indeed a precious gift.
You say you are surprised that I believe God has the capability to sin, and I understand why. It was never meant to affirm that God would ever sin. That is absolutely impossible because He would cease to be God, and that is yet another impossibility. The human languages cannot express certain concepts, and of course, I could always be wrong when trying to do so. We try hard to understand certain limitations that God Himself has, especially in view of the universally accepted concept that God is Omnipotent. And Omnipotence cannot place limitation because if it does, then it is not Omnipotence anymore.
This was the perspective I wrote those words. Perhaps if you would have continued the statement with the rest of its context it may have been easier to grasp.
As support, I ask you, is God capable of forgetting anything? Yet we are told that when we repent of our sins and turn around from our sinful ways and accept the gift of Salvation freely offered by our Lord Jesus Christ, God will cast our sins in the deep of the sea and remember them no more. Is He actually forgetting them? I don't think so, not in the terms of human forgetfulness. God, in my opinion, will never ever hold any of our sins against us, and that is what I understand by God forgetting our sins.
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By "doing any good of ourselves" I meant doing any good that could come out of ourselves. And likewise, I meant doing any good that could be seen as good by God's standards, not human. Of course we can do good. Even secular people can do and do good. I stated that "Unless we are regenerated by the Power of the Holy Spirit, we are incapable of doing any good of ourselves,". I do not believe I stated that we must first be regenerated before responding to the drawing of the Holy Spirit. It is obvious that if the Holy Spirit causes the regeneration, it is He who must start and perform the regeneration, hence, His call or drawing occurs first. If my words were not clear, I must apologize. The sequence of events in the process of Salvation is: God enables us to hear His "voice"; God calls us; the Holy Spirit enables us to hear the call; the regeneration process starts.
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We are all born as a triune being, body, soul and spirit. In His Eternal Wisdom and Sovereignty, God has predestined a people for Salvation. When the Holy Spirit approaches a human being it causes one of two possible reactions: acceptance or rejection. It is not our choice to reject Him or accept Him. That has been preordained even before Creation. The Grace of God is indeed irresistible, but only the chosen ones are able to "feel" or "react" to it. The Pharisees and the people in Jerusalem were Israelites; they did know the law, some because they spent their lives studying it, some because were taught by the others. Yet, how can they accept something that have not been enabled to accept? Just as a magnet attracts a metal object, the Holy Spirit attracted the ones that were chosen by God for Salvation, and rejected the others. I know it's not an easy concept to grasp or fully understand, but when I encounter a concept that goes beyond my human capability to understand, I pull myself out of it and try to see it from God's perspective, from a perspective of total and absolute sovereignty. My personal capability to understand or not becomes irrelevant.
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We do know that the jailer and his household were saved that night. And because the Bible tells us so, we must accept that, in His Sovereign decision, the jailer and his household were part of the people predestined to Salvation. (Please also notice that only the KJV of the Bible states "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ..." while most other say "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ...")
As I pointed before, Salvation begins with God enabling us to hear His call and receive the Holy Spirit who begins the process of regeneration.
May His Name be always praised!!!
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