Dealing with lies concerning what I believe among those who supposedly understand salvation for all, is just disappointing.
A person can state their belief and be good; however the moment they begin to tell lies concerning about another person's belief, is another.
This is not a thing of peace, I am quite self-sufficient. It is about the purpose of why this place exists.
A difference of opinion is one thing, but telling me that because I believe in free will that I do not believe in the Sovereignty of God.
Why would a person even put up with that?
Yup! It's never been an issue of anyone here not believing in God's Sovereignty. It's always been about the villification of those that believe in free will as well. Anyone that believes in the Universal Restoration believes in God's Sovereignty, but how God in His Sovereignty chooses to relate to each of us and to acheive His end goals is where there's seemed to be absolutely no tolerance towards those with an understanding of free will. Someone kept throwing in my face that free will wasn't Scriptural and wasn't to be found in the whole of the Bible, and they tend to use the KJV as a Universalist. So, I picked up my Strong's Concordance yesterday morning and looked up Sovereign and Sovereignty and like I figured, it's not to be found in the whole of the KJV. Not even a word specifically implying it in either the Hebrew or Greek, according to Strong's. (I read really fast, but count slowly sometimes.) But with Sovereignty not being found in Strong's in a translation that was produced when belief in God's Sovereignty was at it's zenith (although I realize that there have been countless revisions to the KJV), I decided to see if the Bible said anything about freewill, simply from the standpoint of the Concordance. And here's what I found. In the KJV these terms are used and here's how many times they're used:
Strong's Concordance says that the KJV uses the word "free" 58 times, freewill 17 times, freed 2 times, freely 16 times, freewoman 3 times, selfwill is used 1 time, selfwilled is used 2 times, and liberty is used 27 times. I got lazy on counting out the word "will" so I asked Biblegateway.com how many times "will" is used and it counted 'em up as 2908 times, willing is used 54 times, willeth is used 1 time, wilt is 208 times, and would is used 437 times.
Everyone with any Scriptural sense is going to acknowledge that many, many of those uses of the word "Will" are going to be in the sense of the will of God, but I'd be deeply surprised if it wasn't over 500 that refer to the will of man, because of my own Church background where man's will was actually taught from the Scriptures rather than improvised by nice sounding flowery new age-isms like you find in a lot of Churches that don't keep it to the Book. Again, no one who believes in the Universal Restoration has ever asserted that God isn't Sovereign. It's the unwillingness of some to acknowledge that man has a will that's anything but corrupt where those who believe in free will take issue. Liberty seems to be the KJV word that comes closer to the idea of what people mean that use the term "free will" or "freewill" around here, although free, freely, would, and will would also be [KJV] Scriptural terms for what someone believing in free will is referring to.
God overrides our free will when it's in our best interests or when it's in the best interests of His own glory, or where it relates to a Covenant issue that He's keeping to the thousandth generation, as when He turns the heart of the king/prime minister/president where He wishes. But not much besides. It's pretty much our own decision and varying degrees of blindness that determines whether or not our socks are matching that we're wearing today.
Most of the time, His overriding of someone's will winds up being about His providing hand to someone that's keeping Covenant with Him, or at least on their knees before Him pushing past every demonic obstacle in prayer. What He did with Pharaoh was in the behalf of Israel, what He did with Christ Jesus was about our provisions, etc., etc.
People confuse the Jubilee principle of the Scriptures with the natural laws of the harvest that Jesus described in Mark 4. The years of release and years of Jubilee where God demands the preaching of liberty throughout the land are entirely different from the normal years where the free will of man is where it's generally going to naturally flow towards as to whether or not there's liberty or captivity. There are no Scriptural laws of the harvest (i.e. 2Corinthians 9, Galatians 6, et. al.) without free will. And 2Corinthians 8:12 says that this is according to what a man has and not according to what he doesn't have, so the arguments about all of the externals and internals that man seemingly has no control over are irrelevant to the conversation. But at the same time, whenever we reach a fullness of time on certain things, God is going to have every single fruit and every single seed that corresponds with His predetermined will for Him to have.
