Predestination And Free-Will

Can Unsaved Man Cooperate With God?

 
Have you ever witnessed to a Catholic, a Catholic who knows what their church really teaches? Do they not say that a person must cooperate with God’s grace in order to maintain their works-based salvation. They consider this cooperation to be a lifelong process. In a similar fashion, free-will teachers say that the will of God works with the will of man to effect a man’s salvation. This idea is unscriptural. The Bible says that the will of God works AGAINST the will of man and vice versa:
 

Galatians 5:17 – “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.”

 

To say anything positive about the will of unsaved man is to make man better than he is – better than GOD says he is.
And this is the main problem with the free-will gospel.

 
Man has a sin nature that is continually rebelling against his Creator as we quoted earlier:
 

Jeremiah 17:9 – “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

 

Genesis 6:5 – “And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

 
Look at what Paul said, and this after he was already saved:
 

Romans 7:18 – “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not.”

 
Paul said “to will is present with me” because as a saved individual, the Spirit of God was in him, warring against the flesh, in which dwelleth no good thing. However, an unsaved individual does not have the Spirit of God and so that individual cannot cooperate with God.
 
As mentioned earlier, the Bible says that the unsaved man wants nothing to do with the will of God even though he may think he does:
 

Proverbs 13:19 – “The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul: but it is abomination to fools to depart from evil.”

 

Proverbs 16:2 – “All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the LORD weigheth the spirits.”

 

Proverbs 21:2 – “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts.”

 

Proverbs 30:12 – “There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness.”

 

Romans 8:7 – “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. 8 So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”

 
Summary: This article is a section of a much larger article on the Bible doctrines of Election and Predestination called “Who accepts Whom?“. You are urged to check out that larger article for many other thought provoking questions pertaining these “Doctrines of Grace”. — RM Kane
 

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