Acts 16:13-15 “And on the Sabbath day we went out of the city to the riverside, where prayer was customarily made; and we sat down and spoke to the women who met there. (14) Now a certain woman named Lydia heard us. She was a seller of purple from the city of Thyatira, who worshiped God. The Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul. (15) And when she and her household were baptized, she begged us, saying, "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay." So she persuaded us.”
And so, the question is then asked, that if men choose of their own free will not to believe the message of the gospel, where does God’s predestination come in? The answer to that question is that God ensures that all unbelievers of their own free will reject the gospel message. So how does God do that? He does that by blinding the minds of the unbelievers, so that they cannot see the truth of the gospel message. And so, in order to establish the truth from scripture, that God blinds the minds of unbelievers, I have once again quoted four witnesses that all confirm that same truth to us. The four witnesses are the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus, the prophet Isaiah and the apostle Paul. The first witness quoted above, is the Holy Spirit. In the above passage of scripture, the Holy Spirit gives us some insight into just how God prevents the unbelievers from responding to the message of the gospel. For in this passage, we see the apostle Paul and his team preaching the gospel to a number of Jewish women. But even though all the women heard the same message preached at the same time, only one believed, i.e. Lydia. So what was different about Lydia that she believed, but the others did not? The Holy Spirit tells us that the Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul. In other words, because Lydia was chosen for salvation, the Lord allowed her to understand the message of the gospel, while He did not allow the others to understand, because they had not been chosen for salvation. And so, we see that the method that God uses to predestine the lives of unbelievers is that He hides the truth of the gospel from their understanding. In other words, if God has not predestined one for salvation, then that person could hear the gospel message preached to them a hundred times and they still would not believe it, simply because they do not understand it, for to them it is foolishness.
Michael E.B. Maher
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