Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: bnr-fos!bnr-public!davem@watmath.waterloo.edu (Dave Mielke) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: thoughts on the recent exchange Message-ID:Date: 14 Aug 89 04:12:49 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada Lines: 41 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article jamesa@amadeus.la.tek.com (James Akiyama) writes: >The problem I have here is what about those who died not fully knowing >Christ? What happens if they wanted to follow Christ but had not yet fully >grasped His glory? I believe (this is really starting to become opinionated) >that you are only accountable for what you know. Adam had not sinned from >his nakedness until he ate of the fruit and noticed he was naked. He was >always naked; but did not become afraid until after eating from the tree of >knowledge. You have raised a fair question to which I shall give a quick answer. I am assuming that you have read other postings of mine and that I won't have to go into too much detail. If I'm wrong then please let me know. I am a firm believer in predestination as described in, among other places, Ephesians 1:11. God, through His foreknowledge, tells us that no one of us would ever want to seek Him on His own terms; this can be seen in Scriptures like Psalm 53:1-5 and Romans 3:10-18. God teaches, in Scriptures like John 6:44, that the only way that someone will begin seeking Him on His own terms is if He intervenes to cause such a desire to exist in that person. There are numerous Scriptures that teach that God always accomplishes exactly what He sets out to do, e.g. Isaiah 55:10-11 and Numbers 23:19. He also makes this claim explicitly with respect to salvation in Scriptures like Romans 9:15. My basic answer to your question is that if someone has died without truly having accepted Christ as his saviour then that person was not elected to salvation by God. Please permit me one more comment with respect to this paragraph of yours. Even after his fall, Adam's nakedness was not a sin. The Scriptures do not describe nakedness in and of itself to be a sin anywhere. God uses physical nakedness as a symbol of spiritual nakedness, i.e. as a symbol of the fact that we stand completely exposed before Him. God had not given man an inherrent fear of being publically naked until the fall as a way of illustrating to us that we had nothing to fear from Him before the fall and plenty to fear from Him afterward. Dave Mielke, 613-726-0014 856 Grenon Avenue Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K2B 6G3