In one of his letters on the importance of Systematic Divinity, Andrew Fuller deals with the seeming inconsistency between Divine predestination and human responsibility.
He points out the difference between the reasoning of the fleshly mind versus the Christian.
A fleshly mind may ask, “How can these things be?” How can Divine predestination accord with human agency and accountableness? But a truly humble Christian, finding both in his Bible, will believe both, though he may be unable fully to understand their consistency; and he will find in the one a motive to depend entirely on God, and in the other a caution against slothfulness and presumptuous neglect of duty. And thus a Christian minister, if he view the doctrine in its proper connexions, will find nothing in it to hinder the free use of warnings, invitations, and persuasions, either to the converted or the unconverted. Yet he will not ground his hopes of success on the pliability of the human mind, but on the promised grace of God, who (while he prophesies to the dry bones, as he is commanded) is known to inspire them with the breath of life.
- Andrew Fuller
I quoted Spurgeon here in a similar post a while back.
work is not so brought about, Luke xvi. ult. Hence said Abraham to the rich man in hell, ‘If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.’ Never did these, conjunctly or severally, appear in any, as in any, as in Christ, who ‘spake as never man spake.’ But behold the issue, John xii. 37, 38. ‘But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they believed not on him: that the saying Esaias the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake, ‘Lord, who hath believed our report? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?’
“I recollect an Arminian brother telling me that he had read the Scriptures through a score or more times, and could never find the doctrine of election in them. He added that he was sure he would have done so if it had been there, for he read the Word on his knees. I said to him, ‘I think you read the Bible in a very uncomfortable posture, and if you had read it in your easy chair, you would have been more likely to understand it. Pray, by all means, and the more, the better, but it is a piece of superstition to think there is anything in the posture in which a man puts himself for reading: and as to reading through the Bible twenty times without having found anything about the doctrine of election, the wonder is that you found anything at all: you must have galloped through it at such a rate that you were not likely to have any intelligible idea of the meaning of the Scriptures.’”
