Author: Joe
Last saved by: Auth User
Company: GDC

99-05-13.JSH-139 / 

© 1999  Joe Griffin

Faith-Rest Drill: Doctrine of Divine Decrees: The Decree Itself; Printouts

III.	The Decree Itself:
1)	The cause of some of the events in the divine decrees is human volition.
2)	Your decisions were percieved by divine omniscience and God wrote them into your PROM chip.
3)	Remember that the entering of data on a PROM chip occurs after the chip is manufactured.
4)	This means that each decision you make was written into your PROM chip in eternity past.
5)	However, God does not wait until the events of human history transpire in order to write data into your chip.
6)	The omniscience of God wrote your thoughts, decisions, and actions into your PROM chip in eternity past by means of omniscience.
7)	In the case of every free will act, the decree provides the following:
1.	The agent shall be a free agent.  At physical birth you were selected for human life by the imputation of soul life which contained free will.  This human volition is never coerced which means that everyone is accountable for his own decisions.
		NOTE:	In order for any person to exercise his free will, he must first of all exist.  Human life is proof of divine selection.  Life itself is an expression of grace.  Therefore, God never rejects anyone.  Every unbeliever has used his God-given free will to reject both the grace of God and the love of God.

2.	The antecedents of every act in question shall be what they shall be.  This is the playing out of cause and effect.  Yesterday’s decisions are the cause for today’s choices.  Today’s choices are the cause of tomorrow’s ramifications.
NOTE:	Antecedent: Applies to that which has preceded and may therefore be in some degree responsible for what follows.  (WN9CD )
3.	All present conditions of the act shall be what they are.  Facts are facts and you can’t escape reality and God will not make reality go away.  We must therefore learn to deal with our own decisions.
4.	The act shall be perfectly spontaneous and free on the part of the agent.  There is no coercion or involvement by God in any way, in any part, or in any sense.  You make the choice from free will.  God writes your decision into your PROM chip.  As a result, all that is written into the PROM chips of the computer of divine decrees:
5.	Shall be certainly future.  All human decisions will definitely take place at a certain point in time but each has been known by God from eternity past.
8)	Incidentally, these five principles disprove the false theology of hyper-Calvinism which recognizes the sovereignty of God but ignores the free will of man.
9)	By the same token, these five principles will also serve to disprove the claims of those who are proponents of determinism.
IV.	Printouts:
1)	There are several printouts that we could examine both for the believer and unbeliever, but for the moment we will note only foreknowledge.

2)	Foreknowledge is not the same as omniscience.  It is more limited because it deals with only the actual and only with believers.
3)	Foreknowledge refers only to those things which are within the decrees related to believers only.
4)	The decree alone establishes certainty.  Nothing could be foreknown until it was first decreed.
5)	God’s decrees never originate from foreknowledge but are determined by omniscience.
6)	The divine decrees are therefore based on omniscience while foreknowledge is based on the divine decree.
7)	Therefore, knowing that with our free will we would believe in Christ, foreknowledge allows God to elect us.
8)	The Greek word for election is ™klektÒj which means “chosen, selected, set apart for privilege, to gather, to count.”
9)	In essence, God read the printout and agreed that it was a correct counting of those who would use their free will to believe in Christ.
10)	He then elected or chose those people for certain privileges and opportunities which are unique to the Church Age believer.
11)	Through the verification of foreknowledge God is able to declare who the elect are.
12)	But election is a function of the divine decrees since our decision to believe in Christ is programmed into the PROM chip.