I skipped to chapter 7 because The Bible makes it abundantly clear that God is involved, at least in some measure, in all things that happen. The author seems to think that coming to Christ and receiving salvation is some kind of explosive supernatural event. Yes, God softened my heart and showed me how to believe and trust in Him, and it's ongoing still, moving way slower than I'd like it to... And His overcoming my initial emnity toward Him was in itself a long agonizing process. "No one seeks God" means The Gospel needs to be preached to people. Nobody is going to go to a Christian book shop and load themselves a Study Bible having not been preached at, at least in some manner and measure. If that does happen, then, yes, that is truly a mighty work of God, which I'd think means God has some big plans for that person, even if they don't become a Billy Graham or John MacArthur... "to work and will for His good pleasure". Yes. The initial work of salvation is a precursor to that working of His will, which I'd think corresponds with the "good works prepared beforehand". "prepared beforehand" does not mean they are of His making. It simply means he's designated each believer for a specific purpose or series of purposes. To say that He created the good works is to say that sin is a problem God brought on Himself which I guess technically there's no verses in The Bible to refute that... It does say from Him both good and evil proceed or something like that... I think Job (the Bible narrative ["book"]) gives one a glimpse of what that means. God didn't tell Satan to do all that stuff to Job. He ALLOWED it -- for his testing , to serve as a testament to his righteous character (flying in the face of Satan, his accusor) but also to purify Job so that he could trust evermore in God and love Him all the more.
A proverb in His word tells a Christian (fka Jewish) parent to train their child up in the way of The Lord and they'll not depart from it. Who are these Godly people? Noah continued to believe in God even after the entire rest of civilization had fled to rival makeshift gods. He was a holdover from the days of Adam when God would come down and speak to people, even people like Cain who killed his own brother somehow thinking that would make him look better (I guess?..) , which I'm thinking was probably because the power and sum of sin had not become the sticky prickly web that it'd become by the time the Israelites had settled into The Promised Land. Getting the smallest piece of spiritual insight into most of those guys' heads was like pulling teeth. Even when Jesus, the true light of the world, was with His chosen 12, they still would worry themselves about things like bread the day after He'd got done feeding 5,000 people with a few handfulls of food. I think I had maybe a slightly easier time understanding spiritual truths even before I made the leap to entrust my future to God, because The Holy Spirit is all over this land. Christians, both mighty in faith and lowly, are on almost every section of every town in this country. Some more so than others. There's light shining through street corners and it's doing what light does - illuminating. It's a subliminal light tho, so it's still a Christian's duty to explain it and some people just don't want it. Why is that? I don't know. Christians are partly to blame for the times we are poor ambassadors of Him, and people that are falsely proclaiming His name are not helping either.
But back to my subpoint about the childrearing proverb. The knowledge of God is as old as humanity. Even people before Israel was called to father the 12 tribes, various people groups across the globe worshipped God. The town Jonah was sent to preach to was not in Israel. It was a town within a nation that was infamous to Israel in its day because of their brutality and so forth. God sent Jonah to tell them to repent! And guess what? THEY DID! Some facets of Christianity are tough to get through and accept, especially in this modern world where people, albeit with increasing exceptions, are getting along fairly well and life is generally peaceful, it can become difficult to swallow passages that talk about God's swift judgement on people, both past and future. But there's a lot of Christianity that can be palatable, although you can spin anything to make it sound more difficult than it is. The concept of Hell makes sense when you consider people like Ted Bundy. But what about people that hurl insults and spew hateful rhetoric on Facebook and never apologize? What about people who drive home from a bar when they ought to have designated a driver to take them home, or, if they did and the driver bailed on them, they could have just stayed put and dealt with the couple days of jail time they might get for being drunk in public instead of endangering people's lives? What about people who steal music from the internet (just pretend Spotify isn't around yet for a brief minute) instead of paying the required wages to access it? God does not send people to Hell for those things in and of themself. He has the right to do so and will if you refuse to **acknowledge** your shortcomings and do what you can to repent. And in some instances repentance is a loooong process. Some things are easier to repent of than others and yet still the propensity lurks. Sometimes I find myself not being forgiving toward others. I have to remind myself of Jesus' words regarding that. Sometimes I have to ask Him for help. But I know He is infinitely more lenient toward me than I am to other people and that's coming from somebody who sometimes thinks of kindness as his strongsuit.
I think I started a couple strands of thought that I didn't finish but I don't know who might actually read this and I'm getting exhausted.
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