Malachi 7:13
Malachi 7:13 (see also Isaiah 65:2)
“From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from My statutes and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you,” says the LORD of hosts. “But you say, ‘How shall we return?’”
This is the conditional nature of salvation. God is willing, but we must be also. Is such a concept so far removed from Matthew 23:37 and Isaiah 65:2? Isaiah 55:6 states: “Seek the LORD while He may be found; Call upon Him while He is near.”
Question: If you believe in a kind of Election where some people are going to be saved, no matter what, and that some people are going to perish, no matter what, then how is God “near” to either type of people?
Answer: For the one group, He couldn’t be any closer, while for the other, He couldn’t be any further. Are our Calvinist brothers going to chalk this one up as yet another one of those “great mysteries of the Bible”?
