Revelation: The Church of Ephesus (Rev 2:1-7), Part 6/6

Send us Fan MailBelief sounds like a simple word until you ask where it comes from. We start with a direct challenge: if no one naturally desires God, what actually gets a person from hearing the gospel to trusting Christ? From there, the conversation turns into a serious back-and-forth over divine enabling, human choice, and what it really means to say salvation is “all of God” without turning faith into a paycheck God owes. We work through key Bible passages that Christians often cite in the Calvinism vs free will debate. Romans 10:17 raises the stakes on what “hearing” means and whether it implies a divine command that not everyone receives. Ephesians 1 forces the question of election and predestination “before the foundation of the world,” and whether being “in Christ” is the result of God’s eternal choice or the result of believing. Along the way, a plane analogy tries to explain how predestination might apply to those who are “in him,” and it gets challenged hard. Then we zoom out to theology and philosophy: God’s decree, omniscience, and the meaning of foreknowledge. Is foreknowledge basically God seeing the future, or is it God setting his love on people beforehand? Romans 11 and the idea of a remnant bring the debate back to the ground, and the tension between divine sovereignty and real responsibility gets personal through a conversion story that happened in prison and still feels like a choice. If you care about Reformed theology, predestination, regeneration, faith, and the question of whether God’s love extends to everyone, this one will keep you thinking. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves theology, and leave a review with where you land on the belief question.Support the showBE PROVOKED AND BE PERSUADED!