59 you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (Deut. 30:6; see also Ezek. 11:19, 36:26–27 — “I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes”). And yet, while God “has mercy on whomever He wills, and He hardens whomever he wills” (Rom. 9:18), we are personally at fault for our own stony heart. Unbelievers are “alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of hearts. They have become callous” on their own apart from God (Eph. 4:18–19a). This is a natural, self-imposed enmity against our Creator, which means our spiritual rebellion is premeditated. Thus, unlike poor Oedipus who, while trying to avoid his horrific fate (i.e., kill his father and marry his mother) only managed to fulfill it, we on the other hand are not dragged along in life against our will but, rather, gladly ratify the Father’s will by all our voluntary choices and actions — for good and for evil. As we can see, God is the mover of history, and all that happens in history is according to His will. So even while we genuinely choose all our actions (“choose this day whom you will serve …” — Josh. 24:15) — the Creator has overriding priority over human volition, defining the condition and extent of our choices (Ps. 139:5). He is the cause of all things that happen in history, and we are the willing agents who respond to and carry out His plan (Phil. 2:13). Only a sovereign and righteous God can enable the genuine freedom of sinners to choose according to their will and still hold them morally culpable for all their actions. Part 3: The Biblical Purpose and Outline of History In Acts 17, Luke provides an account of the Apostle Paul’s witness to the unbelieving intellectuals in Athens — the “ground zero” of secular wisdom in the ancient world. It is interesting to note that when Paul “reasoned” with these philosophers, he did not set Scripture aside in order to find religiously neutral, common ground with them — that is, first make his case on a rational, extra-biblical foundation and then bring Jesus and the resurrection into his argument; rather, he started with and continued to reason from biblical revelation. In the course of his apology, the Apostle challenged several fundamental axioms of the Greek worldview — not least, their understanding of history: “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God …”(Acts 17:26–27).
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