So there was a lot of philosophers that introduced foreign concepts.

Plaginism, Augustinianism.

Here you have a lot of stuff that was inserted into that early time where the Gnostics were creating these heresies.

John Calvin jumped in there, grabbed elements of this to try to bolster his fight against the Catholic Church.

This is a Reformation dynamic.

He goes back, revives an ancient heresy from the ancient Gnostics.

He leaves the icky stuff, and he pulls out predestination.

And that's his big cudgel to swing at the Catholics and the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic powerhouse.

So let's just take some scriptures here that highlight the fact that this is not an illusion

of choice.

This is not a predestined thing in the sense that they're trying to say it.

There's true actual choice that God gives to his people.

Genesis chapter 6, verses 5 and 6, God repented that he made man and his heart was grieved.

Well, if God doesn't change and he doesn't, and he foredains everything and everything's a foregone

conclusion, how can he repent?

How can his heart be grieved?

He already knows it all.

His counsel is immutable.

So why would this be a problem?

But that's not what the scripture teaches.

He did not ordain those things.

Men chose to do evil.

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