Did you read the verse...He does His will in the armies of heaven and amongst the inhabitants of the earth and none shall stay His hand. God answers to no one and no one can thwart His will. He is the LORD God omnipotent. He has no peers or rivals. This is what people were inferring when they said your god was too small. Your understanding of God renders Him less than He is.
Under the terms of your agreement, there is no problem. But that wasn't the terms of the agreement between the Father and the Son. All that the Father had given Him would come to Him. That was the agreement.
They were dead in their trespasses and sins. They were as the children of wrath living opposed to God and dominated by the evil one.
The text of the NT was written by the poor on papyrus, so the originals and earlier copies disintegrated. The educated Alexandrian theologians who tweaked the NT to more easily accommodate their gnosticism. wrote on expensive vellum which survived longer and therefore some extant copies survive from earlier times than the surviving copies from the Asia Minor stream. One cannot read authenticity into the production age of manuscripts.
We can begin with a presupposition that what the the word of God says is true. We should not presuppose that what commentator X or Y claims the word of God is saying or teaching is correct. We should read the actual words: acknowledging what they do actually say and what they don't actually say. And then we should consider all the possible things that what they do say could mean, and not narrow that down by imposing limitations based on presuppositions gleaned from commentaries but not plainly stated anywhere in the Bible.
I see only scripture references you claim mention sovereignty. Post an actual text that mentions sovereignty as exhaustive divine pre-determinists image it.
We can be certain of what scripture actually says. The problem for exhaustive divine pre-determinists is that what they claim the Bible is teaching the Bible does not even say. They don't start with determining what the Bible says. They start with what their systematic theologians tell them they should find, and impose that on parts of verses and verses wrested out of context.Ok, I think I see what your saying and while I don't exactly disagree, you can end up doing nothing at all except wavering between one interpretation and the next. Eventually you have to apply the meaning even if your interpretation is wrong. Better to try, fall, be corrected and try again than do nothing except brainstorm.
My 5 cents worth.
This is a tricky question so it's not a yes or no answer. The question has two different answers, because it all depends on who's perspective we look at it from.
