Forget the appeal to nuanced translation "
error". Do you honestly think you have discovered something here that has escaped examination by those that have come before us for two thousand years? The
chronological snobbery you are exhibiting is astounding.
Your disagreement is not with me, but with Scripture. From my post above using a small sampling of the many teachings in Holy Writ about the
total inability of the lost—Jer. 17:9; Mark 7:21-23; Eph. 2:2; Eph. 2:4-5; Titus 3:5; John 3:19; Rom. 3:10-12; 5:6; 6:16-20; Eph. 2:1,3;1 Cor. 2:14—it is undeniable that
the lost have no moral ability to seek after the righteousness of God.
It is only
when God the Holy Spirit
regeneratively replaces their lost hearts of stone with one of flesh (Eze. 36:26) that the lost are given the moral ability to believe and then
irrevocably evidence
the first fruits of their regeneration—faith and repentance.
The only "response" from the unbeliever will be "No!". God the Holy Spirit is not impotent. Only the unregenerate elect are
salvifically "drawn" (
dragged in the actual Greek) by the Holy Spirit. The lost are not morally
wounded. They are morally
dead to all matters of the righteousness of God. Until resurrected (
born again,
regenerated) they can only sin more or sin less. The lost are not able to
not sin.
We should be in awe that God saves anyone, for all are
born fallen in Adam and deserve no mercy and grace from God. The glorious wonder is that God mercifully saves
even one person, versus the great multitude that cannot be numbered Scripture teaches us will be brought into the Kingdom. Would that we give God
all the glory (one-hundred percent) for our salvation rather than clinging to some humanistic notion of our own wisdom, our supposed openness to being "
wooed" by the Holy Spirit, choosing rightly while our neighbor chooses wrongly, etc.
AMR