Hi Hamish, thanks for commenting.

You are quite right to challenge those who claim we are innocent before we choose or reject God. God will not condemn us for failing to do the impossible. Rather he will condemn us for our sins freely committed. So in the case of the person who has never heard the gospel of Jesus, such a person will not be condemned for failing to believe in Jesus, but for being greedy or hateful or disobeying his parents and for ignoring what he knows of God from creation.

Hamish, I think you may be raising the question of whether the Bible teaches single or double-predestination.

Personally, I think the distinction may be somewhat semantic, in that for God to pass over some, when choosing others does not seem much different from saying that God chose some as “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction” for the good purpose of displaying the “riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory”. (See Romans 9:20-23)

On the other hand, there does seem to be a certain cautiousness in spelling out the precise nature of how God’s sovereignty is expressed in election for those who end up under his judgment.

So in the passage just cited, Paul uses a “what if” argument to make his point, to indicate that he is able to imagine a reason for such a difficult teaching, and I presume his imagination is sanctified at this point.

And yet, perhaps we ought to reflect that “what if” caution when we speak of the topic.

But my big point was to challenge the assumption that God’s complete sovereignty cannot co-exist with real human responsibility.