To start with, Maybe you should click on my name and see my religion…
Okay, so:
God chooses who will be enlightened. these people will obviously be in said denomination, saved and able to make free choices. Correct?
Okay. You’re Buddhist, or at least inclined in that direction.
God does not choose who will be “enlightened”. He chooses those who will be saved. Having chosen them He changes their nature from one which willfully hates and rejects Him to one which willingly loves Him and seeks to conform their will to His.
Within the Augustinian tradition (whether Roman Catholic or Protestant) there is an explicit rejection of the concept of free will as that term is usually understood. That is to say, because humans are born at enmity with God–their wills are wholly at variance with God–they will never of their own free choice choose to worship God. They will create some sort of religious faith of their own choosing, some sort of ‘safe’ religion which pleases them and ultimately enshrines them in the place which appropriately belongs only to God Almighty.
The confusing thing for many, initially, is that God does not make His choices based upon any innate goodness in those whom He elects, nor because of some sort of innate undesirableness in those whom He condemns. ALL human righteousness is as filthy rags in God’s eyes, all of it tainted with human sin and selfishness. He is not more impressed with the merely-human goodness of a Mother Teresa or of a Billy Graham than He is with the abject wickedness of an Adolf Hitler or Timothy McVeigh. If Billy Graham or Mother Teresa are acting in complete disregard to the will of God in their works of preaching or of mercy, then their works are no more acceptable to Him than if they had not done them.
Thus, the goodness of a Gautama Buddha, a Lao Tse, of a Nichiren Daishonin, or of a Mahatma Gandhi are of no account in the eyes of God. His standard of righteousness demands absolute perfection from conception to death, and we are forewarned in Scripture that none will achieve such perfection. From a merely-human perspective such people may be relatively better than others, but their relative goodness is not salvific–it does not save. Only God saves and He does so for His own reasons, without respect to the goodness or righteousness of the individual.
HAVING been saved, of course, the Christian is understood to grow in righteousness, to be daily conformed ever more closely to the image of Christ. But increase in righteousness represents an ‘evidence’ of salvation, not a cause of salvation, and not even an absolute proof thereof. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone for the glory of God alone.
