Title: 13
Author: Joe Griffin
Last saved by: Paul J. Davey
Company: GDC

Clanking Chains

		07-12-30-A.CC02-836 /

Personal Sense of Destiny: Confidence of One’s Eternal Future; the Computer of the Divine Decree: ROM & PROM Chips: Sovereignty of God & Free Will of Man

8)	Worry, anxiety, fear, and dread can disorient a believer and cause a shutdown of doctrinal recall.  The doctrine is there but emotion overrides reason.  It is this concept that Loretta Lynn addresses in her Gospel song, “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, but Nobody Wants to Die.”
9)	I have often referenced this song title and it was a favorite principle enjoyed by Joe Hunt during his bout with brain cancer.  You’ve heard the title but maybe the lyric would amplify Loretta’s message:
“Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, but Nobody Wants to Die”
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die;
Lord, I wanna go to heaven, but I don't wanna die.
I long for the day when I'll have a new birth, ʼcause I love living here on earth.
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
Once upon a time there was a man and his name was Hezekiah;
He walked with God both day and night, but he didn't want to die.
He cried, “Oh Lord, please let me live, death is close I know.”
God smiled down on Hezekiah and gave him fifteen years to go.

When Jesus walked upon this earth He knew His Father's plan;
He knew that He must give His life to save the soul of man.
When Judas had betrayed Him, His father heard Him cry;
He was brave until His death, but He didn't want to die.
10)	That would be spiritual death from the imputation of our sins.  Lots of Bluegrass Gospel has to be tweaked and this is no exception, but you get the drift of Loretta’s point.
11)	The objective of the spiritual advance is to get to the point of cognitive invincibility.  With it, the believer can orient and adjust through doctrine to whatever the decree presents including the prospect of physical death.
12)	This does not imply instant adjustment to the justice of God.  Life smacks us down on occasion and we become disoriented and maladjusted.  It may take awhile to refocus on doctrine.
13)	However, if there are no biblical principles resident in the kardia then there can be no recovery.  These ideas must be learned in times of prosperity so that when pressure causes the believer to lose his bearings he has a place to go to stabilize his thinking and make proper application to the circumstance.
14)	If he has a high inventory of doctrinal ideas stored in his soul to reference then he possesses the capacity to regroup and deal with the challenge.
15)	A clear understanding of one’s destiny in the plan of God clears the mind for action.  Understanding the divine decree puts every event of one’s life into perspective.
16)	The divine decree may be imagined as a supercomputer into which God fed in data concerning His relationship to human history and the free-will decisions of every person.
17)	Although not precisely accurate in its terminology, an excellent example to illustrate the divine decree is ROM and PROM chips.
18)	ROM is an acrostic for “read-only memory”: A computer’s primary storage that does not lose its contents when one switches off the power.  ROM contains essential system programs that neither the user nor the computer can erase.  (Webster’s New World Computer Dictionary, 9th ed., 311.)
19)	As an illustration for the divine decree, the ROM chip contains unchanging data programmed by the sovereignty of God.  The information can be read, but not altered.  These data represent God’s knowledge of human history in eternity past and contain all divine decisions regarding the believer.
20)	The decree also may be pictured as containing a PROM chip which contains man’s free-will decisions.  God from His omniscience programmed it with every thought, decision, and action each person would make.
21)	PROM is an acrostic for “programmable read-only memory”: A PROM chip is programmed at the factory.  It can be programmed just once, after which it cannot be altered.  (Webster’s New World Computer Dictionary, 9th ed., 300.)
22)	As an illustration for the divine decree, the PROM chip is programmed “at the factory,” i.e., by God in eternity past.  His omniscience was able to perceive every thought, decision, and action of every person and feed them into the PROM.
23)	Your very thoughts were known to God and decreed to be certainly future from eternity past.  Knowing how you will think, decide, and act, the PROM, now programmed, cannot be altered.

© 2007 by Joe Griffin Media Ministries.  All rights reserved.	www.joegriffin.org