I have not found that it really says this anywhere. And there are some odd things our minds do and will get up to. And we actually marvel over those odd things we do, or can do, too. We pass them around the internet and laugh about them. Like…optical illusions/mind tricks and…how we can read something that has a large portion of the letters missing and fill in the blanks by the context or…along the lines of phonemic restoration or even how we can almost swear a person said something and they insist they didn’t say it. This last one has been a huge perplexity to me because I realized one day that my family really doesn’t listen intently to each other. There is a constant “you said it, no I didn’t,” thing going on between them all. Jesus understood this about us and even said, Be careful HOW you hear!
What my family does is they hear the first few words and then, strangely,……..fill in the rest themselves! They anticipate what they’re going to hear next and, based on “context” insert the thing they think they will hear next. It’s the most amazing thing. I spent long hours on it trying to figure out what the heck it was about.
The fact that we can do this “not listening intently” thing can lead to confusions, like in my family, but in a situation like a noisy background and still being able to understand what was said (phonemic restoration), it’s actually a helpful thing. But in the case of the latter, one is listening intently because they HAVE to and in the former case, where they don’t HAVE to listen intently, they don’t - they listen in a lazy way and jump ahead to finish for others!
So when you say you don’t think anyone who doesn’t have the down payment of the Spirit wI’ll inherit eternal life, you have done a mixture of listening intently at snippets and not listening intently at other pieces and splicing together segments, and “filling in“ in the same way as the example of my family.
But how to get you to see you have done it is the challenge. I’ve done it too and have then realized what I did, so you would think I could easily show you but it isn’t that easy - the ear is convinced it heard what wasn’t said!
Look at this verse. But look INTENTLY.
Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal: “The Lord knows those who are His;” and, “Everyone who names the name of the Lord is to keep away from wickedness.”
Do you see the quotation marks? Do they do anything? Do they actually connect the two snippets in some way? Or do they actually keep them separate for some particular reason?
