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Is God being the First Cause of those decisions?

If He is not then He is not sovereign? See below…

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Loraine Boettner says that God foreknows what will occur because he has, according to his good pleasure, "freely and unchangeably foreordain[ed] whatever comes to pass" (Reformed Doctrine of Predestination, p. 46). In other words, God foresees all events and actions because they have been fixed and rendered certain according to his good pleasure – "the great first cause".

Yep, isn’t it grand that God is He who is—God, who can do all things according to His holy nature. Just like Him to do something MJM (or anyone) can’t fully understand. I guess that is what He gets for being the boss. Being God has its privileges.

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Therefore, it is my contention that if Calvinists maintain that human actions are fixed and set, not according to God's foreknowledge of them, but according to his good pleasure, then the Calvinian claim that God only permits sin is totally misleading. In the end, God is the first cause of all human actions, including sinful ones.

Yes, your contention is Arminian—. Though God is the FIRST CAUSE of all that has/will/can happen He may do this without violating the “free agency” of man and thus hold man accountable for sin. He does this as only God himself can do it (Acts 2:23). May I ask you as God does in Scripture, “Who art thou that repliest against God” (Rom 9:20)? Are you the POT going to tell the POTTER He can’t do as He pleases with His creation? Are you an Arminian so willful that you are willing to wave your will in the face of God and tell God His will is wrong?

—I do believe it is better to interact with the Scripture, so once again, how do you exegete Acts 2:23, where we see perfect sovereignty and free agency:

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Acts 2:23 Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain:

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If man can make a free decision, then by definition, it was possible for him to decide otherwise.

Yes, man can chose otherwise—you got it <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/bravo.gif" alt="" />, but he will chose to make a foreordained choice (for his own various reasons) which God fore-ordained (without being accounted guilty of sin, etc.)—Acts 2:23. Remember I told you it was a mystery. Would the illustration of one of Shakespeare's plays assist here, or have you already dismissed that example?

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God is not a puppet. God foreknows all of the future free decisions of man, and, in lieu of his foreknowledge of them, he sometimes turns the hearts of men (Pro. 21:1) or prevents them from fulfilling their plans (Pro. 16:9) in order to accomplish his own purposes (Pro. 19:21). Man's freedom is limited. God is still sovereign.

Now think about your statement here that is dependent only on God’s foreknowledge and not on His fore-ordination of all things. While I do believe as you stated, “Man's freedom is limited” and “God is still sovereign” it is not merely because of God’s foreknowledge—it something more? Ask yourself, “Can God have foreknowledge of something He did not first foreordain?” <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/Ponder.gif" alt="" /> God's foreknowledge and fore-ordination run together as the two sides of an eternal coin. Consider this, if God does not first ordain “something” then He could not be God, but the one who foreordained “it” would be ? Put another way, if God did not first foreordain something then someone else must (or else it would not exist for God to have knowledge of it), and thus he could foreordain that God can no longer be God and have no knowledge of this fact and thus cease to exist—if this where true Satan would have foreordained it long ago. God is not a puppet because He foreordained He would never be one-and He knows it.

Rom 8:29-30