IRT: "Question: If the rescuers had, with the best intentions, thrown out a lifeline to those dead, frozen people floating in the ocean could they have grasp it, the lifeline, and saved themselves?
Of course you know the answer. This necrotic condition, deadness, is the condition of all men since the fall of our first parents. We cannot grasp the lifeline unless we are first made alive. We cannot come out of the tomb, like Lazarus, until the Lord effectually calls us through regeneration. We, like those poor, dead, necrotic bodies in "Titanic," cannot respond to the lifeline of the gospel unless we are vivified, made alive."
You are overdrawing an analogy. There is no indication in the Bible that a person is made alive before they believe. A person, though spiritually dead, is not so dead as they cannot respond to the light of God's life giving grace. You might as well say that believers cannot be saved because they are dead with Christ!
"Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him" (Romans 6:8)
So trying to equate spiritually dead with being unable to answer God's call is an overdrawn analogy and logical fallacy.
"And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring." Acts 17:26-28
IRT: "We believe that the Bible teaches that salvation is of the Lord from beginning to end."
Good. So do I, and the Lord has decreed that we must obey Him to be saved (Hebrews 5:9).
