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Chapter 3
The WONDER of GOD'S WORD
and the NEED to AVOID POLLUTANTS
not in the chains of varied philosophies,
but in the commitment to keeping to it and it alone!
How one exults in the precision and harmony of the word of God, and laments at the distortions so often made of it in order to facilitate some preferred philosophy or desired result!
Is it not wonderful that past all the centuries of tumult, as hypocrites seek plums from the hand of religion, as invaders seek to destroy the Bible and its people, as the misled zealously over-correct for this fault or that, that the actual word of God is not merely not lost, but is not even submerged like a discrete submarine in the presence of surface vessels, but continues to assault sin, invite repentance, define its terms, disclose the reality of God and publish the Gospel which He alone has both provided and defined! The word of God IS wonderful.
In this Chapter, elements of this are in view, and these will then be placed in the setting earlier provided.
First then let us return to our well loved lakeside post by the waters of the wonders of predestination and the ways of will.
Of interest is an oft-repeated error that some make of Deuteronomy 29. Let us inspect this in order to see a further example of the word of God maintaining its independence from convenient misuse, and so preserving its unimpaired lustre for man, that most blessed creation whose woes are the mere reflections of the misuse of will, its results both immediate and direct, and lengthy and protracted, sometimes affecting an individual, a race, an environment, an environment of terms, the psyches and the sorrows of man.
Those who delight to dwell on the sorrows, however, and they must be faced, often appear to forget or at least suppress from the torch-light of their minds that these are the other side, the obverse, of the excellent wonder that is the soul and spirit and mind of man. If you crash your scooter when young, well it is perhaps a tiny matter of repair, with no inordinate sorrow at any loss. If you crash you bike, it is becoming expensive, and the heart may respond more. If you banish the beauty of your car, it becomes a matter of your licence, your possible points lost on it, your wallet in some persistent degree, and perhaps your very body.
If you crash your Lear jet, the matters intensity and ramify, although you may not be present to face them, there are ... others!
If man crashes his SOUL, and inveighs against his spirit (like a drunken 'teen-ager, avenging the slings and arrows of society or his mates or girl-friend, by seeking a closer acquaintance with a lamp-post, or a tipsy fool seeking to refashion the evening with lurid, psychedelic drugs changing a landscape which is so only in his distorting mind), then the results are intense and immense, far greater than a casual destruction by a needless crash of a Boeing 737, or for that matter, or a returning space vehicle.
The results bear some relationship to the realities involved! Crash what is made in the image of God and you have anguish as well as agony, wounds to love as well as to mind and body, divorce not merely from purity of heart which might have been forged to some measure amid the stresses of impenitence, at least in hope, but from the probity of soul which is its necessary base. While that utter purity which only God can give is one thing, even relative purity is another, and to foul the latter is like taking cancer-stricken lungs, and attaching new cancers by an operation.
It is ghastly even to say ? It is far more so to live; and millions do it, desiring psychological anodynes in food, drink, drugs, 'love-affairs' (heartless self-indulgences, self-indulgences on a grand scale, like bombing cities for thrill), excitements and the like. Amidst all this is the love, the work, the redemptive work, the appeal, the offer to anneal and even to heal, made by the God of creation.
His ways are not hidden. Indeed, in Isaiah 45, He declares this (and it is most important that theologians cease infusing philosophic nostrums into this biblical field, so confusing base data):
"For thus says the Lord,
Who created the heavens,
Who is God,
Who formed the earth and made it,
Who has established it,
Who did not create it in vain,
Who formed it to be inhabited:
"I am the Lord, and there is no other.
I have not spoken in secret,
In a dark place of the earth;
I did not say to the seed of Jacob,
‘Seek Me in vain’;
I, the Lord, speak righteousness,
I declare things that are right."
First, God identifies Himself, creator of universe and man, solitary author and performer in the work. Then He identifies His word, as if an employer first made himself known, and then his rules, routines and perspectives.
What is shown in this latter case here ? Firstly, it is stressed that the authority is ONE. Alternatives and options instead of Him are not in existence.
Secondly, His speech is manifest, open, public, unesoteric, unhidden, well-known, declared.
Thirdly, it is implied that this earth does have hidden speech, clandestine ideas and the like, but what He has to say is not of this type, order or disposition.
Fourthly, just as He did not create the earth in a futile expenditure of energy, but in order that man, whom He created, might inhabit it, so He did not create man in it in order that he might be a disoriented, dishevelled, mentally awry, spiritually bewildered item in a vast spiritual program, like a nong, a demoted performer, a robot or a philosopher of stone. He so made the universe, the earth, and man, that neither were the former futile nor was the last driven to fuitility in a reckless, mindless operation like driven snow on the side-walk, equipped in man's case to reflect on his position, but without power to understand it!
Not at all. HE, God, the Lord did not make man in order that gifted as he is with powers of rational and testable thought, of attaining to the concept of wisdom as distinct from mere self-advantage, and even of arguing about such issues with principles, protocols and perspectives of different types in view, of arguing about axiologies without basis for any, as if he were erected to be haunted and his existence were a fabrication of fancy to pass the idle moment in its idiocies and preposterous presumptions and assumptions.
Not at all. GOD SAYS that He did not create man in a grip of futility, nor (and this comes very much to the same thing, but put more pointedly and in the actual framework of fact), so that he might long for God, even lust for Him, desire Him, want to know Him, to find the place with Job (Job 29) of wisdom, to learn reality and to know truth, not lounge in its airport terminals, wondering why the plane to take him there not only does not arrive strictly on schedule, but does not appear at all; or if it does, always crashes, as though this were part of the routine.
Not in vain, not without opportunity for FINDING Him, did God create man. How WOULD you, however, find Him ? How would you find your employer's place for putting your pay check (if it were paid in that way), or for handling your nuclear power plant by appropriate buttons (if this were your task) or for interpersonal relationships with him and others (if there were other Staff), if he did not TELL YOU. Of course, he might have all this on the notice board, but there would also be specific features for your own work.
Obviously, he would tell you in words (oral) or forms (written) and these might include a personal word or note, not contrary to the general, but within it.
GOD tells us that HIS words are not hidden. How ludicrous, how obviously infelicitous an assumption that he would make man with these powers and needs, and then categorically prevent all possibility of his responsibilities and operative capacities finding their due and true alignment, field of operation and action! No less ludicrous would it be if He did not speak "things that are right" as He declares. THINGS THAT ARE RIGHT are the stated arena and area of His discourse, declamation, declaration, utterance.
What would you expect ? that a boss would tell you how to wreck the joint ? how to fail in his reasons for employing you ? that he would obviate the order of his schema and operate through you in order to plague you with harassments because, being denied needed knowledge, you failed to be sensible or sensitive or useful!
Psychic disorders hit all classes of people, but not God. If HE were a pathological entity, then He would be subject to disease, to onset of what is beyond His power and has operational sufficiency and efficiency such that He could not, though its author, omit its existence or change it so that such harassments of His being were excluded; but COULD NOT is a defining element in the exclusion zone, if you are seeking God (cf. Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4).
God has of course done this. His word moreover verifies itself (cf. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ) inveterately, continually, principially and practically, in all fields and at every test. That is what you would have to expect when Him of ALL knowledge speaks His mind. That is what you find.
Impediment to finding Him ? You can find this when you so obliteratively interfere with every kind of human harassment to your own deliverance that you become an icon, a memorable misfit; for God does engage in endless play with marauding man (cf. Isaiah 57:15). For one thing, man's being is not so made that play for ever is its authorised pastime. There are results to proclivities and there are conditions for interaction. Even in the flesh, there are limits: thus a cancer once removed by one technique from a particular person's throat was found NOT to be removable by ANY known technique from that place when it re-appeared! That man died.
However the love of God is such that He would that ALL might be reconciled to Himself, yes even in heaven as on earth! It is categorical, multi-cosmic, hyper-regnant (Colossians 1:19ff.). To deny this is to falsify His word, intentionally or other. In this, as in any other sphere of interaction, it is NOT ONLY your intention, but what you do which matters. Just as faith without works is dead (living things MUST be the very fact that they are alive, operate, do, and what they do depends on what it is that IS alive! so is thought of limiting the outgoing love of God. It is a dead conception, contrary to the life that lives, the very life of God, eternal life.
What then do we say when we look at Deuteronomy 29:29.
Before we say anything, we look at the context and the Speaker. The latter is Moses, but it is in the name of God that it is uttered (Deuteronomy 29:1). The former ? Moses is presenting the covenant with historical overview. In times past it was so, and now, in the day of Moses, it is God who so makes covenant (29:14-15), and it continues till the finale comes whose word is to have final authority (Deuteronomy 18:15ff.).
In Deuteronmy 29:29 therefore, we have a true statement backed by deity. What is its purport ? The Lord had for long (as shown in the historical overview) dealt with express words and self-revealing force with the people, the covenant people, and many things were quite obvious, entirely apparent, with no slightest difficulty to comprehend, whereas they had by no means always been done, though divinely declared for the welfare of the people. Thus there are other things, not yet revealed, those which are not in this covenant or as yet made apparent: these exist. It is precisely as Christ stated in John 16:12: "I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."
Did Christ mean that they were beyond human knowledge, even if God should speak them ? Far from it. In fact, Christ immediately proceeded to declare this: "However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth." Thus there was no limit in this respect. To be sure, now we see as in a glass dimly, but then face to face (I Corinthians 13), but what we DO perceive is not categorically astray, just possessive of power for further disquisitive detail, fuller comprehension, as now it is apprehended. What we have now is what is given by "a man who has told you the truth" (John 8:40). Indeed, HE IS THE TRUTH (John 14:6), so any endeavour by theologian or other to dismiss this is to be divergent from spiritual reality, not an enticement to reason or reality. If it does not come from God, it does not come; and when it does come, it confirms what the image of God in man - pathology apart - reveals (Romans 1:17ff.).
It must at once be added that Christ did not stop there. In His categorical declarations He not only told them that He had told them the truth, that there was more understanding to come, but that the Spirit who would bring this would NOT SPEAK OF HIMSELF. There was to be no counter-authority. The Spirit of God and the Son have diverse specialist functions within the trinity, as the Cappodocian doctors rightly declared and scripture makes apparent (cf. Isaiah 48:16ff., John 15:26, 14:26). The word declaims the truth, and the Spirit of truth deals aptly with it, illuminating but without countermanding or asserting authority in any way other than what is granted for this purpose in the Word (John 1:1), which by its very name signifies the ultimate for this purpose.
Those then who fail to realise the truth, and those who fail to realise that the word of God defines it, or who imagine that there are to be dimensions of reality made apparent by some sort of independent spiritual operation, as if to bypass the word of God, are alike mistaken. God defines on the one hand, and illuminates on the other. When the Spirit of God indites the scriptures (I Corinthians 2:9ff.), it is indeed a work, a specialist work that He does toward man and from God, but it is the WORD which He indites, so that as Christ declared, "He shall not speak of Himself, but whatever He hears, He will He speak" (John 16:13). As to the only authorised word of God to mankind, this is finished (Revelation 22:18-19), for the THINGS may not be added to, nor may the WORDS be subtracted (cf. Galatians 1, Ephesians 2:20). It is as in Deuteronomy 4 and 12 in the Old Covenant: inviolable.
We find then, to revert to Deuteronomy 29:29 which many use illicitly, past its own content, and find that there are secret things. NOT ALL has been revealed. What HAS been revealed is the word of God who is without iniquity so that His word IS truth (John 17:17, Psalm 119, Deuteronomy 32:4); but there is more.
What could be example of this ? First, as in Ephesians 3 and Colossians 1, there are things not earlier revealed in the way now revealed (in the Old Testament Covenant, that is), and things not understood, though significantly present in the scriptures (cf. Romans 16:25-26, with 'and by the scriptures'). Understanding does not always reach to the uttermost part of the declarations! Thus the DEGREE of fellowship of Jew and Gentile in the Messiah came as a fresh impact of revelation (0) and the ACTUALITY of Christ in you, the hope of glory came as a marvel to eyes that had not found this, seen it in their hearts. To be sure, there were intimations, but this VERY THING was not seen with all of its munificence, practicality and inordinate blessedness.
Does this however mean that what God said was contrary to fact, concerning Himself ? That would be to say that He is a liar, fraud or misleader, contrary to Proverbs 8:8, which excludes any thought even of His words being unintentionally misleading, let alone intentionally so. Such a concept is merely to contradict who He is, the truth. When He speaks, He speaks of Himself. He alone knows it all; He alone by virture of His very being, IS it all (the rest being derivative), and to 'wrest' it, to distort or misuse it would be like a self-inflicted wound. Since God already is what He would be, since NOTHING can prevent this, and would be what He is, since time with its limtis is merely an invention - time as we know it - thus truth is as He declares, what he says.
Hence to USE this Deuteronomy verse to make it appear in some subtle, or surreptitious, or mysterious, use the adjective you like in such denials, it is all one in being ghastly counterfeit, that God ACTUALLY does NOT love, with the sublime breath biblically portrayed, despite the FACT that He repeatedly DECLARES that He does, that He lacks that amplitude to His outgoing love, is mere confusion at best, counterfeit at worst. The mystery, if you will, or 'hidden' thing, is not that He is not doing what He so often says, but the WAY in which it is all wrought. The form of God is not for our analytical comprehension. It is for His revelation. However the FACT of God is known from His works and His revelation in reverse order of definition; and the feature of His love, His hatred of sin, love of sinners, call to all and outthrust of love toward all, is known from His word and the way in which He has caused first His prophets to act and speak, and then from the way Christ, its focus, came with ALL His power to do what love will not shrink from doing: sacrificing for the attainment of its objective, but not imperiously command response into existence, as if man were NOT in His own image, but a controllable oddment.
What He in fact does in love, and has for man, it is not to have hidden types of love and opposite sorts of involvement, contrary to divine specification in declaration, but here in Covenant of Moses, it is not totally declared in what He constructs His plan, nor are all its features revealed at that point. Hence something stays 'hidden'. ONLY God knows Himself just as man knows his own self by his own spirit. Thus revelation is necessary; and here it is definitive, some things being left to the New Covenant for their deposition (Ephesians 3:5-6, Colossians 1:24-27).
That we Gentiles who believe, have believed and will do so, were all His elected before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), and were as Gentiles to have fellowship with Jews who are Christ's in precisely the way we now do, and that Christ would come as He did and perform the substitutionary atonement as He did, this was not in clarity of shape, seen in the day of Moses.Some of the things were still left in symbols (cf. Hebrews 7-10). Such glorious things were yet to be shown in pure and distinct form. In accord with His love, some were not unknown altogether (cf. Deuteronomy 32:43), but were yet in measure secret. MUCH remained to be shown, amplifying but not denying the concepts, bringing into substantial actuality what was forecast.
Imagine using then, Deuteronomy 29:29 as if it meant that God kept His secret joy or passion or initial selectivity of love up His sleeve, did not reveal it, though it be the case, when the Bible continually, directly, indirectly, explicitly, implicitly says the opposite! Such however is precisely what has frequently been done. There ARE 'secret' things, as any father knows relative to a son. HOW you love, with what reproductive consequences, how you courted, such things are not in the repertoire of divulgement to young children! Nor is the precise mode of existence of the love of God.
However, this is at once subject to two caveats and limitations. We must limit the limitations. First, the initial SCOPE of the love is NOT kept secret, so that to assume this to be part of the secrecy secretariat, if one might perhaps put it that way, is merely an obtrusion from thoughts outrageously contrary to scriptural specifications. While hate can come where love does not reach, as with Esau, and God knows before time the end of it all, yet what was the logical beginning, that is, the initial impact of His love, longing and thrust is DEFINED unambiguously as shown above and in the 6 volume work on Predestination and related concepts has been placed on this site.
Secondly, in limiting the limitations, we must observe that just as we can SEE and DISCERN MUCH concerning love by the voice in which it is spoken (not this alone, with mankind, since some are hypocrites, but God is genuine and sincere, truth being His ambit, nature in accord with His works, wrought not in confusion but in harmony with His will), so with the tone of God's utterance we can see how He feels, finds relationship with what He seeks but does NOT take. Obvious illustrations include:
Jeremiah 31:20-22, where the movement of His love back to its place is made dramatic, full of yearning;
Matthew 23:37 (cf. SMR Appendix B), where the inward desire of the hen is made obvious, relative to her chickens, irrespective of whether they come or are coming or not;
Hosea 7:1, where what He would have done, though He did not do it because of the alien field in view, is stated concerning Israel;
Jeremiah 51:9 is explicit - God WOULD HAVE HEALED her but she is not healed;
Ezekiel 33:11 (and God is no respecter of persons) makes it clear that HE HAS NO PLEASURE in the death of the wicked, but that they should TURN, and He exhorts them to do so, appeals to them, "Why should you die ?" with entreaty and poignancy;
Isaiah 55:7 where He enunciates His desire, 55:2-3, where He shows the lack of price for the restoration, as far as man is concerned, at the entrance, and indeed, for the conferment of the salvation in view, and in the surrounds, exhibits the most forcible desire, utterly limited not by lack of the love with which He professes His protestation, but with the failure to meet it, specific to some in a way through which He declines to penetrate, as with the patches where the water would not flow in Ezekiel 47;
Isaiah 48:17ff., where precisely as in Matthew 23:37, He muses meditatively and relays with deeply affected yearning love, the depth of His sorrow that what He was able and willing to do, could envisage with all its loveliness, had for them in His heart, yet this they denied (as some do not!), and so their destiny was not what He had held before them in those days;
Luke 19:42ff., where He weeps, appalled that Israel did not know the day of its visitation, obviously considering that it might have done so in terms of what was available to it, but elected not to do so to His uttered grief of heart;
Ezekiel 33:32, where God laments with deep grief that although He has sent Ezekiel to speak with power, with imagination and depth, yet it is all trivialised (in terms of another option available and to be desired by GOD HIMSELF), so that these great and portentous, these piteous and appealing words are as a lovely song, but NO MORE! to these recidivists, these reprobate silver (unlike what is not reprobate, with which it is as in all such cases, implicitly compared, ore that yields differently to treatment); and
John 3:16-17, where we find that the love of God was of a certain dimension and quality: it was SO much that WHOSOEVER would might be restored through it (NOT whosoever He lifted the bar for, allowing relevance), as to the world, taken as a total vehicle of containment of the human race relative to the One who procured its existence; and in the next verse, we find that as to possible motivations that He MIGHT have had, there is one that is absent: to JUDGE. This was not present. The intention was not artificed to produce an effect of some psychic kind, but to exclude an effect of a very simple kind, namely judgment on sin, in the way that it always, evidently and immensely deserved. SUCH was not the texture of the mission in which He SO loved that He not only came but did so in such a way that SO facing all the world WHOEVER wished could come.
This in no way reduced His TOTAL sovereignty, which is quite as clear as other points (cf. John 6:65), just as it no way induces a human control, in man's pathological state, in the transition any more than any other birth does, for its exhibit. Instead of pursuing such non-ingredients, excluded on other grounds, we do well, here as elsewhere in contextual matters, to take what it gives, and neither more nor less. What is more, is this, that man chooses, expressly denied in John 1:12. What is less is that God does not SO love as far as all that, and therefore in part had come to judge, in that some were surely up for judgment since they would refuse His salvation and so inherit hell! (John 8:24).
Thus does philosophical folly sully the stringent purity of the word of God. But it will have none of it, saying what it says on each topic, and rebuking reckless intimations attributed to it wrongly, infamous or foolish as these may be. His word ? It is wonderful. It tells us what we need to know; it tells us the truth; it advises us not to ADD to His word, lest He rebuke us and we be found liars! It means what it says. Let us mean what it says and say neither more nor less, and when defending it (as in Philippians 1:7, where we find Paul to be working for the defence and confirmation of the Gospel), let us say what is the logical structure, and what is harmonisable, on the one hand, especially when as here, there is no other option but that in the Bible to harmonise all the gen of life, and distinguish this from the word itself. Defending something is not the same as saying it (you can say you are innocent, and someone may seek to establish this, but they are different actions, even if the hearts of both are as one).
Now let us turn to various facets and features of this wonderful exhibition of the love of God in terms of man in His image, in his own follies, in his pathological state, in his selection by God, in his owes and in his works, in a convenient selection, so that what has been said of this, God's wonderful word, may be relished the more, in a relatively small compass, with its blazing light shining like searchlights into the sky, identifying the wonders above. .
AN OVERVIEW OF RELATED ASPECTS OF PREDESTINATION,
FOREKNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN WILL
The above may be read in the light of various expositions of elements related to it, in order to see it in situ, in its setting, with something of the wonder of the ways of the Lord, in His glorious and inveterate harmony, as becomes truth, passionate love, without intrusive dynamic, as becomes purity, and elaborately precise and wonderful words which are the very acme of articulation with knowledge, never varying from precision, exactitude of concept of discretion of announcement, or for that matter, from reliability of content and security of wisdom.
These facts make them apposite for our current volume, as a background for the above notations from Deuteronomy.
I) From The Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch. 6.
B. From Predestination and Freewill, Section 2
(for end-notes, please consult the original, through the hyperlink above)
This salient sovereignty appeared unduly to monopolise the toils of predestination; and not unexpectedly it met unretreating opposition in some quarters. So near systematic as to be intellectually appealing, it was emotionally cacophonous to the ears of many religious expedients; and even doctrinally divergent from some of the data. The extremes provoked by this view, however, if more satisfying to a 'feeling for' generalised divine beneficence at the highest level of destiny, nevertheless came to be set in a form perhaps even less amenable to the claims of Scripture and reason.
Wesley himself was slow to condemn Calvinistic Predestination in any official way. He long strove for friendly ministerial relations with Whitefield; he was reluctant to discriminate against Calvinists in his Classes: but at length he reacted sharply, and said of this form of predestination: It represents .
"Our blessed Lord as a hypocrite, a deceiver of the people, a man void of common sincerity, as mocking his helpless creatures bar offering what He never intends to give, by saying one thing and meaning another *89.
For some 50 years Wesley was an unflagging and vociferous proponent of the propositions of Arminianism, and held that all men had their sins expiated by Christ whose love lavishly had done all adequately, had effected expiation for all. Now we can see the force which led to such an extreme reaction: for just as Calvin's doctrine would (inferentially) omit the highest form of love, as panoperative, from predestination, so Wesley's would show it not merely present without prejudice on earth for the purposes of salvation, but even fixed in a format of universal redemption! Indeed, as the first system would withhold the adapted love *90 , so the other would provide the effected atonement: as the one from thoseto be lost, so the other to them and both without sufficient warrant. Nor is even this comparison necessarily other than unilinear: for a love absent in predestination will be so also in actuality because it was so predestined! These extremes, then, are
understandable, but they are not acceptable:
if we are interested in
conformity to our data
*91.
Not, that is, just as they
stand.
Of Calvin we have spoken; but Wesley we must ask: Can penalty justly be exacted twice? (and are you not he who has spoken against Calvin in terms of being reasonable*92 and of God's being just?). But if it cannot be so exacted, how then on the premise of universal redemption would God be free in judging to penalise any? If it was notexacted of Christ for all,then there was no expiation forall.But if itwas exacted for all, then there is no judgment for *93.
We read, again, in Hebrews*94 that Christ redeemed us from the transgressions which were under the first covenant; in Galatians *95 that He did so from the curse of the law, through His cursed death ("being made a curse for us"). In Hebrews*96 also we find express correlation of the pervasive principles that it is given unto man once to die *97 and that Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. It follows with entailment that this proposed formula of universal redemption has implicit (and not merely potential) juridical efficacy.
Whether therefore we reason from 'the things that are equal' *98 or from the direct doctrine on this point, we reach the same conclusion.
Again, Christ states categorically in a cause effect formulation, that in the relationship between ultimate salvatory grouping and faith, the former is the cause and the latter the results.
"Ye believe not because ye are not of my sheep." *99 Indeed He made a practical and in appearance almost pertinacious categorisation of some present as: "not my sheep". This disjunction was made in the very situation where the categorical cause effect statement eras uttered. Christ explicitly advised that He laid down His life for His sheep, and that these will never perish. We are thus confronted with a redemption which is effective and selective in fact; and Wesley is at variance. But we must not stray to the other extreme by gratuitously assuming any defect in the extent of the actuating love: for this does not follow, as we shall see.
In Isaiah, so greatly used for quotation in the New Testament, but especially in this 53rd chapter, we find:
"He will justify many". *100
A sufficient cause for this action is then added:
"Because He will bear their iniquities." *100
Now God is no respecter of persons; and there is but one Gospel available to any man; and we are instructed that:" Whom He justified, them He also glorified"*101. Therefore, once again, it cannot be said that He bears the iniquities of any who are to be lost: otherwise they would be both justified and glorified. That love so justly dear to Wesley is not to be formally captured in just that way.
It is interesting and illustrative of what we said of motive for passing over these considerations in pursuit of love, that almost immediately one says this, and insists on grounds of which these few suffice as examples, that there is a limited atonement in the sense of pardon effected for and through history to be provided to the elect: this divine logic and efficiency seem to be mistaken for a tragic (and unScriptural) economy implying a deficiency of divine predestinative desire or devices which occasions the abandonment of most mortals.
Logically and textually neither view works; each involves a systematic expansion of a discreetly Scriptural principle: the one sovereignty, the other love. Each is true in its Scriptural (and uncompromised) form; neither in philosophic reinvestment; both cohere, we shall seek to show, for example, as far as the 'giving of a reason' may require us to go, in such a provisional harmony as Section III is to present.
This is not to say that we do not find a particular and valuable stress in Wesley, as a preaching proponent of open salvation. On the contrary! It is that of the adapted and adequate willingness of God even towards those who will be found to be nonelect. Abstracting this from the theological form in which it was invested, one obtains a sturdy reaffirmation in the Church of the considerations and textual points noted in our endeavour to moderate some of the more extreme reaches of Augustine's teaching. Even if, as sometimes in this area, we find an inclination for attitudes as much as for propositions, we must ensure that we enfold these in articulated form without missing the determinative influence of our data.
In a letter to Calvinist Whitefield, Wesley once said:
"The case is quite plain; there are bigots for predestination and against it; God is sending a message to either side, but neither will receive it unless from one who is of their opinion. Therefore for a time you are suffered to be of one opinion and I of another. But when His time is come God will do what men cannot, namely make us both of one mind."
Might we not interpret the attitude and express in other terms: The case is quite plain. There are too rationalised and too liberalised views of predestination. We must avoid both and seek not merely to avoid them, but to be constrained by our data.
End of Excerpt
The will of man is relevant but not operative; the will of God is that all might come to a knowledge of the truth, and is operative. It is so, but not dictatorial. So do men strive needlessly.
C. From
Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy
Ch. 9, *2
*2
Romans 9 makes it crystal
clear that divine foreknowledge has NOTHING to do with a man's future works,
merits or attainments. There is NOTHING of merit in it. Alas, Calvinism can
readily (and entirely unintentionally) come so close to ascribing merit, that it
is sad. Thus WHY should someone be chosen by God ? because of NO differentiation
? That is caprice, not wisdom, which God personifies and essentialises, being
its true and only ultimate source. Christ is made to us wisdom, and this is
because as in Proverbs 8 (Barbs, Arrows and Balms
27), this is
Himself.
Again, IF there is
differentiation, is it because of something nearer, dearer or clearer at least
to godliness, or not ? If not, then is it perverse ? Of course not. What then is
the basis ?
ungodliness ? Biblically it is love, unrestricted in outreach, glorious in
power, grand in kindness. It is in nothing divorced in its ample procedures,
from itself, by the God who IS love.
However, it is precisely this wholly unscriptural divorce from the citation of the will of man as relevant which leads to such fuzzy things.
In fact, it is the WILL of man which is cited. Now at once, it is to be noted that sin has made it operationally defunct (that is one of the best of all the features of Calvinism, to make this so very clear, as in I Cor. 2:14, Ephesians 4:17ff.). Indeed, the insistence on the 'choice' of man in his own unsaved state, is one of the glaring foci of Arminianism which makes the corresponding error of Calvinism, itself vastly nearer to Scripture as a system, the more readily understandable. They often fight it out, quite foolishly, in this, where both are wrong.
Operationally defunct, however, though it be, it is as we have seen, directly and repetitively cited by God in terms of the non-salvation of the loved sinner. It is therefore in principle perfectly certain that in SOME way, God does not proceed because of the will of man, in HIS OWN knowledge, which OMITS any thought of future attainments or performance (Romans 9). In principle, this is very easy to understand, though in the form of God, He may of course implement this revealed principle in any way, except in this, a feckless or dysfunctional way, for it is sure to be successfully wrought by Him who works all things after the counsel of His own will (Ephesians 1:11). With God, the knowledge will be knowledge indeed, be it foreknowledge or any other kind; for in Christ is all the fulness of the Godhead, and in God are all the riches of knowledge and wisdom (Colossians 2:3, Ephesians 3:8, Colossians 2:8-9).
In PF, as in SMR Ch. 8, one has shown how it MIGHT have been wrought. It is necessary to do this in that context in order to DEMONSTRATE the coherence and competence of the Biblical picture of these things, in contrast to the necessary and intrinsic failure of all else to cover all the components, guilt, liberty, deterministic elements, sovereignty and the like. That this is so has been shown in some detail in Sparkling Life ... Ch. 7.
However, there is no necessity, of course, since the form of God is an infinite reality, that it be done in that way; nor is it the intention, nor has it ever been in these writings, to suggest any such thing. What is in fact necessary, in view of His REVELATION, is that there be
His love to the depths of His Being for the lost.
His provision for that love.
His foreknowledge in such a way that this love for them is to His entire satisfaction implemented.
His knowledge of the relevant feature of the human will, itself inoperative AT THIS LEVEL as shown, on this earth, which concerns Him, to ensure the integrity of His love is met, and its virtue.
Will
is not merit. God's knowledge of it, is not a knowledge of merit. It is a
knowledge of need. As to the will of man, it is only when it is corrupted that
its exercise would involve a RELATIVE merit. In its uncorrupted state, it is
merely proceeding without loss, to follow the way it is. In wickedness, it would
enter into comparabilities, one will with the other; in the goodness of an
unspotted creation, however, it is merely what it ought to be, no better than
made, a blessed function not misaligned.
Moreover, if Adam had chosen otherwise, when sinless, that would be no merit in the slightest degree. This is manifest. What would then have been the case ? This: He had the need, he stayed with it, and went as one would hope he would do. One formulation, then would be this: that God knows what man, each man, would have willed, had he been free to will, and not polluted by the confusions and blindnesses of sin. As to God, He does not need time to know this, nor does He need to refer to it, and He in His divine majesty is in no respect limited.
Whether God proceeds in this way, in some such METHODOLOGY as this, it is not now for us to know; that He MIGHT do something of this kind is the point. In principle, there is no problem. It meets moreover all the scriptures. What is sure is that He is not oblivious of man as a willing being, in making His choice, nor is He in the slightest degree directed by man (to become, to the point, incompetent). It is a wise sovereignty, lovingly selecting, without abuse of the nature of what He has made. Man is citable and cited for any loss, and THIS IS the condemnation, that in the presence of HIS light, this divine outreach without limit, man has preferred darkness, in HIS own very presence, man has not received Him.
This is certainly what the scripture teaches, and Wesley's unlovely Arminianism with which he appears to have tried to protect it, and Calvin's unlovely mysterious predestination (in the sense, relating to the selection and love) with which he appears at such loss to scriptural fidelity to try to protect the sovereignty: these are two of the byways of the church. The men are not. They erred, each, and Wesley, it would seem, quite as grievously in his inadequate system as Calvin in his restrictive intrusions into what is written (cf. PF). Thus, in this precise point of the love of God, Wesley was right and Calvin wrong. In the theology of the whole matter, Calvin has magnificent points to make, and Wesley fails.
It is time to get away from these forbidden things, I of Calvin, I of Wesley (and for that matter, I of Luther) and to be thankful for what each of them contributes, for each has a wonderful provision to make, in this area or that, and none is perfect. The TEST is the scripture, and as in any provision, when it is made, one can see the error and delight in the true tones where they are. Greatness is no excuse for violating the scripture on this point; and as to that, it speaks and has spoken for itself. The ONLY wisdom is to follow it, in all doctrine.
The great delight is this, that God IS love, is not the author of sin, but of liberty, and even when liberty is de-licensed through the breaches of sin, making man defunct in adequate spiritual knowledge, distorted and distorting in his comprehension, God is ABLE to find the lost, and is on record in this, that it PLEASED HIM, having placed all fulness in Christ as man, the Messiah incarnate God, to RECONCILE ALL THINGS to Himself. If it pleases man to demean this scope with his inept and inadequate philosophies, whether miscalled theology or not, this does nothing to diminish the glory of God, but by contrast to highlight it. Blessed be God.
D. From Predestination and Freewill, Section 2, and Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 2, *1.
The latter
incorporates both elements. Some slight adaptation may occur, including *1 for
(1) below.
A Detailed Note in the Field of Fidelity
For the actual statements of Calvin, clearly showing his error in this regard, see Predestination and Freewill pp.76ff. He 'admits' Christ's call as a hen to her chicks, which includes this, HOW OFTEN WOULD I have gathered you under My wings, but equivocates with the irrelevant, as if an expression of the divine desire in Christ is in some way to become enmeshed in metaphors, rather than being taken to mean what it precisely states, an index to Calvin's confusion at this point. "We must not define the will of God," he declares immediately after this 'admission' concerning Christ.
No, we assuredly must not, except from His word, and above all from His Son, the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus in whom dwells the fulness of the Godhead in bodily form, so that "He who has seen Me has seen the Father." There is nothing of the merely metaphorical about this statement of what Christ so often would have done, or the contrast between this willingness and their eventual desolation through rejection. Whether you use hands or wings or words, it is one: you show what you would have liked to do.
We MUST define the will of God from His word and His Son for HE has already done so and He is the EXACT EXPRESSION of His Person (Hebrews 1), so that the one seeing Him, has already seen the Father (cf. John 6:40, 14:9)! ANY DIVORCE IS IN THE MIND OF MAN, NOT OF GOD... 'Accommodation' is incommodious when it rips the reality from the representation coming from the very WORD of God, whose word is truth, who IS the truth, whose words are as commanded. If God declares exact representation, then we must follow, for the jousting with false jubilation must cease.
As Christ is, so it is. He is not in the form of a man and of a servant (yet without sin), that becoming flesh He should cease to BE the ONE who was in the form of God. Informed with light, He sheds no darkness; and the light of the world is in nothing at fault; nor is God without means of expression, nor is His Word without ample capacity to express.
This then is perhaps the worst lapse of Calvin, and while he sought to avoid confusion, in this liberty and indeed laxity, he merely created more by presumption against the very words of Christ, and his own words ignoring the actual issue with irrelevancies that neither touch the issue, nor even contact it. The metaphorical forms of speech do not mangle the fact but illustrate it; and the will which these signify is not dulled but made simply clear and clearly simple in the process: not simplistic, but clear like light, in which is NO darkness at all.
It is time for more
unity in this enthralling and delightful beauty spot, the love of God: His
loving sovereignty and His sovereign love.
The opposite extreme is
most common also. See
Section 2, op. cit. for further development of this matter.
It needs attention in the love of Christ,
according to His word, most clear and most perfect in this as in all its
divulgements.
THE FIRST (1)
For convenience an excerpt from the Predestination and Freewill is here given:
"Cf. Calvin's Institutes, Book 3, Ch. 24, Section 17. As for
Christ's lament and statement of gathering in Matthew 23:37: Calvin's disregard
here of the clear exposure of the heart of the incarnate God is a hiatus in the
life of the divine picture, for which scripture gives no ground. If the "form"
of God is not on earth as it is heaven, yet when we come to Christ's word: "He
who has seen Me, has seen the Father", this is known, because He expressly
changed His form (John 1, Philippians 2), but not His reality (Heb. 1:3,
Mal.3:6, John 8:58). Accordingly, rejection of a divine statement of heart and
principle, for one at variance from it, is no interpretation! Concerning Matthew
Calvin's equivocation here is astounding. He speaks as if the fact that in Christ God appeared as man had a strange consequence. It is as if His being made man, made truth not the criterion of His utterance, precise, profound. From Calvin at this place, it is as if Christ's coming precluded this, which nevertheless He said and TRULY: that "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" , as in John 14, and that "I have not spoken on My own authority; but the Father who sent me gave Me a command, what I should say and what I should speak... Therefore whatever I speak, just as the Father has told Me, so I speak."
What results from this then ? You have only one choice. Irrationally to reject Christ, or to accept His words. If His words be true, Calvin here is not; if Calvin were true here, Christ's words would be contravened. This is no sacred mystery, but an evil aspersion on Christ's words, though doubtless such was never Calvin's intention. Never move from Christ as THE TRUTH, speaking as DIRECTLY COMMANDED by His eternal Father, and you will never move from the incarnation as BEING THE EXACT IMAGE OF GOD in its outcome (Hebrews 1:3), or again be in the shelters of philosophy, cowering as before enemy aircraft, afraid of what is not known. KNOWLEDGE has come.
We do
not know the FORM of God (I Timothy
Now of course Calvin brings up things like metaphors, including this:
"He says that he has stretched out his arms ... to call a rebellious people (Isaiah 65:2); early and late he has taken care to lead them back to him. If they want to apply all this to God, disregarding the figure of speech, many superfluous contentions will arise."
This however simply is irrelevant to the point at issue and is a good
illustration of the fact that NO MAN is to be followed, but the word of God
only: though some man's words be found ever so helpful. The greatest can fall.
NOT of Calvin, or of Wesley! THAT is the consideration that is CLEARLY written
with not a metaphor in sight! (I Cor. 3).
Let us now be practical. It will not hurt. Is there any question of what God is saying in the cited passage in Isaiah? Of course not. There is no issue about whether He is earnest, diligent, whether He SENDS His messages through His messengers, seen presumably as engaging Him in their own activities ("in all their afflictions, He was afflicted" - Isaiah 63:9). The matter is INCAPABLE of misinterpretation. The metaphors enliven it, make it clear in human terms; they do not seduce, speaking in one set of imagery which obscures, renders ambiguous, far less denies what is the point of the metaphoric mini-parable, if you like. You see the Lord in this figure of Isaiah's, in His earnest, dawn breaking zeal. Very well, that is known. Since Christ Himself in fact DID just that, arising a great while before the break of day, it is even less of any tendentious character. AS MAN, GOD DID JUST THAT! (Mark 1:35).
Now how does this evacuate
the MESSAGE which the FIGURE of hens and chickens provides in exact parallel to
that of the zeal of the Lord, in the other ? The figure is about hens and
chickens, in this, that LIKE that, He has acted. But the simile is simply
passing*. It proceeds:
I
WOULD HAVE GATHERED YOU AS
....(simile), but
YOU
WERE NOT WILLING.
THIS is the DIRECT
statement. One, called Christ, had a strong, deep and direct desire which is
evocatively likened to that of a hen for her chickens. It is intense, immense,
earnest and warm. This is the thrust. He is not BECOMING a hen in this picture.
He is likening what HE FEELS and WOULD HAVE, to the way a hen appears to act. In
the FACE of this (as in 'stretched out', the imagery cited from Isaiah by Calvin
himself), this earnest zeal, this unequivocal desire (not a decision to force,
but a decision to seek with ardour), CHRIST STATES WHAT HE FINDS. He has this
zeal and this desire, and its character is compared to the hen's thirst and
desire for chicks, to protect them.
Despite this desire, hen or no hen,
this
intense WILLINGNESS and ZEST which was His,
but
which was given an analogy of the most direct and simple kind,
EXACTLY as in the case of stretching out arms,
He
finds an equally evocative result.
It is
this:
YOU
WERE NOT WILLING.
Thus even the case
cited by Calvin merely confirms the point. The imagery is evocative, and
declarative of content, as is normal in imagery. It is clear, as is normal in
good imagery. It means that the Lord NOT ONLY desired to find the lost, but that
His desire was cardinal, direct, assured and indisputable. It is :
1) direct - I WOULD HAVE GATHERED. This does not mean: I WOULD NOT HAVE GATHERED, hen or no hen!
2) evocatively presented in the hen format: LIKE that sort of deeply emotional and desirous quality which a hen exhibits, so was His. AS... SO. THESE are HIS words and HIS words are as COMMANDED by His Father, and this He declares, who is the word of God. Who knows the word better than the word ? Let him stand forth!
3) The result is categorical. I WOULD... YOU WOULD NOT.
Now we come to the next error of Calvin, who sidestepped this issue with a mere flurry of words, in gross distortion of the simplicity of the positive-negative propositions of Christ: I WOULD... YOU WOULD NOT. And this which must be added : IT HAPPENED LIKE THAT .... OFTEN!! (HOW OFTEN WOULD I ...!).
Calvin states in his
peculiar fashion in this context, that "although to our perception God's will
is manifold, he does not will this and that in himself, but according to his
diversely manifold wisdom, as Paul calls it (Eph.3:10), he strikes dumb our
sense until it is given to us to recognize how wonderfully he wills what at the
moment seems to be against his will."
So He is WILLING what in
CHRIST'S OWN WORDS is ONE THING. The will celestially however is quite another.
The Father, we evidently are to learn from Calvin at this point, is NOT doing
this. As to this, the Lord's own statement of simplicity and clarity, the theory
is:
it merely distorts the complex situation which in essence is OTHER and DIVERSE, indeed DIVERGENT. In appearance ? If only in appearance, well: then in reality He is willing just as His son, speaking as commanded BY HIM, is speaking. That is the function of word when it is TRUTH. But if in reality, then the word of the Saviour is countermanded in heaven, and He who is to show God shows what is not TRUE. The ludicrous nature of truth being untrue, we shall leave for the scholars. The fidelity and precision of God is witnessed throughout all scirpture, to the contrary, and He stakes His NAME on it! We for our part, in interpreting what He says, will stick FIRST to WHAT He says, both in Christ and elsewhere, and not make yes mean no, and assuredly mean not really!
First, however, let
us consider Calvin's quotation from Ephesians 3:10. There the context is this:
formerly there was no such clear and manifest notion of Jew-Gentile fellowship
in the Gospel as is now revealed. Unsearchable are the riches of Christ, and
while this amplitude of logical simplicity, the historical fact that first the
Jew-Gentile mix was not at all close in the matter of relationship to God -
indeed they were was apart, NOW the Jew-Gentile are in this able to be together.
While this is so, it is ONLY in Christ, the one - the Jewish nation, having
first rejected him, and the other, the Gentiles nations, at first not having
known of him. This WISDOM is indeed manifold, as the apostle states: but it is
not in the least obscure!
There is not the slightest issue of DIFFICULTY: merely it is one of strategic beauty, and glorious composition. It is not in the least a question of what is a flat contradiction becoming uncontradictory, what is a denial becoming an affirmation. It is that what was FOR AN ABSENT REASON, not present, now by the PRESENCE OF THAT REASON, hs become operative. Without Christ, they were separate and severed in relationship to God, nation to nations. Now they are not so divided. Why ? It is because they have Christ, the great basis of unity in God, from God, for God.
What then ? Without a cheque book, you COULD not abide the high prices. NOW that you have a well-padded one, you find no problem at all. There is in NEITHER case, the slightest question about clarity or confusion. No means ? then no result: that is all.
The MANIFOLD WISDOM of God, then, is as is stated in Proverbs 8:8: in His words there is NOTHING "wreathed". It is ALL CLEAR to him who understands, we are told. That is what is written. There is the OPPOSITE of clever semantic play; and there the precise contrary of allowing misconception and misconstruction. The words of God are clear to the one who understands them, seeking as silver as in Psalm 119, and what is less clear, as on a fine day looming from the mist, becomes more so.
What is present is the simple need to read what is written, from God, in whom is no iniquity, to examine what it is saying as the speaker gives it out in His chosen place, and to examine all else like it that He has stated. If it is difficult, well. That is quite different from twisted, distorted, the very things that Proverbs EXPLICITLY DENIES to the word of God. It may be hard; it is never wrong. It may challenge ingenuity; it never threatens truth. ONLY by insertion or desertion can that happen! That is the challenge given, and this is the experience found. They are as one.
The ABUSE of this MANIFOLD CONCEPT, by Calvin, to achieve what the apostle Paul is NOT saying, is if not contemptible, at least confused. People might at times have THOUGHT God would not favour the Gentiles (but He states the opposite often enough in Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 67ff., Isaiah 49 and so on, and relates it in Jonah with the utmost eloquence). People might not have realised that in Christ the result of togetherness would come (but God STATES that Israel is to have a new name, acknowledges they will reject their own Messiah - Isaiah 49:7, resoundingly states that HIS servants will be called by another name while Israel's servants will hunger and thirst, Isaiah 65:13-15, and makes it clear that in Christ will all the justified be covered, whoever and of whatever race they may be - Isaiah 53:6,10-11, 44:5, 45:22-25).
Thus we are not finding a conundrum solved, but a feature focussed, a commencement consummated, so that what He had begun to exhibit, He now exhibits in the utmost detail.
Hence any use of this passage in Ephesians 3:10, to make it appear that God is an author of self-contradiction, or even One who makes statements of a devious, unclear or misleading character, is ludicrous. It is CONSUMMATION that is expressed here, of wisdom already shown, not NEGATION of oddities which were contrary. There is NEVER any question that God's words are not CLEAR to the understanding reader. He may be baulked by his own ineptitude, but not by divine deficiency in that beautiful art of coherent and logical speech.
Further, this appeal is merely trivial. To suggest that because God in fact can engage in progressive revelation, that therefore He can contradict in the most emphatic and direct sense what He is evocatively and potently declaring, is a case of making another sort of speech for the Lord, than that which He claims for Himself, and commends (Isaiah 41,43,44,45,48 are eloquent on His TESTABILITY in DETAIL and NEVER being unclear - so as to be untestable for comparison purposes - or misleading, inaccurate or wrong).
CHRIST as MAN speaking to MEN by DIRECT COMMAND of His eternal Father, as His eternal word, stated His feelings, His wishes and the results. There is no room for talking of a double will, or a confused will, or a forked will. CHRIST SAYS IT IS ONE THING, and CALVIN SAYS IT IS ANOTHER, the direct opposite.It is a choice in this case between Christ and Calvin. Do not even children do this, saying that mummy or daddy REALLY meant that they SHOULD go out when they said they SHOULD NOT, because how manifold (tricky ?) is the will of parents, and how often they ask one to show courage, so yes, one should GO out when told NOT to. This is fiddling and pettifoggery.
When "what is human is transferred to God" says Calvin on Matthew 23:37, as if this "explains" his flat contradiction of the words of the Saviour, that covers it. That is all it is, so we can now know that the thing stated by THE LORD is not final, is not indeed, true. It is suggestive of something; it is not expressive of what it says. What it says, this is intensely asserted as the case, and the One who does it, is the Maker of the case, for one, for all!
Does however this, Christ's
being human, then explain it ? that what He says is not the case ? If that were
so, then what is God when transferred to man, this too will not ACTUALLY expose
the reality of His character, expression, desire (for that is MOST EMPHATIC
HERE) and so on. This represents is a denial of the incarnation, even of its
relevance to TRUTH; yet Christ said He was the TRUTH. Now Calvin, carried away
in a good cause (to prevent misconception of the power of man), has simply gone
too far. Man DOES lack power relative to God, but GOD DOES NOT LACK POWER
RELATIVE TO MAN, and in particular, His power of speech is consummate, precise,
the subject of challenge in comparison with all other speech for the CLEAR and
TESTABLE performance of what it claims.
Calvin does not mean so to deny, and if he did, then all his theology, like Barth's, would become illicit, vain, a contradiction of what he affirms. How can God make anything clear if this will, emotion and desire cannot be made clear because as a PERSON SENT FROM HEAVEN AND INCARNATED ON EARTH AS A MAN IN HIS OWN IMAGE, He cannot convey the actualities of the situation. The race having been manufactured thus, in this format, He cannot speak His mind ? How much LESS could He have done so, if this were so, through the prophets, for this so obscure 'reason', then! Since the prophets were mere men, sinners to boot, how much LESS could they convey reality, truth, of God Himself AS MAN, in the image created for just such a thing (Isaiah 51:6) is reputed here to be UNABLE to communicate better than the opposite of what He means!
Calvin did not
mean it (the implications, we assume, based on his other utterances);
but he said it.
Be warned you people -ism followers, you devotees of this or that, just because
many Christians are indubitably excellent in much. Look to the head, not the
shoulders! (cf. Hebrews 12:1). Calvin erred in this point, and one simply shows
its enormity, not to make him appear heretical, but to show the grandeur of the
error, contrary to his normal thought, into which he falls in his endeavours,
misguided and misled, to avoid the teaching of the Saviour (not again, that he
intended this, but he accomplished it!). If Calvin could so err, let us all be
careful, NOT to 'make' God mean what He either does not say, or the opposite of
what He does! Let us read what is written, and find what is stated, and follow
it, not some alternative, philosophically induced, in plain contrast to both the
text and the terms it employs, such as affirmation and negation!
Further, who is Calvin and who is any, to make it appear that when the Saviour is doing one thing, God in some OTHER way is so MANIFOLD in 'wisdom' that to HIS OWN WORD in the flesh, He is opposing a flat contradiction! Is God not then God ? But CHRIST IS in His own Person God ? Will God have a double mouth ? WIll He so invest and invent a situation (incarnation) that His truth is lost and His mouth is not! This is for God to DENY HIMSELF, statedly and logically impossible! (cf. II Timothy 2:13; see SMR pp. 25ff., 581ff., Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6).
Indeed, says Calvin, God does not will this and that in Himself! This is news! His will is so manifold that it is excluded from being this or that: Read Isaiah 30:8ff., and see. The very vocalisation of the word of God and His infinite backing to its jots and tittles (Matthew 5:17ff., Isaish 34:16, 59:21 etc. and see SMR Appendix D) means the precise opposite. What He knows is operative as He speaks, and He speaks what is true where truth is relevant, and He upbraids (John 8;40,44,46!) those who do not LISTEN to HIM a man who told them the truth! Yet how could He do so, if He was so inferior a representative of the divine word that the actuality of the thought of God was too manifest, manifold, to be reduced to mere speech! HOW HAVE a word if this were so, or incarnate it if jumbled semantics were the consequence, and clear unequivocal, even emphatic utterance of plainest kind were unreliable as to one little thing: that it accorded with FACT!
Mr Calvin, unfortunately though you have an objective, here, of some concern, the price is too high, and the means are not right.
Now let us consider the
reality of the word of God: GOD is indeed deep and masterful and marvellous, but
PART of that WONDER is this, that He can SAY what He means and DO (accordingly)
what HE SAYS, so that it OCCURS, the laboratory, the acid test (Isaiah 41,48)!
All this precludes
any such nonsense as in this case, Calvin here falls into. Even the righteous
man can fall seven times! Why worship man! Let us instead turn to the word of
God, return to it and keep turning to it, for it is the TRUTH.
Calvin is of course utterly correct in rebuking those who want to make it appear GOD HAS TO ACT in this or that way towards all. However this is not that: GOD WANTS to act in this way towards all, and says so. HOW He works that out in history is His affair, and my Predestination and Freewill shows how it COULD happen, simply to remove any question of logical congestion. But that He knows how to be chaste and desirous would not appear too remarkable. All human love is informed with the same thing. However His sovereign majesty and double predestination of all needs no such help as this! (cf. I Peter 2:7-8, Romans 9:15-16 with 9:12!).
Let us not then throw away the power of Christ to SPEAK what His Father commanded, and BE the truth, and SPEAK the truth, in order to depart with some show of reverence from what that truth, in this matter, actually IS! It is all gloriously consistent, utterly delightful and by ANY alteration for ANY reason, it is like a beautiful design, spoiled. See on this also Predestination and Freewill. The word of God is indeed VERY PURE, refined seven times.
It is indeed regrettable that a man of the stature of Calvin should have made such mistakes, but it is a lesson, never to be so concerned for the appearance of difficulty (felt for some reason or other) as to actually CONTRADICT the word of God! He has His OWN answers; OUR part is to take it as it comes, not give such accolades that the meaning is reversed through sheer supremacy! as if speech were an art form divorced from deity when attempted to man, even by Himself as one of them: by incompetence of purpose, plan or equipment!
Added note
*1
Thus from Lamentations 2:10ff., we find the “daughter of Jerusalem” to include
the elders! (bold added). For a full treatment of this aspect, see SMR
Appendix A.
”The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep
silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves
with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.
Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon
the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the
children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city. They say to their
mothers, Where is corn and wine? when they swooned as the wounded in the
streets of the city, when their soul was poured out into their mothers’ bosom.
“What thing shall I take to witness for thee? what thing shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? for thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee? Thy prophets have seen vain and foolish things for thee: and they have not discovered thine iniquity, to turn away thy captivity; but have seen for thee false burdens and causes of banishment.
“All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth? All thine enemies have opened their mouth against thee: they hiss and gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up: certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it. The LORD hath done that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old: he hath thrown down, and hath not pitied: and he hath caused thine enemy to rejoice over thee, he hath set up the horn of thine adversaries.
“Their heart cried unto the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night: give thyself no rest; let not the apple of thine eye cease. Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger in the top of every street.”
THE SECOND (2)
However in Calvin's Commentary on Romans, we have an allied error. It all seems to stem from the same misplaced fear, but the coherence of the parallel errors in this case is not admirable. Here, in commenting on Romans 1:17, Calvin advises us as follows: "In order that we may be loved by God we must first be righteous, for He hates unrighteousness. The meaning is, therefore, that we can obtain salvation from no other source than the Gospel..." This is in flamboyant contrast with Romans 5:8, the whole thrust of which is this: that amazing as it may seem, and beyond the highest human love expressed in sacrifice for what seems noble, God's love comes for what is INTRINSICALLY BAD! He loves the BAD in order to make it good, because it is His, and He made it and this is the nature of His heart's yearning (as in Lamentations 3:33, Ezekiel 33:11, I Timothy 2:1-6, Matthew 23:37 concerning which also, see SMR Appendix B for a fuller exposition).
It is NOT being said IN THE BIBLE, that God does not love until righteousness appears in the sinner; but the exact opposite. His love appears DESPITE THE ABSENCE of goodness in the object, indeed despite its PROFOUND absence; and He commends His love to us in this, that He died for us EVEN in such a deplorable condition as that in which we were. NOTHING commended us. His LOVE commends itself in this, that when that was OUR position, THIS was HIS! In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Calvin does seem to have real trouble with the love of God! His exposition in this case of Romans 1:17 is precisely opposite to the divine affirmation, relative to what GOD is willing to love! Now it is TRUE that He loves righteousness, and it is also true that He MAKES the convert righteous by imputation, and makes FOR righteousness by planting with His own hands, and giving a right seed (I John 3:9), so that the sinner is both pardoned judicially and enabled dynamically, albeit in the latter regard, only imperfectly, yet with scope for growth and for maturity and for depth!
Romans 1:17 is actually NOT saying this about the love of God, not even mentioning it. In the preceding verse 16, the word of God is telling us things about the Gospel, including this, that it brings into force and focus a power with a special purpose, salvation. Here in v. 17, it is explaining things, starting with - 'for'.
We learn therefore in verse 17 of Romans 1, that the Gospel's being the power of God with the payload of salvation, relates to its revealing righteousness, "from faith to faith", so that "the just shall live by faith". This is explained further in Romans 3:23ff.. Meanwhile what is "from faith to faith" ? From the faith of prophet to the faith of the reader, comes the faith in the Lord to salvation, according as a man is called: this is one rendering. Again, it can mean that faith reads of this wonder and this opening its eyes further, reads yet more, going from strength to strength. It may mean both. Faith is used to evoke faith, the work of faith in the word being the way of faith to the reader.
This is the apparent thrust. When no limit appears, no ground except utter constraint can exclude different vistas of meaning. Whichever emphasis however one takes, and the stresses cohere, and this by no means is to be assumed to exhaust the COMPLEMENTARY beauties of this verse, the word of God is not here saying or even implying that God loves only what is righteous!
His love does not DALLY, it is true, for ever with wickedness or the flesh would fail before Him (Genesis 6); and the conscience may be seared as with a hot iron, in those who reject the love of the truth (II Thessalonians 2, I Timothy 4:2, II Timothy 4:3). Yes, but this is not the teaching Calvin raises here, in his unheroic treatment of this text.
These two parallel
importations into the Bible, one by force of contradiction and one by force of
addition, do nothing to adorn the name of the scholar; but they do show, in view
of his prodigious brilliance and helpfulness in so many fields, the need to go
slow on 'ISMS'! Calvinism and the rest are, we remind ourselves (as in
Repent or Perish
1), simply
forbidden
(I Cor. 3).
Finally, even if it seem repetitive after Predestination and Freewill and The Kingdom of Heaven 4, let us realise that the SYSTEM of the 5 points of Calvin is NOT involved in this error, improper or lax means of preserving it never having been required (as shown in the above references, together with SMR Appendix B). They, for their part, are a splendid array, seen in the light of the Bible as diversely shown throughout this site.
How pure is the word of God (Psalm 12, 111, 119), which for its part, NEVER ERRS, and how marvellous is the Lord who NEVER FAILS, and whose word is NOT WREATHED, contrived or imprecise, but rather soars like a space craft, perfect in comprehension, diligent in disposition, incorruptible in content.
Alas! it is man not God who can be 'manifold' in this sense, of being inconsistent! The word of God, for His part, is pure, seven times refined, not prolix. That is what it says, and what one finds. It is perfect in grace and nobility, in consistency and in depth; it challenges, but not by obscurity; it hammers, but not with dull noise. It is a precise instrument, and it reveals a love of righteousness and of the unrighteous, each in his or her place, so that the end result gains what is to be gained, but the initial outlay is something very different, enormously expensive, wholly sacred, and foreknown in the wisdom of God, in all its outcomes.
Indeed, WHOM He foreknew, not in works but in reality (Romans 8:28ff., 9:11), He set about predestining! This is the logical sequence. THAT is the order which it says. Who is He ? He tells us that He is love (I John 4:7ff.), In Colossians 1:19ff., He shows it in that vast all universe expedition in the cross, sole competence for any sinner. What then ? It is NOT to be sure, that love is He; but that HE is love: for it is HE who gives to love its very definition, as to faithfulness, for in each there is no alloy (James 1:17, Deuteronomy 32:4).
"For it pleased that Father than in Him {Christ} all the fulness should dwell,
and
by Him, to reconcile all things to Himself,
by
Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven,
having made peace through he blood of His cross..."
Yet it is HE who knows: "YOU have not chosen ME, but I have chosen you!" (John 15).
For the harmony and significance of these things in the beauty of the Lord's unique holiness, see The Kingdom of Heaven Ch.4, SMR Appendix B and SMR Ch.8, initial pages, and The Biblical Workman Ch. 8, End-note 2, Repent or Perish Ch.1, End-note 1, together with Predestination and Freewill. In the end, we are all relevant to God (He does not know nothings!), but our 'virtues' do not in this domain of salvation, register; and His will is the determinant, not forcing man by violence, nor yet indulging man as if his were autonomy. In the end, He is the sovereign and it is His will which is done; it is His will that those saved are thus saved, that He and He alone justifies by grace, through faith, on the basis of His redemption as sacrifice and His resurrection as authentic; but He is the loving sovereign whose will is that man, not some enticed substitute, might be saved.
II ) From Ch. 4 of The Kingdom of Heaven -
Love that Passes Knowledge and Dimensional Darkness
The Westminster Confession speaks in Chapter III, of 'elect infants, dying in infancy' and 'all other elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the word' as 'being regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, and where, and how he pleaseth'. This emphasis is just. GOD appoints the gospel, the time, the manner of its dispersal, and sovereignly secures by its criterion, those who are His, who without works, He has before the world known.
We do not, may not and cannot rightly prescribe; to His patience or to His knowledge, by the wisdom of our little wits; but will leave to His divine knowledge the securing of His own WITH the love He protests He has (and I believe Him!), declares He is and executes without prejudice (I Timothy 2:1-6, Colossians 1:19ff.).
Against potentially damning, indeed justly damning evidence, then, comes the divine supervention in METHOD (pardon and regeneration), PRINCIPLE (the procurement as by the Gospel) and TIMING (when He will), that all chosen, repenting and believing may be, and indeed assuredly will be saved. Let us take then care not to distort or contort, to squeeze or to qualify outside the Bible that magnificent love of God. HE does NOT go through the souls of men as a philanthropist might go through an orphanage, and select now this one now that, condemning by non-selection those left.
DESPITE His love for all, He rejects some, but on the PRINCIPLES stated which fully delineate His love, and NOT in some way which denies them. NONE deserves to be selected, let alone through some mysterious X-factor of God-acceptability which is viewed as in some way endemic. (Cf. Predestination and Freewill pp. 82 and 97 - note 88. "I know that in me, that is in my flesh, dwells no good thing," says Paul in Romans 7:18 - cf. Psalm 16:1-5, Isaiah 45:23-24, 64:6, Romans 3:20-27). Perception of spiritual beauty differentially in the flesh is not the ground of salvation, or its criterion, but "the grace of God that brings salvation, which has appeared to all men" - Titus 2:11.
ALL deserve to be rejected. But GOD deserves to be taken at His word which He states that He would have all men to be saved and declares in the most categorical imaginable terms the barrier against salvation not in His love lack towards some, but in the response in the very face of His STATED intention (John 3:17) and His direct ADVENT, of those whom He rejects.
Those known before all time indeed are lost, but not through lack of love towards any as the basis and underlying cause, in His attitude. To state, makes parables or imagine to the contrary is to have an imagination at war with the word of God. Of all places in which to wage war, this is the last.
III) From The Marvels of Predestination and the Ways of Will Ch.2
Before this excerpt, let us consider the point of it here.
We come now to the necessity for liberty of such a solution as the Bible alone provides, for in it there is not only a sovereignty of all knowledge, but a will of all integrity associated with a love of all-encompassing initial thrust, and all this together with a free access to God dependent on no massif of character or wonder of personality. Hence freedom has point, in His knowledge, accidents are excluded in His foreknowledge, will has its scripturally stated relevance in His assessment, no one gate-crashes by duplicity or manipulation into the presence of God, nor is any excluded by inferiority of being, as if a conferment from an adverse destiny.
Liberty is protected; truth is inspected; error is corrected; love is injected without limit or selfish favour, things impersonal are a stage and things delimiting BY personality's woes are not the criterion, for God knows and finds His will by an omniscience which is not conquered by pathology in man, or misdirected by his inabilities. Despite God's will that the world be saved, and the fact that He SO loved that this was an impactive outcome, yet since His love is outgoing in a magnitude which suffers no restriction, and pure in a fashion which allows no indulgence, as if to assassinate truth in the interests of advantage for example, He denies Himself those whom His love does not reach. This, being known past pathology, is not a differential in value in its recipients, since where sin is not, differential in goodness is not in a creation, but it has differential outcomes.
Without all of this, there is no way in which people can be free to be what they now are not! for what they now are would limit them in their very choices, and being created, they would have no liberty. With this, being in the purvey of God who MADE and understands liberty, they have neither cultural nor psychological, nor social nor genetic nor other woes to disclose their destiny, but like all others, are selected by the God who WOULD have all, but takes only His own, the exclusion cited being, in the very light of these facts, that they prefer darkness. Indeed, and further, like all truth, this ramifies with relish. Thus, if they WERE to be brought to heaven, while personally preferring darkness, it would be hell; as if someone who detests morals and by a sort of psychological tic calls them hypocrites, were MADE to hear lectures on the purity of morals daily!
Those who do come, are found, are foreknown; and these do not come moreover as if immune in their own spirits to what they are, but come in the domain of repentance, for sinners can never cease to be such by mere words of description. They come in the fear of God, facing the stark realities in His containing presence: for just as He foreknows the realities, so it is the realities that are foreknown, and not something else. As to the mode of it, however, this is in the liberties of the divine, and cannot be taken as circumscribed in any way. He has freedom to see beyond what man has liberty to be.
CHAPTER 2
As indicated in Ch. 1 above, the singular logical requisition for the grave and comprehensive position of the Bible in this field, is now given. This is augmented in Chapter 5 of Part II of this volume.
Here is the Necessity of Biblical Truth in this Area
v Since it alone provides the ingredients
v
which explain all things that are actual ingredients of our situation,
v without perversity, reductionism or callow authoritarianism,
v as is found in the irrationalities of determinism,
v
or
of voluntarism,
v in their respective, unbalanced and inaccurate harpings on only one facet of our affairs.
A. An EXCERPT
from
Tender Times for Timely Truths,
Ch. 11
Including the scope of predestination - see also original above
STEP 2: CONSIDERING FURTHER
In fact, there is nothing else that covers ALL the facts about man in this arena of freedom, responsibility, liberty, limits, licence, life, pollution, capacities, but this which is found in the Bible. NOTHING else DOES OR EVEN COULD perform what is needed to explain and expound it all from ONE BASIS.
Let us review these things, then, a little, as we move towards our stated object, double predestination, to see that it is so far from being obnoxious, that its omission is devastating and absurd; and indeed, wholly unbiblical!
If you have liberty, then it is YOURS, and then YOUR comparative advantages advance you, so that your cultural superiority is for evermore made the crown of your glory, the advantaged having advanced not only to power, position or prestige on this earth it may be, but to heaven itself on the basis of nothing more than an idiom of birth. This makes freedom a delusion, and hence as reasoned in detail in Predestination and Freewill, and elsewhere, is false.
If on the other hand, God in fact did deploy a sovereignty that merely selected for His own advantage, or wish, or caprice, and there is nothing at all to do with the fact that human beings have an image of God status with wills, then man is to be selected as he is, not as he is not. What then ? it becomes some X-factor in man, some X-feature, or focus, which relates NOT to what is NOT there, but to what IS there; for man is said to be FOREKNOWN, and hence it would be the flattest of contradictions, to make the flat earth society look positively mountainous by comparison, to assert that it is NOT something known. Of man, in such a scenario, there is something known, and being known, he is selected.
If it be maintained that it is something, which - while assuredly THERE in the man chosen, or elected, or selected, or to be 'one of the elect' - is NOT at all meritorious, then the doctrine is sound in so saying, but the consistency is lost in having to say it. For if there be something desired and chosen, which is NOTHING to do with human will, which, that is, omits the fact that this basic feature of being in the image of God is THERE, then it relates to something ELSE, and that ? It is the evaluable reality of what the thing is, which is so chosen.
If then you are SUPERIOR in acceptability to God, by virtue of what you ARE, then superior indeed you are, for who better knows what is good, Himself being the criterion, than God! But if you yet say, But no! there is NO merit, it must be something which He does NOT appreciate, or desire, then this is mere contradiction in terms. Further what possible MERIT is found in the beings described in Ephesians 2 and 4! Such would be a contradiction of these things AS WELL! We are not dealing with social niceties here, but with TRUTH, what God says, and investigating what it means. We are not like some judges in the US, in one phase of their history, it seems, deciding what is meant by the law (in their case), and then adapting it to what it is deemed would be the will of culturally sensitive people NOW, with the same intention!
That becomes judicial amendment to law in the interests of interpreted culture. This is wholly removed from the Biblical position (not surprisingly, since God is God and man is His highly mobile... creation, attending to many things illicit, confused and confusing, awry from his Maker).
What is WRITTEN is the criterion here. It is the Bible which is being considered, not considerations about what it would mean if it were adapted to this or that.
"frustrates the signs of the babblers,
And drives diviners mad...
who confirms the word of His servant,
And performs the counsel of His messengers"
- from Isaiah 44:25-26.
So, looking at both the cases above, the anti-predestinarians
(of this KIND) maintain their cause; and the autonomous man pugilists, those
averse to any such concept, maintain theirs, and there is no resolution. Nor
should there be.
BOTH are astray from the word of God and are merely echoing, or paralleling in religion, the antinomy justly found in secular thought (and it is justly found because what omits the atmosphere when studying meteorology could not be sound, unless there were none! and GOD is the subject looming above all others, so how would His omission lead to anything but confusion, which is in fact, over millenia, there the case!).
STEP 3:
THE ANTINOMY IN SECULAR THOUGHT
HOW DETERMINATE IS DETERMINISM ?
In secular thought, determinism cannot live any more than in religious thought. First, in the latter case, starting with God: were HE determined, we should simply have to find the notation expert adequate to invent such a program, who in the ultimate, is the actual God, not some robotic device. Determinism in monism, on the other hand, normally found in materialism, is - if it were possible, even more ridiculous.
If it all were determined (as by determinism for all things that are), then it could not again BE determined by assessment of validity or right and wrong, for from what source would things other than what occurs find mandate, relevance or even existence! What it is, it is; and that is it. That which has happened cannot on such a basis, be assessed on right or wrong, for
· a) it could not be otherwise than it is, in this model: so that standards are irrelevant illusion, coming from somewhere which does not have the benefit of existence. What MIGHT have happened is wholly irrelevant, inoperable, unattainable, as this is the what-is model, and what DOES happen is ALL. To move outside the system is to have somewhere to go; but on this system, it is all there is.
· b) this would represent a capacity for divergence of what is in the potential direction of what ought to be (as for example, in terms of validity for such a theory as that of determinism), which would simply be irrelevant in a supposed scenario of ... mere transpiring of events.
Or how COULD what could not be otherwise, be invalid ? in the model concerned,
it happens, exists and knows no contrary. It is immune from validity
considerations in principle, but in practice it supplies thought for its
validity, in seeking to establish itself; and hence it is self-contradictory,
logically being forced to employ for its sustenance, what it abuses.
If however this sort of systematic event of a deterministic universe is NOT the summit and the substance of all that is, so that things are, indeed, assessable, categorisable as correct and incorrect, right and wrong and so on, subject to logical assessment as wrong, whether or not they happen to happen: then there must be at least a dualism, not a monism, for monism's assessment and grading! It cannot be matched to standards which cannot be there; for if what is, is all, then what is not, is not. From what is not there, you put right what is there, so that what is there is left as right. Obviously, this is thin air, vaporous, and nugatory, deploying non-existence in order to shape what exists, a threadbare theory.
In other words, illicitly, you come to a more realistic conception, by force of what is being done, in the midst of what is happening!
You then allow
a) a deterministic component in reality and
b) an
assessive capacity, capable of error and detecting
it, drawing principles or positions, from another source, which hence becomes a
second rank in reality: second in kind, not in importance. This however is not
determined; and the case is not determinism, but dualism or other.
· Thus logic is an illusion, or the theory of determinism is. It is however, by means of logic that this theory is put.
· If therefore, logic is an illusion, then the theory of determinism must lack validity in logic, its admitted basis; but if, on the other hand, logic is not an illusion, then theory is, for logic, in use, denies determinism as adequate*1.
Moreover, there must be error in the world of this system (called determinism).
Thus if the system is right, the contrary to it, is and must be wrong. If, on
the other hand, at the outset, the system is wrong, that is error in itself.
Put differently: if the system be true, it MUST be false, for it implies error by its very assertion of a contra-distinct view from the range available. If then error be objectively present, the theory is false, for objective error is a separate reality from a one tier system where what is, is all there is. If on the other hand, it should be asserted in defence of the system (of determinism) that the error is not objective, but a merely some kind of delusive subjectivity through which one does not attain to what is real, then the theory works on things that do not hold objectively, without being able to differentiate, and so fails as truth, masking and not representing reality. It aborts logic in order to operate, while depending on logic in order to be accepted: if however the abortion is correct, then the theory CANNOT be logically established, for it denies the universe of discourse essential to its establishment.
Wherever error is, and it is inevitable as shown: what happens is not the end of the matter, but a mere entry to what might be, and could become actual, if critical assessment so determines, determining what is determined by means subject to error, to thought, to invention in a multi-system reality, not monism.
If then the theory is taken to be objectively true, it results in its being objectively false. If however it be acknowledged to be objectively false at the outset, the same result arrives! The falsity is universal in type, inevitable. If moreover, it is a theory which operates on delusion, so be it. It is not delusion which we are seeking, but truth.
Error is an exhaust gas of the theory, if it be right; yet wrongness is proscribed by the theory, nor can it accommodate it. If then it be true, it must be false. If it be false, it is abandoned. That is all.
Further, without absolute truth in existence*2, you cannot find it, with which to make any statement concerning the nature of things; and indeed, mere existence of it does not suffice, as your own limits and relativistic involvement in the system, on this model of thought, make your responses mere reactions, resultants of the interchange of things, banal confinements for any communication, on the nature of what is the totality of which these events would then all be mere particulate activities.
A RESPONDER capable of discriminating truth, even when it exists and is presented, not an activist capable of reacting to happenings, is then needed. Further, the responder needs to be an adequate one, equipped with heavy capacities to discriminate standards of assessment as a base for thought, outside the happenings themselves. Again, he/she ALSO needs to be TOLD, since the tele-psychiatrising of God by finite means is a contradiction in terms. Even with one another, people with their spirits, are the despair of psychiatry, which advisedly has in practice more and more abandoned its illusory imaginations, and is moving to less expensive ... drugs. (See SMR Ch. 4, Part 1.)
In short, you need man as well as God, and man who is possessed of capacities which overview happenings, not in a series of actions, but in a standpoint of understanding beyond any understanding. You need, in short, man's spirit. Since you have it, when God sees fit to communicate to it, on His own basis, that is fine. On the theory of determinism, however, you do not have it, and so cannot illicitly, on such a model, use what you do not have!
It is thus pleasurable to see, when examining such contrivances as determinism, that they may help focus on the whole necessities for truth, which they are found wholly to abandon. As we see in Ch. 3 of SMR and indeed Ch.1, these are found in one place only, the self-revealing God of creation, whose communication is there seen as required on the one hand by logic, and admired on the other by unique verification, to which none can begin to compare.
Equally, determinism makes a mockery of guilt, a folly of accusations of the same, as when those holding this viewpoint attack others as ... wrong by standards that are not identical with mere eventuation, or are even ... moral; and is constantly at war with all the actual activities and stirred responses of man to man. These things we have seen in detail in such places as Predestination and Freewill, and here merely note for conspectus.
HOW FREE IS AUTONOMY ?
If it be held, however, that this ludicrous, not to say extravagant extreme of determinism, is folly, that the case is the total opposite, that autonomous man has his most distinctive thought, and that he is not in the least susceptible to anyone or anything when he uses his god-like powers, THEN we run into a similar logical impasse.
Thus, if it is all a matter of what the equipment is that we so notably use, and the manner in which the wonderful will of godlike man is moving in its vast waters, then how can it ever get beyond the dimensions of what it IS, and be personal in its imagined total independence ? Independent in what ? In its glorious self, its psyche ? This given, it is free! Un-metered, it can measure … itself! It can ascribe meaning without having it ? It can know without knowing itself ? It can get past itself in order to determine itself ? To where ? Autonomy is in as much desperation as determinism for ground of thought, as empty, as epistemologically defunct!
What are the criteria, the parameters, the bases of the will relating to the preferences of the psyche, in all its fascinating givenness, to the dispositions of the heart, to the past, to the equipment for consciousness and so on, to the culture*3 ... it goes on.
Where in the causal nexus is there liberty in that ? You see this because .. and you feel this because ... and your causes go on in almost infinite regress and interaction. Thought of in this way, it is but delusive, and liberty regresses like the waves after a tsunami. Liberty in such a model is chains. If some SELF be made to arise from the waters, then from WHAT did it come ? If it does not exist, the case is worse for thinking in its absence, and hence not having the personality with which to discourse at all (the folly of Hume as in SMR Ch.3).
Thus the desire for secular liberty reaches with dragging wings, to meaninglessness that yet ascribes meaning (SMR pp. 292ff.), extending even to the conclusions of dismal dismissal of the realities of error, of guilt, of human relations, which determinism for its part, even more directly affronts in blind contradiction. Meanwhile, in the land of 'liberty' through autonomy, we find the chain-conditions or controls of inevitable containerization (the containers are like chains, but in figure, they also are themselves chained, for not only are they enveloping, but encapsulating like a prison, in a prison compound of ramifying rooms); while the desire for secular determinism entails the contradiction of itself in the attribution of mistake or even folly to those who think otherwise, by their errors, duly assessable, and indeed reaches to antinomy in unknowability of truth with which to so much as state the case, and to the removal of the validity of the person's thought who so thinks even the theory!
It is for this reason that law
courts frequently seek to absolve from any real blame, for both extremes lead to
such confusion, and society pays for its premises with ruin, now enraging, now
astonishing the wayfarers who watch such highly paid aberrations; or anon,
lampoon them in cartoons.
STEP 4: THE HARMONY WHICH IS SO ARRESTING IN TRUTH
In Christ however all this is as nothing. The WILL is relevant. Hence there is no intrinsic denial of the reality of thought. This meets the necessities of liberty. God does not evacuate these from His creation in His will. It was His will to create liberties. It was in His own image that He created. What was the nature of that creation, then, if it were not one with a will, even to the point of acquiring guilt through wilful, superficially based, disobedience! That was WILL par excellence, right in Genesis 3!
Hence man, divorced from his NATURAL relationship to the SUPERNATURAL, to God, is in a profusion of confusion which tends to dampen all clarity (hence philosophy's history) and to remove the structural soundness of all deep thought. This is symptomatic of his divorce from truth, which is found ONLY in God, from whom it comes, absolute and alone able to be such.
The spirit of unredeemed man, designed for communion and co-operation with God as Father, divorced and separated, is stunned either into insignificance (denying itself in determinism, oblivious of logic), or into delusive aspirations with wings but no atmosphere, as in autonomy. Burrowing, buried and bewildered, now exultant, now distressed, it tries to turn into god or sod, making nothing of either... for it is more than the one and less than the other, and its actual status is not ... acceptable to renegades from reality. It is true realisation of reality hurts at first; but then, so does the beneficial drill of the dentist. Decay may be acceptable; but it has consequences.
The human will then ? This will, though present, therefore, is polluted. Further, it is without God, and in man, a naked emblem of an image, a function of a festering spirit. By Biblical statement (as in Romans 9:17, John 15), it is NOT sovereign in man. Hence man's use of it towards GOD, does not depend on his imperfections, moments of thought this way or that, inability to know God because of sin, and hence on his comparative ability derived from his equipment, environment, helpers and so on, at least to move in this direction.
How could there be liberty if all this is what you ARE, so that your exercise of it becomes a sort of historical episode! or whatever else you are, has no (operative) basis, so that you are blown like wind ?
Biblically, you DO NOT depend on that, so that you are free from that impasse. On the scriptural basis, freedom does not evaporate in comparative advance of your equipment, facilities, susceptibilities drawn from your upbringing, education, political climate and so on.
All these relate to what you MEET, and may influence what you ARE, but the two do not meet as lord and subject. You find and you are, and what you are is marred, and so often is what you find, but you have a deposit status from the creative hand of the living God. If immunised to reality in its wayward journeyings, the spirit of man is yet not immune to the operations of God. Dope is cover, not king.
Put differently: There is a structural residue amidst its functional decay. Your image of God personality may be derelict in sin, and it certainly is not competent to 'choose' God, in its exclusion by sin from His knowledge (I Corinthians 2:14 - "the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them" !)'' ...
If however such were the case, and you did have enablements here to find God in your own self, then again, your comparative conferments would lead to your comparative approach, which would lead to your superiority of disposition, of origin and consequence being enshrined for ever, as if such things produced YOU and nothing of liberty or even of meaning were the basis. This! It is not freedom but manoeuvring. It is a situation, however, categorically denied in the word of God, which thus categorically preserves and protects the reality of liberty; but NOT the reality of SOVEREIGNTY in your exercise of it, for being dead in sins (Ephesians 2), you are not alive to the issues as they really are, as shown in I Cor. above.
Thus the external impacts and the internal expressions for a given man, in his being and experience, duly related, and each with endless seeming parameters and backgrounds, are neither of them determinative. The internal ones are not because you come from God and are able to be restrained or made aware of Him, who is not determinable; and their very deficiencies are not determinative BECAUSE it is NOT all in YOUR hands, nor do they control the outcome. This is the perfect harmony of Biblical predestination with Biblical liberty, and logical liberty, such as requires treatment in any non-reductionist approach, which faces all the facts.
Liberty is not lost, and liberty is not determinative. It is in God's hands. There is the awesome actuality, which cuts across the secular delusions, the religious confusions, and settles the matter in reality and in truth, according to His making, nor our marring or sparring.
But in God's hands, does it not lose its reality, some may pursue: if He chooses without respect to man being in God's image at all ? As shown above, this too is so, for such an imagined and imaginary model is the expression of the preference of the preference expert, of the goodness who is good, and knows what is good. What is it that is chosen ... the best for His desire! What is the best, the equipment which has become so, which in all its backgrounds, historical, political, social, psychological and so on, has been the fortunate end-point of the events. Even the fabric of the soul is moved in these ways, by many influences. At what point is this or that influence determinative which, were it lacking, would have a different RESULT! There is no liberty in that.
But when and ONLY WHEN the CROSS is the selection criterion, or its equivalent in the form of God as He proceeds with principles stated, but in glory unspeakable, is there peace. Then it is the case that a NEW BEING is available (II Corinthians 5:17ff., Colossians 3:10, John 3). It is NOT the you who "chooses" which is made eternal. It is the YOU who has "NOT CHOSEN ME", and of whom He states, "BUT I HAVE CHOSEN YOU!" - John 15). With its new equipment, it has a wholly new set of realities with which it lives: CHRIST IN YOU (Col. 1:27) is assuredly not the same, or of the same order or sphere at all, as YOU! The infinite makes an infinite difference, and His sinlessness is in the sharpest possible contrast to your sinfulness, when unconverted (cf. Ephesians 2).
It is NOT your QUALITY which is selected, then, as if to confirm that you are indeed marvellous, by comparison with the riff-raff which frankly, did not come into this Olympian Selection - if one might make an implicit comparison with the selection trials for the Olympics. This is precisely contradicted moreover in Romans 3:27ff..
It is YOU! But what is this YOU, which is FOREKNOWN (Romans 8:29ff.), and hence must exist to be chosen and known. This however is so only in the mind of God, for in the creation of Genesis 1, we find the history of the creation of "the heavens and the earth" as in Genesis 2:4 - there is no creation of some other kind which one may at leisure add; and this one has kind to kind continuance, not a pre-contingent of created souls wafting about. Thus we abide in Proverbs 30:6!
But what of your destining ? It is not now your character which is the determinative, for then it is all the same thing, as before: where did it come from and what influences and so on! And this would be indeed a subject for boasting such as Paul states to be definitively excluded in Romans 3! It is not your character, but your WILL in this, that this represents your capacity to RESIST, to REJECT, despite the most marvellous influences, the best fostering this earth provides!
This is often precisely the case with many, and in one sense, it was pre-eminently the case with Judas Iscariot, for was not CHRIST in amazing power and tenderness, total discernment and compassion, his pastor! One remembers in this context, Isaiah 26:10:
It is YOU who are chosen but NOT your will which chooses (as in Romans 9:15-16),
and note this,
"it is not of
him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy."
It is no good 'interpreting'
"not of him
who wills" of course,
in the best line of modern theological cavil, as meaning "it is of him who
wills"! There are some limits, even for modern theologians, and flat
contradiction like a flat tyre, does not go.
Yet it IS the case that God "would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed" (Jeremiah 51:9), and we know because HE says so! And it is He who would have healed Israel, when the opposite was to occur (Hosea 7:1), and as shown in Spiritual Refreshings for the Biblical Millenium Ch. 12, SMR Appendix B, there are multiplied cases in the Bible, where the disposition for compassion of the Lord, and the wholly absent complacency about His creation lead on to a tenderness and a willingness to move into more and more opportunities (as indeed implied in II Chronicles 36 and shown in Hosea 12:10), that are exhibitive of the most extreme love, even for what is lost. Indeed, in the case of Jonah, even the godly prophet (evangelist extraordinary and gifted in obedience at the last - do not forget!) was humanly lacking in the extreme profundities of the DIVINE compassion of God towards these lost Gentiles (Jonah 4).
God
"does not willingly afflict the children of men"
- Lamentations 3:33.
As shown in SMR App. B there is no way of removing the meaning of Matthew 23:37, and Calvin's failure to make inroads is similarly addressed in Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 2, End-note 1. CHRIST WOULD have healed the current generation*4 of the Jews in Jerusalem (Luke 19:42ff.), but they were not willing. His crushing emotion is intense at this; but His truth does not deviate in what follows! This is the standard and multitudinously clear meaning of such a context as Matthew 23:37 likewise, compared with outré efforts to avoid them, or hapless failure to acknowledge them, as shown SMR Appendix B.
Misplaced desire to 'protect'
this or that may motivate such errors, but does not sustain them. It is also
necessary in view of Biblical principles, as also there shown, concerning the
guilt of the fathers and children, the one relative to the other, to avoid
anti-idiomatic efforts to make a generation division here.
It was the current people of Jerusalem who were besought and they who were
unwilling. It was that express generation of the city, just as of another such
it was written:
"for as a
young man marries a virgin, so shall your sons marry you"
(Isaiah 62:5). It was of them that the willingness of the Lord was voiced and
the unwillingness of the people was contrasted. WHO contrasted these ? It was
the Lord who so declared.
Indeed,
Hence it is the WILL of man which is relevant and the WILL of man which is NOT SOVEREIGN.
It is God who KNOWS what He is doing and with WHOM He is doing it, but who in so sovereignly selecting, and who is acting in the full sway of His love, and not despite its absence, relative to those both chosen and not chosen. GOD IS LOVE (I John 4:7ff.), and this being so, He is not unloving in some things. He CAN HATE, but this is not without a cause, and as shown in The Kingdom of Heaven Ch.4, this love is His very being, and the results of its forfeiture do nothing to degrade it, but rather to upgrade our realisation of the intensity of that love, that He went so far to avoid for us what we deserve, that He took it Himself... selectively (as in Romans 8:32 - where those on account of whom the sins fell on Christ, are those who inherit all things).
He does not choose on the basis of merit or superiority; and man cannot choose being blinded by the circumstantial correlates of sin, culture and clouds of self-assertion, self-will, self-parameters and the like. IF MAN COULD, then he would merely BE what he IS, and this having been in the first place based on many things, would be a resultant, not liberty. IF GOD WOULD dictatorially elect what was most pleasing in His sight, in its natural circumstances, this would likewise be not liberty for man, but the tyranny of the pleasure of another, and whatever man might be or want, this would be neither interpreted nor consulted. It would be the MIND of another without reference to the nature of man in His image, a being with some independence of spirit. Freedom in both cases is simply aborted FOR MAN, either by his fall or his utilitarian selection, or subjection to preference criteria on the basis of where he got.
In Cross selection however (as profiled in Colossians 1:19ff. with I Timothy 2:1ff., Romans 8:32ff., and John 15:21ff. and other sites noted), all this is avoided. Man, as repeatedly shown in scripture, as observable in Matthew 23:37, Ezekiel 33:11 in conjunction with I Timothy 2 and John 3:16, is overall the
In His divine splendour, the Lord implements this,
not some caprice or personal hedonism. Love is not like that; God is not like
that; He did not act like that; He does not act like that. That destroys the
basis of love. Love enables the basis of freedom. That is the simple fact. It
does not simply crush or apportion IN MIND, what is to be disposed without love.
In love, it predestines with foreknowledge of what is the one predestined, but
without concern for meritorious achievement as the selection basis. What follows
regeneration is not the same as what precedes, even in mind; the good tree bears
good fruit rather than the good fruit bearing the good tree. God plants the
trees (Isaiah 61:3, Matthew15:13, Titus 3:5ff.).
Man MUST be able to OTHER than he is, to be free, or as we have seen at some length, he merely expressed his construction and environment, his history and his genes, his gender and his culture, his appetites and whatever else he has somehow obtained (cf. Predestination and Frewill Section 1).
This, if the ultimate, would be a mere puppetry in terms of liberty. Man MAY become other than he is, through the regeneration of God as in Titus 3:5, leading to his acceptance as a child of God. Man COULD NOT do this freely, if his circumstantially oriented being were the LIMIT, in the matter, this being merely the production of a product; and of course, if there were NOTHING ELSE available, or, even if there were, it were not available because it was invisible to sin, or despised because of his current nature, per force! When it is YOU who are diseased in a blindness of spirit, a pathological situation which removes the eyesight from your purvey, then choice is a matter of choosing what you will, but your will itself remains, in its sad sickness and disability, the problem! IT therefore cannot resolve for you the matter! This the Bible emphasises in Romans 9 as in I Cor. 2:14 and John 15:1ff..
Man, then, CANNOT in fact do
this at all, constitutively, constitutionally, as he is; as in I
Cor. 2:14.
Very naturally, however, when God and the nature of the case, in fact, move
together, they combine with felicity. What man
cannot do,
would not, if it were done, be the functional work of someone in God's image,
since he is in sin and thereby limited and distorted; and even if he could do
it, in his sinful state, present since Adam, except in the incarnate Christ,
then it would not be free. HOW can man escape himself, when himself is all he
has ? Not at all. But then man would not exist at all, being devoid of creation
itself, if he were all. The 'problem' exists only when you either ignore the
CREATION OF A BEING IN GOD's IMAGE reality, and so
seek, if you will, help for the sick heart of a panther, when your patient is in
fact a man; or else distort or ignore what God has said that the problem is
there at all.
When you consult what God has caused to be written, in His word, the Bible, and only then, is the answer clear. This explains all, enables all, ennobles all. GOD IN LOVE ACTS BEYOND MAN, and man thereby is neither the mere pivot of another's power, nor the captive of his own littleness and lostness of SPIRIT. Liberty is instituted, though sin withdrew it - not in kind, but in relevant operation at this level, it still has dim light as in the heavily polluted atmosphere, say of Gary, Indiana - but you do not see the realities in this. Love is implemented, though hate may operate if in the end, it will. Goodness is manifested in mercy, though it is not imposed. Light is everywhere, and this is our current point: it is the light of the STRUCTURE of things about man, in the SIGHT of his Creator who having made all, and provided initial freedom, both knows how to implement the same, even with the rebel, and to do so with fidelity to truth and in the very tenderness and beauty of what love is. For love ? It does not selfishly seek its own; but it DOES seek to deliver what it loves.
Such is something of that vast magnitude, the love of God, which has a sort of spatial expression in magnitude alone, and loftiness, in space, and another one in time, where so much is enabled for so long, before the last chapter of the book of sin is written, that which followed the crux of love in the Cross, provides that final burning, for our God is a consuming fire, which is the lot of what will never relent in its self-imposed littleness, never leave itself for its Lord. It is bright. Its pain is inward: the conscience that cannot speak for it is foul, the pride which cannot speak for it is exposed, the remorse which cannot act, for the heart does not last forever, the spirit would fail before the Lord, as He says in Isaiah 57. Truth is not commuted, nor is reality overthrown, while time finds its bounds as He appoints, who in the first place, made our processive time, where you MUST WAIT!
But as to what separates, as to sin (Isaiah 59:1-2), love has borne the quintessence of that already; and has provided peace with pardon and power, in the merciful love of God, which is then the milieu of one's life. How any other could be valued! But it is...
The choice of God, then is not capricious; but costly. It is not inert, but intelligent, like all of His ways. It is not an imposition, but an exposition; it does not force, and it does not relent. It does however remit, but again, not in caprice, but in capacity, bought and wrought in the Cross. This choice then is that of God.
GOD CAN and DOES DO IT, so that man is NOT dependent on his parameters. God does it in LOVE, being LOVE (I John 4:7-8), in precisely the way Christ depicted and showed continually (cf. SMR Appendix B, The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 4 and Spiritual Refreshing for the Digital Millenium Chs. 9, 10, 11, 12). Hence the disposition of force, not freedom is not the case; and the decisions of farce, not liberty, are avoided. This is the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY liberty could thrive, and indeed be found for man. It must be beyond himself, but wrought in the love which knows what he cannot know, and does what it alone can do. (Cf. Predestination and Freewill pp. 121ff., in Section III.)
Love is the answer; the love of God, in the sovereignty of God; with the integrity of God, directed towards the actualities of man, not as an attainer, but to the heart, where God foreknows what man would be, even if he could know. Yet this is not to state some form of procedure in the divine nature, in the form of God; it must not be so misunderstood. It is simply the case that the PRINCIPLES which He states, are those which operate, in the way God sees fit to use them. What He affirms true, occurs. That is as sure as His word is! It is entirely sure. It is here only that the result, the solution obtains. That also is sure. The second verifies, as all does in the end, the first.
It is the COHESION of the principles as scripturally stated, and their harmony with ONE ANOTHER and with ALL facts of life for man, and with liberty for which man is answerable, and with the realities of responsibility, and the trials of conscience, and the servilities of sin, TOGETHER WITH their provisions in and FROM the living and PERSONAL GOD, who as a person loves persons: it is this which ALONE CAN ANSWER the facts. Here alone is harmony conceivable. And here it is found.
But where else ? In the book which resolves all problems; and in this case as in many, it does it in the only way it could be done.
But that, it is hardly surprising! After all, the 'problems' come from the interaction of man with God, of his environment with his Maker; and it will HAVE TO BE, as a verification of man's very creation by God, that the answers are found in the same God, who, creating, founded what now is to be understood FROM HIM. ONLY His knowledge could be accurate and adequate to have it; only His power could implement it, who knows the end from the beginning, alpha and omega.
His word is thus verified, not alone in answering the otherwise insoluble problem in predestination, determinism and so on, on the one side, and freewill, responsibility, on the other; but in answering it with that sovereign finesse which leaves all other efforts to 'resolve' the 'problems' of life, unspeakably little, wholly lost and without help.