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CHAPTER SIX

LOVE AS MOTIVATION

LAW AS INCITATION

TRUTH AS INCRIMINATION and

ACTION AS IMPLICATION

Evangelising versus Quiescence

and Missions verses Moping

with Excursion on the Area of Defect in the Teaching of Calvin *1

EMANCIPATION TO THE LIBERTY OF  LOVE

It is well when people are emancipated from the Calvinist error, NOT the five points in themselves, which in a biblical setting are not amiss, but the horrible decree^*1 setting of Calvin himself.  This has a considerable basis in his writings, and is like a volcanic eruption from the toils of a moving and heated earth below, not from nowhere, as we shall see further below. Far from it.

This historic theologian finds no answer to the fact that in his opinion, that God simply and inexplicably excludes some from the fall of grace upon them, from  salvation; so that he finds there is no answer to the matter, except to call on His sovereignty. That he should dare to use the word 'horrible'  of a decree of God, even if the meaning  were merely that it invokes a sense of irresolvable horror, though doubtless deemed  justifiable in some way: this is a sour pollution of biblical truth. The point that he omits the answer, reasonable and revelatory as it is in the Bible, the very one that should induce him not to refer to the predestinative decree in any such manner as he does, when the answer is not only plain in the Bible but repetitively stated in many ways, so that it is  rather a wonderful decree, when it is understood, is sufficient ground for leaving him in this error, and taking no part in it, neither recognising it nor the means by which he erroneously produces it.

This failure of Calvin is NOT sufficient ground for throwing out his entire system. A good way of handling the matter is to refer to the omitted revelatory fact, the extensive as well as intensive nature of the love of God, which in this, he vigorously avoids, is to note that his error is  PRE-SYSTEMATIC. It comes outside the arrangement of his plan of salvation, and is in the area of divine motivation, the spread of his love which is implemented indeed along such lines as he outlines; but the lines are far from grievous in their scope. Love has designed them, wisdom has built them, grace has assigned them and the God who is love (I John 4:7), has not at all forgotten Himself, nor made assignments of such devious-seeming oddity as Calvin, outside the Bible but inside his presentation, seeks to construct.

That is, granted

	that God knows who are His and does not take those who are not,
	that the matter is settled long before the chronological sequence of our time, in fact before creation and hence long before man began,
	that it is not based on any works to be done by man as in Romans 9, Ephesians 2, Titus 3,
	that unless it be granted by the Father, no one can enter the Kingdom as in John 6,
	that God, knowing His own mind, and sending His Son, led to a limited atonement, not conditional on the work of man, or on his own operation of his will  as such,
	as in John 1:12, and
	that these are regenerated whom He has predestined, secured, kept and inherit heaven: and no others

yet there  is more  to be said which is logically prior to this array of elements, gives it a very different complexion and a totally other quality in the beauty of divine holiness.

This more is therefore said to be pre-systematic, for it does not disturb the rest, but gives it a fuller biblical perspective. .

It concerns the love of God. WHY did He do all this ? WHAT is the nature of the love which impels Him as in John  3:16-17, Hosea 11:8 and Ezekiel 33:1, Jeremiah 31:18-19, Titus 2-3 ? Is His work to satisfy a dimension to which alone His saving love in any sense reaches ? Did God so love a part of the world that He gave His only begotten Son for it ? If so, why with such simplicity of utterance available, did He not say so ? Are His words not clear and far from crooked, plain to him who understands ? Is His motivation in salvation, of this grievous delimitation ? Does He assert that His love, as God, is for the world, which is the butt when God is the basis and man is the objective in view, as in I Timothy 2 and Colossians 1 demonstrably, the heavens and the earth being there in view to take it a step further, SO THAT anyone in it who believes is saved from perishing, when His love in fact would have nothing whatsoever to do with a vast portion of it, on Calvin's terms ?

It is amazing that one so discerning as Calvin often is, should descend to such depths, like David, at another level, with Bath-Sheba.

The answer does not require cogitation, since it is written. It is true that the various statements in Holy Writ which concern the matter are sometimes direct, and  sometimes  implied, but they are there in multitudes.

What do we read in Colossians 1:19ff. ? It is this.

It PLEASED the Lord, having  made peace by the blood of the Cross to reconcile all things  to Himself, whether things on earth, or things in the heavens. ALL THINGS, the Greek PANTA in transliteration, is by no means oblique or unsure. It is comprehensive, encapsulating all. Look at the heavens, look at the earth, consider it: THIS is the butt of divine interest in this case. What is the scope of that interest ? It is this which we should learn at once and once for all. ONCE He had made peace by the blood of the cross (in that sense doing the work required for the scope of His concern), it pleased Him to reconcile ALL THINGS to Himself. This, totally constitutive of the breadth of His divine desire, is yet not enough for Paul in his inspired depiction.

He repeats in order to extend. It pleased Him  to reconcile all things to Himself, but this is not so limited as one might otherwise imagine, for it is ALL THINGS WHETHER ON EARTH OR IN the HEAVENS. It is an astronomical love, stopping nowhere. It does not contain delimitation, but amplification. It does not exhibit anything horrible, inexplicable, but something  wonderful, a marvel. Whatever follows from it, since God is omnipotent, will exhibit a love of that dimension, and not only A LOVE, but THE LOVE OF GOD, and not only the love of God, but one defined as being in the area of the blood of the Cross, and with the intent of reconciliation of this array,  that is all things, and that ? to HIMSELF!

THAT is the ambit of His motivation in terms of salvation, as in I John 2:1-2, Ezekiel 33:11, I Timothy 2, John 3 and I John 2:1ff.

That is FOR GOD. What of man ? In John 3:16-19 we learn that God so  loved the world that He gave to the uttermost in the most practical of fashions to enable the refashioning of any who believe, His aim being in this contradistinct from judgment; and that He did it so that the very CRITERION of exclusion in view of such a love for such a body as specified, namely the world which we learnt in John 1 He made, and into which He sent His light, is not only far from Himself. It resides as a divine specification, in the very setting where HIS OWN action and motivation is defined, IN MAN.

As to God, He did this for this reason, and love impelled; and as to man, there are those who have a preference of another kind, and this impels them to do otherwise and neglect the offer, reject the love and protect their status outside of God. All categories are covered; nothing is left out; the divine and the human are specified as to the scope of the matter, the divine as to its motive and nature, and the human by contrast as to its annulling force to what is the divine contribution. Hence it declares without any inhibition or qualification that MAN in his evil preference, when so faced with such love from such a one as God Himself, he is the disruption, the exclusion agent.

It is not a love that is feeble, it is SO vast that it staggers, and to the very life of God. It is not a love which is selective in its motivation; it is so UNIVERSAL that it covers the world exclusive of judgment as a relevant motivation. It is so simple that it involves reception by faith; it is so effectual that it means non-perishing from this part of His creation, everyone who believes. It includes the universal, it excludes judgment in its purvey, it focusses on the world and features fulfiment in faith. It is not so directed as to be exclusive in character, whether in faith or in any other feature. This love of the President of the Universe and Creator of man is holistic, holy, vast in scope and coverage, and it gloriously directs itself to a payment adequate for the scope of it,  payable to those who believe. It is not thwarted by something else in God, as to its very nature, and as there, so here, there is but one operative unit in man to reduce its  attainment (as in Matthew 22), and that is his negative preference.

God is well able to overcome any universal dislike of salvation, such as sin may produce, since His plan is not perverse, but motivated by a love and desire for non-perishing for which He makes vast provision. He states this, that the purpose was non-perishing, that it covers one as another,  all the world, and hence any differentiation is to be found not in a technical black-out, as if the love did not know what it was doing, or the motivation was shamelessly a sham or a shambles, inapplicable and irrelevant. Hence nothing generic as an exclusive agency can relate. In fact, God STATES what as an exclusive agency is the ACTUAL, and the divinely defined exclusive agency. It is precise and particular, and the lot of some who so elect differentially in response to this love:  they prefer darkness.

Does not God know ? Is He consigning man to hell, with a special  exemption clause, despite inclining to the salvation of the world in generic  terms, and paying an  enormous price towards the accomplishment of this stated design of stated scope ? That would represent a self-contradiction. I want by all means  to  save you by an  enormous payment with love for you as the motive (since the world before God is not a partial thing in terms of His heart-talk about it as its Creator), and if you do not take this interventionist mode, this offer, this grand marvel of offer, then differentially it is your own fault.

Indeed, you are justly to be condemned, because in this second degree you prefer, not only to sin in the first place, but to sin against a divine deliverance,  full,  total,  effectual and as candidly offered as the love of the omnipotent can make it. In so doing, you inherit not the realisation of the divine love for you, for each of you who so declines, but the just condemnation which is the actual outage.

From whom  does this come, since the love and its  scope and provision  come from God ? We are  categorically told the criterion of this critical matter: it comes differentially from  some of mankind. They do not inherit merely, but secure their own exclusion.

You can, as Calvin does, bring in secret matters as if this annulled the veracity of God, destroyed His generics, avoided His direct and  repeated statements; but that is to charge God in effect, with not knowing His own mind or even watching His own words. Instead of such intrusion from contradiction of sinners, it is necessary to prefer to LET  GOD SPEAK. One remembers in Gilbert and Sullivan, a delicious passage in which the Judge, about of course to be demeaned, is met by a hubbub of admiration as he enters the scene. He becomes somewhat exasperated and cries repeated and loudly, LET ME SPEAK! Eventually they settle down and listen to his tale.

LET GOD SPEAK, and do not chatter, but look and learn. It is all written.

What then of John 3 ?

It is directed not only to ourselves who believe, but to the whole world. It is as in I Timothy 2, the case that the ONE MEDIATOR appointed is that between God (the Creator) and  Man (the created). He, we are told by the word of God who knows His own heart better than all the philosophers and theologians who ever were or would be or could be, that He desires all men to be saved (it is the movement of His heart, not the decision of His will, which is as defined as the other). Desires and decisions are  two different things. The one signifies what one would like, the other what one has resolved to do. Why there is a difference you have to learn by hearing what the one concerned has to say.  Let us do that.

You can scan the heavens, as Colossians 1:19ff. indicates, but there is NOTHING there that it does not please Him to reconcile, in view of His having made peace through the blood of the cross. You can search, scan, rove over, investigate the earth, and time is not problem in earth and heavens, with God who made, the only limit being Himself. As to that, now made categorically clear past equivocation in scope, it PLEASED HIM to reconcile all things. In what way ? In this: to Himself. It was a negation on His desire that He stated, but its nature.

There was no grudging alteration in view of this or that. THIS is HIS statement of HIS good pleasure, what HE would like, and nothing anybody ever says on this earth is going to alter the divine exposure of His heart here or in the multiplied other cases. You can throw your systems at God, but you cannot alter His mouth.  Facial surgery has been attempted before; but it is too late now.

Love, His, being what it is, HE does not show in a self-contradictory way; for it is not inclined to seek its own way, thrusting, busting, contriving. It is what rejoices in the truth, and in truth it will love, so that where love is not to find its place, there it is not. It is ready to be rebutted, declaimed against, misconceived, but it is not ready to invade. Long may be the suit, but short the negation. That is the operating environment for love as shown in principle and divine practice in the Bible, and both at length. It is sent amid men so that the longing, heart-breaking cry comes from the very lips of the Lord as in Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff., Isaiah 48:16ff., Jeremiah 31 and Hosea 11. It is so whether in prospect or in retrospect.

It is not as if He did not create the heavens and the earth freely, or made them with some constraint. It is HIS work, HIS heart and HIS sovereignty, to be as He is, saying I AM WHO I AM. If He says it, that is it. This must be learnt. Even a sensitive psychiatrist might hesitate before simply dismissing an assertion. When it is not a man in trouble, but God in truth who speaks, it is necessary to heed and not hinder His words. Otherwise any system is as untrue as in science, when as sometimes happens, some obstructionist refuses the empirical fact, and dictates from theory to the unwieldy evidence, what it is desired to find. That is both ludicrous, and where God is concerned, common.

In truth and integrity, one must avoid this when facing the word of God. It is not there as a playground, but as a pronouncement. We are not to imagine that being of superior discernment, intelligence or linguistic capacities we can improve on His ideas, like some intrepid speech-writer for a President. God made us. He knows how to speak. We have to learn HOW to listen, and listen good, as some in the US are disposed to phrase it.

It is not as if He were forced into it, to do it, or was worried about clashes in His varying motives. It is GOD who  GIVES peace (Philippians 4, Isaiah 26), and lust has no place in Him (James 1). He sovereignly made the heavens and the earth the way He planned, and planned for His love to be resistible as Stephen so eloquently indicates in Acts 7, yes for the Holy Spirit to be resisted in His saving entreaties, and that His tears should flow for the uninhibited lost. He organised it, who works all things after the counsel of His own will (not someone else's - Ephesians 1:11),  so that He should show mercy for generations, and judgment when despite every plea,  exhortation, exhibition of power and grace, the way of truth was rejected. It was His sovereign will that this be so, that He would miss NO ONE to whom this love foreknown in its flow and accomplishments, would reach, being what it is. He knew who those were, who did not prefer darkness,  chosen in Christ before this world or sin ever was in man (Ephesians 1:4).

He knew this, before man was indeed, to whom His love would effectively reach; before sin with its distortions could cloud the issue. He knew those to be His and those not so, the residue, so that He should GAIN none where the intimate, ultimate preference before sin in the nature of things, was negative, but all where it was not.

He knew, in short, what He was doing. God as sovereign, is like that. But what a sovereign, and what else is like Him ? What and who else is definitionally exclusive of non-love as His initiating attitude! Where else is non-love in approach to things, excluded. Resultants there may be, but not through any limitation in the love. Hatred may descend where love is aborted, excluded, is disruptive of truth and a plague to peace; but even there, it is a resultant that He seeks to avoid, as He keeps His flock, and even to such as King Manasseh who brought ruin to his land, He is willing to bring mercy and seeks it.

A sovereignty which is created by man of some different kind, is not only fiction but faction.

What then ? Just as in the mode of Being called God, infinite, the Creator,  contradistinct from the limited and constrained, there is one, and in the contrived and created being called  man, who is not so exempt nor illimitable by what is beyond and imposed, there is another, so there is the ambit of operations in this field, the One to act, the other on whom He so acts; and so His words require us to construe them.  They are categorical, repetitively so on various occasions, generic, and are defined as to their nature, motivation and mode of address.

In Colossians 1, as in I Timothy 2, God is emphatically  covering 'all' and  moving into the realm of all things in the most categorical way conceivable. Thus this desire that all be saved, is matched by the action. He gave, we read in I Timothy 2, that He "gave Himself a ransom on behalf of all,  to be testified in due time." He gave, we read in John 3, His only begotten Son, with desire not to condemn but to save this world. He is not in the place of all, for those for whom He is delivered up, as distinct from offered in integrity, these inherit ALL THINGS (Romans 8:32). That is not the portion of the generality, of those to whom what is offered is not what is accepted.

So  desiring, God has so acted, in the time allotted and  appointed, in parallel with I  John 2. This is what He tells us, and in terms of biblical truth therefore, this is what is to be believed. Not to believe it is to challenge God's own declaration of His own heart.

And why ? It is to telepsychiatrise God in an act of enormity so vast  as  to  make the atomic bomb on Hiroshima seem but slight.  It may not be meant so to defile divine declaration, for many are bent; but this is the nature of the case. This is what He says, making no allowance for those who either would add to or subtract from His word. He makes it sufficiently clear that this is not only illicit, but forbidden most strenuously (Proverbs 30:6, Deuteronomy 4, 12, Revelation 22:18-19).

This IS the nature of the love shown in John 3, where we learn that God did NOT come to judge the world, but DID come that it might be saved. The parallel is the lifting up of the brazen serpent to Israel in the venomous snake attack (Numbers 21), so that ALL Israel having this symbolic focus for mercy, invited, and even incited,  could use it: it was a grace shown to the nation by a divine gift, and if in wild disobedience some ignored the national intent, then that was their own insidious and non-generic responsibility (as parallel to Deuteronomy 29:18ff.). As the serpent was so raised, we learn (and it is necessary to learn),  so is the lifting up of Christ on the Cross, placarded as Paul puts it in Galatians, so that all the world might be saved.

That is the declaration of terms in John 3. Love is the motivation. The world is the object. God and the world are the terms, the one the absolute Creator as in I Timothy 2, the other the absolute creation relative to all mankind; and the issue is double. God statedly does NOT want to condemn the world, for His coming is not an issue of judgment but of salvation. He DOES want to save the world. This is the twofold and mutually definable situation, God and the world, as in Colossians with its ALL THINGS and I John with its 'whole world' , by which he decidedly did not mean 'part'.

Nor was it 'part' in ancient Israel for whom the atonement was presented, though some  excluding themselves might not receive of the national bounty (cf. Deuteronomy 29), their departure from which was an insolent and spiritually insolvent act, as unconstrained as the wind, and as unkempt as any other lawless deed.

The entirety of mankind is the object of the saving love of God. In this, Wesley is right. God's decision about a limited atonement, which is indeed the result, is a completely different issue. There lies the outcome of man in  God's image and the move of God in His own heart, and it is no more relevant to the issue of the scope of His love than is a father's desire for a child to go to university is the same as his putting him there. So far from being incompatible, the two are correlatives. So far from being unthinkable, the two are seen in constant exhibition on this earth; so far from being a strange situation it is typical and topical for man on this earth.

The intensity of the desire of the father (with God as in Hosea 11:8, as in Jonah 4, as in Jeremiah 31, as in Ezekiel 33), and the emphatic character of His renunciation of any bone in the throat of His love to the objective of salvation for this world, as in John 3 directly, is by no means limited by what is to be gained. He did not weep for nothing, for the disparity is a constant and consistent them in the Bible. The scope of such a love as this does not impend or imply anything whatsoever in terms of the attainment of this love, the resultant when it is placed in the sphere appointed, this world, the wicked, the all.

Attempts to fuse the two are confusion. If His desire for salvation of the world, associated with a decisive act in coming NOT to condemn the world, and the appointment of the WAY in which the world might be saved, means that the sovereignty must for its own satisfaction, force love to become something different from what it is, then this is mere human invention. His love is not like that as I Corinthians 13 shows, and a regiment of illustrations constantly shows in the Bible.

HIS preference till the consummation, is this, that the power which He blessedly retains over all means, modes and outcomes is not to be expended to alter the nature of  His motivation, His purity, His love and His very nature and character. In HIS world, and in HIS Heart, love is not like that. This is something we all have to learn, and to humble ourselves from the extravagant idiocies of some, who want to push love into the realm of force, as in demeaning woman or become male pigs (there are of course sows in any ordinary farm, as well).

Love and power have to co-exist on the earth, and they are together in God Himself, never entangled, for the tears of Christ, like those of Jeremiah, are not for the unloved lost, but for the unmoved folly of those who insist on it. As God says to the King in Jeremiah 13, HUMBLE yourself, lest , give glory to God,

	"before your feet stumble on the dark mountains, and while you are looking for light, He turns it into the shadow of death, and makes it dense darkness.
	"But if you will not hear it, My soul will weep in secret for your pride; My eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears, because the LORD's flock has been taken captive."

When the Lord acts in judgment, at length, there is majesty and action; but though it may not seem so, it is from a bed of grief that it is needed. Such is the wisdom of God, who has His own harvest.

It is the Lord who has spoken, says Jeremiah, and it is not a matter of sharing his own views with those of God, whose directives are empowered and whose words are final. Jeremiah continues to show the word of God in 13:18, with the divine directive, "Say to the king and to the queen mother, 'Humble yourselves, sit down ...' "

From 13:12 on, the Lord is displaying His word, His meaning, His attitude, His actions from His own name. Hear and give ear, He says in 13:15, Therefore you will speak to them, He says in 13:12.  Say to the king and to the queen mother, He says in 13:18. Lift up your eyes, He continues in 13:20. Whether directly or through the medium of the inspired prophet, God is speaking His word, showing what He has in mind and why. It is as in Jeremiah 48:35-36, where even for Moab, God shows the most intense solicitude and grief. It is as at Jerusalem as in Matthew 23:37ff., and in Luke at 19:42ff., where the Saviour did the same concerning Jerusalem. This is what God the Sovereign is like, filled with mercy and lovingkindness, by no means clearing the guilty, but urging, surging, longing for the lost so that even ONE MORE brings keen rejoicing in heaven.

The scope of divine desire is universal. The scope of sin in man is universal. The disposition to saving love is universal from God. The love and power of God co-exist. The one CAN do what He will. The other WILL do what He will. What He wills comes from the One who He is, the I AM. It has to be learned from His lips, not from those of philosophers.

The love of the One is for the scope of the latter: all.  Each is quite clear. The love and power are in the same One. TO abort either is like abortion of a child in the womb, in this case, the child of truth in the womb of comprehension. God is SAYING what He means. Why attempt to unsay it, or re-say it differently! Is philosophy to instruct God!

The love of God to this world was so extensive, that He acted for its salvation, thus motivated. The correlatives of divine love and lost world are mutually associated, so that we dare not limit the love or the world. HE is emphatic about that.

Condemning the world is not a limited concept. Saving the world is not either. God is not a limited Being. Saving the world in love by the sending of His Son is affirmed, and re-affirmed often directly or indirectly. It is the character of His motivation, associated with the character of His action both positively and negatively defined. IN so loving, the DESIRE is NOT to condemn the world; and it IS to save it. With nothing may one move from this. His power is according to His heart, and His heart is not subject to His power. Such is His being and such is His heart and so He declares. Let no one countermand the characterisation of God by God.

THE CONTINUATION OF DIVINE  SOVEREIGNTY UNMIXED

The love of God is sure and described by Him. On the other hand, the sovereignly assured power of God and containment of all situations in His ultimate counsel (as in Ephesians 1:11, Isaiah 46:10) is no less sure. We  do not  compromise with the word of God, as if to take neat ways out of meaty principles, with bone  splinters. It is necessary to take it all. If with medicine this is the prescription, how much more with such words of relief and of life!

It is true that the will of man CANNOT contain the issue now in terms of mere decision, as in decisionism, since this is directly contradicted (John 1:12), and also implied in I Corinthians 2:14 for example. The natural man finds godly things foolish. How then can he decide, when the very situation is one to which he is blinded, or one where his bondage of heart obscures his vision! But does this pathological obstruction, amounting to closing the eyes to what is there (as in Matthew 13:13ff.),alter the love of God to this world or His stated desire for it ? That would be a massive presumption, amounting to intrusion into  one phase of divine declaration on behalf of another, as if to tutor God. Whatever the intention, we cannot ignore the result. It is in presumption, prohibitive and in performance, prohibited.

Is it so hard to take it as given ? If the whole world is what God wants to save, in His heart, and only a limited section is saved, is this a matter for prescribing to God how He must work, and is His own statement to be supervened by a majesty of man's mind, attributed to God without warrant, and contrary to His word ? One would assuredly hope not; for no good thing can come from adding to or subtracting from the word of God. If man is incapable of finding God by will, does this mean that God is incapable of finding man and his will ? Is man the measure of God, then! Does God then have limits after all, and are these to be inserted by man ? But what sort of a God is that, for it becomes in this a mere image of man's imagination.

Is man's puny mind, offensively to tutor God!

The saving love of God is repeatedly stated for this world, with the provision that the action in terms of this love, which He took, was NOT to condemn the world. That action was exhibitive of and resolving for His love, left in naked contact with the same world with only one inhibitive force, that many prefer darkness to the light so defined, which has so come. What was the result for such a love from the Lord God Almighty ? How was the issue resolved, love for the lost in a wicked world!

In John 3:19, we are told the answer to such a question. Here we thus find the constrictive agency not only mentioned, but defined, and not only defined, but so defined in the presence of the love being for the world, exclusive of judgment in its issuance, that there is abundant clarity. The non-fulfilment IN this world is so explained. Broad as was the love, adequate as was the provision for implementation, costly as was this provision, unbaulked from within the Lord as it was, yet He suffered it to be baulked differentially in some among men. These differ from those found, in that they preferred darkness to the light so come in Christ.

In this way, despite the amplitude of this love expressed in desire for salvation of the world as distinct from judgment of it, it is not saved, and the reason is definitively stated, to the extent that THIS is the condemnation. Not the heart of God but the heart of man is the issue in reprobation, in non-fulfilment of the love differentially in some. So coming in such love, and so acting, God does not go further, but acknowledges the counter-force, which is the preference. Where this differentially obtains, is the case, He pushes it no further. Love is like that.

Thus, the limit is denied concerning God; it is  affirmed concerning man. Where is anything horrible in that ? Where is something undefinable, unfound, mysterious and starkly inexplicable, as with Calvin, in that ? Quite to the contrary, it is  STATED what the impediment is, in a concurrence of issues: God's motivation, what God excludes (judgment) in terms of the love, the scope, in terms of this world, God's adequacy in the provision of means for the salvation, and the incision of the cut, man's preference.  It is not something else which is made the stay on proceedings. It is this.

These things being exquisitely clear and magnificently simple, readily understood even in human terms, and the more so in the case of those divine, therefore, we find that those blind to the mind of God, who refuse Him, do not do so by the movement of His limited heart (God forbid), but of their own. He has not been technically inhibited, like those said to be 'intellectually challenged' or things in parallel, on this earth. What He wants He is not going to fail to get, HE being the definition of His own terms, or its source. Where He stops at a barrier because it is in accord with His love that it stop there, that is His sovereign decision. HE is not baulked, though His love is not received.

If then LOVE in the terminology of God, describing it as it is in Himself, the source and basis and prototype for man, is SUCH that despite its maximally motivated presence, it may be countermanded by preference, then that is the nature of love. This is scarcely surprising. We do not find on this earth that a forceful dictator demanding to be loved by a new member of the harem, has anything to do with love but its abortion. Swagger and force, demands and thrust, these may be used to overcome evil, but not to induce love. You may drug someone, but while deranging their mind, you do not by this means secure the love of the heart.

It is either there or it is not. If it is not, then it is not love, biblically defined, which persists with means other than itself, to achieve its end, whether by deception, changing the nature of the loved one so that it is something that despite rejection, now accepts, or fear: nothing such is going to work. One can given all the wealth of one's house for love (Song of Solomon 7:7); but it is not so bought or wrought or seduced.

Force and fear may operate, but not as determinants, and not as applications to substitute for love. Love is strong as death but not wrong as force (Song of Solomon 7:6).

Hence when GOD SO loves that He SO gives, and SO provides this SO simple and totally adequate way of salvation at SUCH cost to Himself in attestation of His EXTREME love, reaching to the very heart of His very life, as He separately affirms in Ezekiel 33, we LEARN something. It is this: that this is perfectly compatible with exclusion zones for this love being not only tolerated by God, but respected as that which is inherent in those created in His image. He is not propelled by force, nor is man in his own heart. What even man through sin CANNOT do, choose God, God through wisdom CAN do, know the preference of man beyond all pathology, all limits of whatever means to distort, confuse, or counter. It is necessary not to limit God by man, or health by disease when God is at work! That alas is forgotten, it seems, by very many.

Moreover, since God decided to swear that He does not change (as in Malachi 3:6,  Psalm 102 confirming, James 1:17 attesting), then the love of God can is not movable. Accordingly, since God has foreknown as in Ephesians 1:4, who are to be His, and excludes their works as the ground of His choosing (Romans 9:11-15), thus the love of God sees beyond the fall and the delimitations of sin, discerns the truth, and this being done in FOREKNOWLEDGE, by God and God alone, this is the truth of the matter for each person. Before sin entered, no differentiation of morality existed in mankind, that is such was He in the mind of his architect, who before time surveyed man.

Before time and fall, He surveyed him, and in His love, a constant, He considered him; and according to this categorical and universally inclined love, He acted, and knew who were His and who were not, man being as in John 3:19, the ground of exclusion, but the matter being as discerned by God.

What then ? The Lord as in Romans 8:30, predestines whom He foreknew. This, that He PREDESTINES next in order, in this text. Thus the knowledge,  antecedent, becomes sure, and cannot be ruined by mere events. In this is security, and so His word covers all things. The mystery is the intensity of His love, the immensity of His vision in seeking to save the world, the restraint not only of His patience but of His tenderness, that He should SO act,  NOT ONLY to provide the free remedy (as in Romans 5:1-12, 6:23), not only at such PERSONAL cost, but so as to be willing to have all this ignored by human preference, rather than sweeping over all like a flock of bombers in their gleaming aluminium,  as distinct from white, robes.

That is the mystery delicious to contemplate, a matter of worship to ponder, of thrill to the will to watch, inducing the O CAN IT BE! sort of hymnal reaction, that YOU my God should die for me.For me You died, not for something else, to be made up, or forced; but for me, even being a sinner!  Such is also the lilt to be found in Romans 5, in its paean. God is in utter and total control, not to obliterate what He has made, not yet to countermand its meaning and place, but to interpret it with security, direct it with decisiveness and to love it in the very heart of a divine love which is sui generis, and has its own ways, standards and purity. It is neither gross nor commanding, but pleads, exhorts, is patient, does not seek its own way, yet does not capitulate but rejoices in the truth, pretends nothing, extends all.

In SO loving, He is being entirely sovereign, for it must be appreciated that it is HIS love, and this is its nature, its preciousness; and He REFUSES to have it any other way, and does so sovereignly. It is, this His love,  sated in being what it is, and not in being transformed into anything different, as if this would show how great a sovereign He is. The first sovereignty is over oneself, and it is not a question of satisfying philosophers about what they deem would be a nice sort of sovereignty. That would not only be a muddle, like the vast admixtures of Canon Law in one religious body, but it would be a surrender,  as some surrender to the strange ideas of the United Nations, and virtually abandon the sovereign rule of their own countries. Not so with God. He is Who He Is, and does not alter for anything or anyone.

It is a grand basis of praise that this is so, for He is eminent in love, gracious and kind, fearfully just in truth and magnificently merciful in heart,  spoils nothing and is foiled by nothing, giving freedom its head in the limited but decisive ways He has chosen, and as He moves in His counsel, letting all things broadcast the reality and the wonder of His Being, and the truth in which Christ came, embodying it as His own.

Now these things have been considered before, and are not here provided as a substitute for more extensive coverage, but merely to pinpoint crucial elements for a special purpose. The interested reader can consult many chapters throughout the site, or the 7 volume work on these topics, as also *1 below. Such sites are to be found under predestination and the love of God in the index and a selection is given in the note below^*2.

MISSIONS

Some may say, In that case, why bother to evangelise, to deny oneself comfort and luxury, and go to steamy jungles and searing deserts, in love to show the Gospel ? If this be so, then enjoy yourself, stay at home, keep off the streets, do not sacrifice a fortune for the testimony of truth!

Love is the topic and failure to understand is the problem. Love is not like that. It does not have such a reaction as that. The mother does not say, Well my son is healthy and it would be a waste to do this and that for him. She is concerned to the uttermost and seeks by every means to find what is best for her son. This is but one of the phases of love as set by God in the very nature of man, however much he may quash it, disorientate it, detest it or seek to suppress it (cf. Romans 1:17ff.), in desiring to distance himself from the Lord. If man finds the truth incriminating, as one may hear on occasion, is this reason to forbear at the bars of just condemnation, lest come be enabled to be freed ?

Love does not relay its wish, but seeks to purvey the field and convey its life. God has a whole world and the whole of history to appoint and teach and show, and eternity for the result, and has done what is most loving in the end, knowing His own, and showing His truth. His is wisdom and counsel being beyond ours infinitely.

With us, however, we do not play God. It does not work, quite apart from the virtual folly of it.

We do not ignore the command of Matthew 28 concerning missions, because of some stilted and formalistic concept of love. We do not ignore oppression and torture, because of some unrealistic concept of love. We do not fail to stretch out the hand to help, because the concept of the Good Samaritan somehow galls. This is by no means the way if one is to follow the biblical teaching. Nor for that matter do we shout about our own goodness, IN acting to help, as if so helping others with something short of the Gospel of grace (cf. Galatians 6:14) were enough, and eternity was a shallow recess for distortive minds.

This entire Web work, for example, has not been without cost; and why ? It is that those who do not know, might know; that it might reach where some have not reached; that it might teach where some have not been taught, or have become distraught because mistaught; it is to cover the globe with effectual answer to the challenges to God from man, and to the Bible from those under the thrall of false prophets, which covers seemingly the case for  BILLIONS. It is to countermand devious imaginations (cf. Ecclesiastes 7:29), and to demolish false philosophies (following II Corinthians 10:5, I Corinthians 11:1), which challenge and assault the truth, the Bible, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is so to seek to act, that that none may be needlessly languishing in mere spiritual smog, waiting for the outcome of their cancers.

The Lord gave the word; great was the company of those who distributed it; and giving a reason for the faith is part of the duty according to that word, as well as giving the word of that faith (cf. Philippians 1:7, I Peter 3:15).

If God is omnicompetent, am I in His image and redeemed in His love at such cost as provided, as made available for ALL the world and ALL things in the earth and in the heavens, to be wilfully incompetent ?  Are we not commissioned to amplify it where the current signal strength is weak because of oppression, whether physical or academic ? Or is being called to the ministry of the word of God, of Christ, a reason for indolence ? If one is betrayed, is that a trading post for betrayal! Is a commission lost because it is unfinished; and if it is to be finished, must it not involve labour, and at that, a labour of love! Is the Christian not to shine as light in dark places (Philippians 2:15) ?

Why on this earth or beyond it should such a thing be imagined! The misuse of truth is appalling, the mistreatment of man and the galling of his spirit is odious, the bleats of His sheep are appealing, the need to be faithful is unlimited! How ever could anyone not desire with all the heart to respond! Or shall I, being redeemed, ignore the non-redemption of the scattered remnants of many a flock, and the incinerative sinfulness of millions ? On what  grounds would this be done ? Is it for one moment to be imagined that because God is competent, I am to be incompetent as if His mastery means my default! It is precisely HIS mastery which enables me (II Corinthians 3:1-5). Is it because He is intensive in love and action and relevant placement of Himself IN this world, that I am to be inert in non-love and inaction, or forbear to have the best relevant placement of my person and such gifts as have been given to me, and to use this ? Is yes to mean no, is need to mean sloth ?

What sort of love is that ? It is certainly not the love of God.

And that, it is our subject.

NOTES

*1                              

CALVIN AND THE BIBLICAL TEACHING

The Defective Area in the Teaching of Calvin

THE SHORT-CIRCUIT AND THE LONG WAY AROUND

Calvin refers to this in his Institutes, Book 3, Ch. 23, Section 7. The reason why Adam's fall, he intones,  " irremediably involved so many peoples, together with their infant offspring, in eternal death"  is this, that it "so pleased God" . " The decree is dreadful indeed, I confess," he continues. But since God foreknew what end man was to have, before He created him, " and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by this decree,"  we must face it. That is the 'horrible decree.'

Here Calvin rather grossly inverts the biblical teaching. God foreknew the end before He created man. True. But untrue it is that He "consequently foreknew because he so ordained by his decree."  This makes foreknowledge based on decree, not decree, as in the Bible, based on foreknowledge. There is no because stated for the impact of foreknowledge on decree. This is, on the contrary, precisely what is presented in the logical sequence of Romans 8:29ff., where foreknowledge is the first element. It is then predestination and calling and glorification enter in due completion of the orderly sequence given by God in that scripture.

It is all in train. God foreknew is the biblical sequence, and hence predestinated, gave decree, having so resolved. It is not will but knowledge which is basic; and though it is both unnecessary and even possibly intrusive to speak chronologically, at least logically that is the order of action.

Hence Calvin slides here. From the FACT of foreknowledge he moves to the wrong inference of the thing being all because of decree.

In the Bible, it is the FACT of foreknowledge which leads on to the flowing fact of predestination and on,in turn, to justification. Intrusive indeed would be any attempt to twiddle with the logical order. Hence it is NOT "because it pleased God,"  that the whole result from Adam is to be stated, as though such a gross result were pleasing because it happened.

In fact, God is not only sovereign but a gracious sovereign. Sovereignty is not to be abstracted from His nature, of which it is but part. What KIND of a sovereign He is will bear on whether or not He is pleased with this or that. We KNOW that He WAS pleased that all should be reconciled through the blood of Christ to Himself, because He says so. We know He was NOT pleased with the rejection of these opportunities by Jerusalem, because He wept, even the One who is such, that having seen Him, one has seen God (John 14:9),even  He is the truth, such that whatever the Father does, He does likewise (John 5:19ff.).

This is the fundamental failure in Calvin's depiction, in so much so good, but here contrary to the word of God. The reason is NOT incomprehensible, Calvin opining "we cannot comprehend it," in Book III, Ch. 23, 5. What is ? This, he asserts, that "the Lord has  created those whom he unquestionably foreknew would go to destruction." Why is it incomprehensible when God  TELLS us that however unquestionable the result (as when  a failing  student sits an  exam, or a rebellious one  voices his fury), there is the equally unquestionable motivation which moves Him in approaching the cause, and  collecting that result! In no model, or  depiction, is it wise to abstract from basic elements, finding mere appeal in one so impressive or impactive. ALL is needed, EVERY part of His word (cf. Psalm 119:20,24).

It is not a  direct process. The Lord makes. Man falls. The Maker proceeds with the  solution to the problem so made, and moves into reality, the  resolution in justice, mercy. This is applied in His seeking  deliverance for man; and in so doing, He redeems those foreknown, which include  all  those which the love of His breadth and purity secures. He does not  redeem those who, through His foreknowledge of them  apart  from works, prefer darkness. If this is their preference, heaven itself would not  atone for its  rupture. They would  love it though immersed in heaven (cf. Isaiah 26:10).

Calvin confirms his  error in saying in Ch.  23, this:  " But since he foresees future events only by reason of the  fact that he decreed that they take place ...", thus showing once more his preconception which collides with the word of God. This  again is to compartmentalise and intrude. God does indeed decree what is to be; the point is to find what He has said about what is back of it. The Bible declares that it is a foreknowledge not dependent on human works; it is an essential type of matter. The will, when it all comes to the point in history, is cited for the ground of rejection. It is AS KNOWN to God.

He  can  foresee what is to be, and  decide what  action  to  take, in order  to draft it from this or that to another,  without removing the principles of the operation, but rather confirming them. This however is not to  make the  decree lead to knowledge, which must fit in; but on the contrary, it is the foreknowledge which includes His own  awareness of  all  components,  people and peoples,  issues,  be they ever so subtle or subversive in kind, in whatever depth, which is the stated basis of the predestination which fixes the facts.

In a simple analogy, it is like a jelly that sets. The jelly has whatever ingredients,  added for this or that purpose. When it sets, it is not that setting determines the jelly, but the other way around. While this is an impersonal example, it ILLUSTRATES the point. God WORKS in His counsel with all things known for what they are (Ephesians  1:11),  and this being so and so known, and His principles being applied and so accomplished, and each person being foreknown as  love which He is, moves: so the outcomes are in logical order,  ready for  specification. Then decrees come in their logical place,  down the line.

He does not decree what He does not want, but what He would like (which can be the sense of boulomai ), relates to His love and principles and truth, so that it does not in itself exhaust the situation. IF IT BE POSSIBLE ... the Gethsemane cry is still a thing wanted; but it is not done, because what God is and WHO He is, for He has such a nature that He does not simply please Himself (cf. Romans15). We must avoid a confusion of terms here. Lamentation is not pleasure; and Christ lamented. There is what He wants, would  like, and there is what He wills and  manifestly in Christ, you see the entire distinction between these. It is not hard: we have it in our own selves.

DIVINE DISPOSITION AND DECREE

His good  pleasure in what He is disposed to  do, would like  to  do, that is one thing; His decision how to act, that is another. IF certain developments in a man were to occur, then that would greatly please Him, and He  so desires. But if there is foreknown and found to be  something  else, then though it please Him not at all, He suffers it, for love is like that. It is never impervious or impervious, except to evil.  We are all acquainted with the  concept of wanting desperately to do something which would really please us, but not  doing so because it is against our preference for life, our sense of  duty, of love, of honour, of what is fitting.

Even if given all power,  we would not alter it. That of course is the sense in which God would have  all men  to be saved, and is not willing that any should  perish and so on. It is NOT with Calvin, that therefore He does not  really want it except in some secret and contrary, minimalised way, but that there is a barrier in love, and in truth, to what may be done. A desire and a dutiful and responsible action are not the same. This does not rub out the reality of the desire, but its relevance where its nature is dismissed BY THE ONE DESIRED, in whatever way this may be ascertained. WIth God, it is foreknown.

That the fact He has the power to act in  such a way as  to secure a given result is by no means the same as having the  resolution that this is what has to be done, however much pleasure it might give to Him. In doing, therefore, whatever He pleases, God is not to be assumed to be enigmatic, mysterious, with two wills and such things, for we are abundantly acquainted with such expression in ourselves, as  with the two wills invention of Calvin. God makes up His mind to act even if, as at Calvary, it is in  vast pain, and it is His pleasure so to do. But what  does this mean ? It is this: that  wisdom in Him is such that He would need to  transgress truth and  distort love  to gain what would give Him pleasure.THEREFORE He in such cases does not do it, and it is grievous to Him as He so often says (as in Jeremiah 13). Yet it stands. This is how He is, and how He proceeds. He acts to fulfil what love is, and implement what what mercy finds, pay what He will, to help the pangs of man with the sufferings of His  Messiah. It costs. Love is ready to pay, but not to defray invasion. That is for others, in the  spiritual realm.

A divine preference for a method because of who He is, has no problems ethically or in any rational manner, since WHAT He is transcends all human love and kindness, and love does not  seek its own  way (I Corinthians 13). It may be termed a matter of  pleasing Himself, but it is by no means implies inscrutable oddity, mystery or the like, since WHAT He finds necessary in order to be holy, pure and  godly, is declared in so many ways and so often, that if this were mystery, the word would have no meaning. It is really a matter of  resolving the issue, rather than pleasing Himself, the latter only in the special sense of carrying out one's will. God does not ask us  not to please ourselves, only to do the same Himself; but this does not remove the concept which He gives, whether freely in love, for Himself, or derivatively, in ourselves (Romans 154:1ff.).

What is in view, then, is the REASON why God  so acts, both in love and this ultimately as at the first, rejected, in judgment (John  12:44ff.). It involves the truth of what He declares, all  of it, and not  at all the nature of the case being distanced from thought; otherwise why speak. Thus His actions in quality and motivation are far from an incomprehensible. The case is explained, not in its intricacies of thought, at the first, but in its direction of flow and ultimate objectives, by what He is.  That is being filled with all  goodness.

In all this, there is  no  mystery but the  depth of  love, nothing incomprehensible: for it is all too sadly comprehensible as in  Isaiah 48:16 and its correlates in Luke 19 and Matthew 23.Thus  though God  would give - as He  did give - His ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, One more than adequate  to redeem all: yet all, despite the  breadth and amplitude of this  love,  and the efficacy in scope and power of what He  DID  in  view of that love, prefer enduring divorce. As to this salvation, they do not  desire it, many preferring  darkness as  He has  foreknown. What, however,  is horrible  about going where you have your heart  and  finding what you insist on ? What is horrible about having yourself cited for preferring out when it comes to Christ, even when He has come in, and appeals,  remonstrates, demonstrates, calls,  laments! Is such scope of love in any way horrible ? is such payment of  cost, in a personal way, so that in all our suffering, whom He redeems, He suffered!

NOT FORGETTING THE SOVEREIGN BACK OF SOVEREIGNTY

 He is Far more Important than it is,

Since it is His, and He wields it as He is

To be sure, there come to Him those whom He wills (Matthew 11:27). It is why He  wills it which is the pertinent point. You do not need to write His biography for that, for He writes the relevant portions for us, and they are most readily read! In NOT revealing the Father to some, then, it is because the foreknowing, God in His love, does not find there the place for love,  way beyond time, in  eternity, beyond sin, in reality. There is excision of some, therefore,  in  the APPLICATION of His  love and of His mercy, but not in its INSPIRATION, found in result, but not in the motivating cause; for where this, His love with any, has nowhere to come, there in delectable honour, He does not force an entry, or fudge the issue by eliminating the power to resist. It is that which Stephen so excoriated as for so  long  so active in so many in Israel.

Making up a view of  God with these mysterious and incomprehensible decrees, which supposedly precede foreknowledge and to which allegedly it must conform, One who makes people in many cases expressly that they might be condemned, is a work of factitious fiction. It is in this vein that we find this in Calvin, Bk. II, Ch. 24, 14.

" The fact that the reprobate do not obey God's Word when it is made known to them w ill be justly charged against the malice and depravity of their hearts, provided it be added at the same time that they have been given over to this depravity because they have been raised up by the just but inscrutable judgment of God to show forth his glory in their condemnation."

.This denies all that God affirms of His sovereignty: surely it is unquestionable by arrant man, and it is nothing less than just to deal with the unjust; but God insists that in so doing, He FIRST in logical order, DESIRES their salvation. IF the predestining phase, after the foreknowledge, has to lay down the resultant of love's mission, then so be it. God will be glorified in it. But let no man omit the working of these  divinely declared motivations, principles and designs,  from the matter of the resultant. That is like beheading God, or at least, telling Him what He  denies, making  Him what He excludes, and it is to turn the simple fact that the Sovereign rules with power, into an omission of HOW He so rules and  all the criteria of His particularity and personal nature, nurture and procedure. 

Mystery in this lies only in blotting out this phase of revelation, and so is an arcane and artificial mystery. Mystery there is, but in His magnificent magnitude of love, of meeting cost, of power  in overcoming the impact, and of grace in leading on His people with that very same love with which He so loved the world. He does not change, now, backwards into eternity, or forwards. He swears it. He is always the same, whether as Christ on earth, or as the Lord in the wilderness (cf. Isaiah 45:23-25, Philippians 2:1-10).

When therefore Calvin turns  around II Peter 3:9 ( Book III, Ch. 24)  in its declaration that God does not desire any to  perish but that ALL should come to repentance, he moves the word of God aside, to make his  own declaration. His view ? It is:

that since God COULD (as to power) change their hearts if He chose, and manifestly does not in the case of all, but only in that of some, thus for those not so liberated, it cannot be His will to save them, it cannot be so  desired, so that we must find some other way to interpret Peter!  God is  thus deemed to call His elect, in the very midst of this general call, to Himself by a secret call. Thus the others CANNOT hear, and WILL not come, being dumped as to divine intent,  and precluded so that although ANYONE may come, yet aha! not so, for they will be  excluded on technical grounds that preclude such  operation! He WOULD  need  to intervene, and to get His  secret will, He  will not  do so.

Neat ?

This is tantamount to rejection of biblical statement. Such philosophy insists that God MUST get whatever He wants, then even if He says He wants something that is not got, then He does not really mean it; for if it were otherwise, so would be the result. Arguing in a circle, He has this flawed view of WHAT God wants, despite contrary biblical statement, of HOW God acts, again contrary to biblical  statement, and then contradicts biblical statement for the third time, because it does not fit in with his own, unbiblical concepts. That surely is one way to handle the thing.

But it has nothing to do with the Bible, except to contradict it for philosophic reasons, which cannot be drawn from the Bible. What God is it who says He wants something when He doesn't really, but has secret counsel of a disparate kind ? Of truth! How hard it is for Calvin to understand that when God says what He wants, or seeks, this is not the same as putting  omnipotence behind it, because there is quality control. Tears are its  testimony, and universal statements are its  expression, with passion its  underlining as in John 3 and Ezekiel 33 with Jeremiah 32.
 

INTERPRETATION IS NOT REPUDIATION,
SERVED WITH COMPLIMENTS OF CALVIN

Biblically interpretation STARTS with what is given and adjusts thought till it conforms to it.  In these instances, Calvin STARTS with a private philosophy and adjusts the Bible until it agrees with it, simply stating that if it meant what it clearly is saying, then the philosophy would be breached; but since this cannot be, it cannot mean what it is saying.

His appeal is to the  fact that unless God grant  repentance, you cannot have it. This is true, but what does not follow is this, that the REASON why God does not grant repentance is that this is REALLY what He secretly wants. This rejects the fact that what is statedly found in foreknowledge where in the love which He statedly is, is operative, since He does not change, is what is operative in the decree, the counsel and the call of God. It manes that His finding it NOT in this case one of reception. He is not received, so the soul so seen lost, is not the object of the call. Its deaf ears are already known. The exclusion is in man, and not in God as stated in John 3:15-19. GOD, for His part, did ALL. Man,  despite the divine and stated motivation, rejected the all. That is all. God knew.

This is by no means to exclude a variable awareness, perhaps not dissimilar to seeing the beating of your heart on a screen, of the working of God in you, in our normal history. His knowledge is of truth, and what the polluted heart is disenabled to do, God is not disenabled to show it!

The FACT of such divine desire is often  stated; the LIMITS truth places on it, are often indicated, and the RESULT of such repulse, foreknown to the uttermost in kind, is exclusion. The  certainty, the foreknowledge being predestinated, is total. The impact on the individual soul, being in truth now as in foreknowledge, being foreknowledge of TRUTH, may be great in consciousness now, or less. This is in the counsel of God as it will be; but it is so simple for the soul involved. If you want Him, take Him. If you do not, do not complain. If you feel rejected in foreknowledge, this COULD ONLY BE because of the disposition of yoru own heart. Instead of mourning or moaning about this, the result is simple. MISS the Lord so much ? Take Him. Don't miss Him so much, then don't blame Him. It is NOT HE who is the negativing agent. Yet again, you question this ? you are  dissatisfied ? Then put it to the test and TAKE HIM. He  would like you to be saved, so that it is only in yourself that the trouble can lie.

Thus freedom is preserved, pathology is overcome and love is consummated. In going to such lengths as incarnation and crucifixion, how could it not be! In refusing to change into force, how could it be anything but pure! In losing none of its own, found and known ones, from  eternity, how could it fail to be fulfilled ?

The heart is one thing or the other, and when it  comes to the point, when with all power and technical facility, the God of creation seeks for those lost with desire that they be saved, short of  calling Him a liar,  or confused, there are only two possible results. Either that love, in God's omniscience, reaches the heart foreknown and now before Him, or it does not. In the former case, it is the elect. In the latter, it is the reprobate. In the former, there is vast joy in heaven. In the latter, God in patience  prevails over  any danger of force or invasion, and is content having  done all, to release the wandering soul, so that it does not have a false haven in a heaven undesired.

Prior to sin, it is found, and being known, the opposite is not implemented.  How could it be forced into place by mere power and know-how, without love becoming subversive instead of emancipatory, or a force instead of a seeking kindness!

Calvin with his set way of saying IF God wants it, He MUST get it, ignoring the nature of God entirely in the process, very clumsily seeks to  circumvent this, or at last acts in such a way as to accord with such an intention to  avoid the issue. He seems incapable of grasping the simplicities of it; but then that is to humble us all, for just as Einstein in his brilliance, made the simple  mistake, which someone  else pointed out to him, of dividing a number by zero, an error which  he reportedly overlooked in  zeal for some objective which apparently was dear to him:  so in theology  fixations and desires can so warp judgment on a point, perhaps a quite  simple  one, that a grave error like this, can be made. This error, fundamentally is quite simple.

It is a matter of not believing what is written, but instead giving  reasons for rejecting it, as if this were interpretation, and so inventing a flat contradiction which in turn can become either a case or a custom IN THAT  FIELD. This is the error of Calvinism, excellent in much, woeful in this element, and shows the wisdom of obeying God in this also (as in I Cor. 3), that you  may NOT name your position as of Calvin or Wesley or any other but the Lord Himself. DO that, and a whole sheaf of error and controversy might have been avoided.

All God meant by universal salvation statements of intent, says Calvin (III, 24,17) is that IF you seek  after this mercy fully then you will find it, but that you will not be allowed so to act, chosen so to act, unless chosen altogether, so that hence ALL who come are received. But it is not matter of an identity statement: all who being caused to come, come, so that the rest are not relevant to a universal promise. That contradicts the universality of the appeal, offer and motivation as stated. It acts to falsify a statement, indeed many statements of God. That simply will no do as an 'interpretation'. It is a question  of a principle, that while He desires all, He will not  traverse the land of untruth, or seek  to scoop up what in being alien in heart,  would find heaven hell unless changed behind the scenes first.

There are things which God unreservedly would like and  indeed, which He seeks to the point of looking in the ways and byways for those who may be found (Matthew 22). However, He does not transgress in the interests of love, what love has tuned into being at the creation, in the form of the human  spirit. Hence there is a barrier to His seeking which He STATES in John 3:19. There is nil mystery. There is total restraint in the interests of truth and purity. Man retains, however wounded in spirit, the PROPRIETY of rejection. It is recognised. It is implemented. It is contrary to the divine desire as in Colossians 1, and  to the divne availability as in John 15:22-24; but once it is seen to be so, in the presence of God, then the result obtains. IF YOU HAD NOT... Christ  told them, THEN you would have had no sin. But SINCE you have seen and not believed, THEREFORE you are without excuse. Excuse is sought, in this, that Christ has wrought on the cross, and taught through His Spirit and indeed His own lips, but where there is none, then truth abides, and cannot be changed.

THE PANORAMA OF PATIENCE

These are stated things - HOW OFTEN I CALLED, yes the way a hen does her chicks, such was the intensity, immensity and the unqualified nature of the desire; but you would not come, so that despite the utmost, you would remain alien. So be it. Love entreats, but does not beat. In this case, the heart that reviles may, being defiled, be indeed even hardened as with Pharaoh it was,  as in the  stated procedure in II Thessalonians 2:4-10. In that case, having expressed its innermost being, it finds its ultimate pathology, in the very throes of condign judgment.

The extreme reluctance of God so to act is shown in the centuries of dealing with Israel, as in Ezekiel 20, where He 'wrought for My name's sake,' (20:9 and on),  that is, laboured in love to contain the response of anger till the day of necessity coming at last, it had to be recognised., THEN it could not in truth be deferred any longer. Such  was the case in Luke 19:42ff., where Christ laments that IF ONLY they had known IN THIS THEIR  DAY, the things that belong to their peace. But NOW they are hidden from their eyes. That is the nature of the reported case,  not something alien to it.

Calvin alas, on the ground  that despite what the Bible is clearly saying in such universal salvation desire statements, there MUST be some secret exclusion technique on the part of God, to enable a nice fit with non-attainment, or non-salvation, is looking for a basis for  contradiction. It does not exist.

The idea that the divine will so plies its  trade that, in such a way,  it gets what it wants, is merely human inventing. That God knows what He is getting is one thing; to assume a device of secrecy, when what we are TOLD is the delight of grand and universal statements and the reason for the failure to save some, lying in man alone: that is quite another. The truth is otherwise for the Lord, and this we learn from Him. It is He whom we must study and seek to understand, through His grace from His word, as shown to be desirable in Jeremiah 9:23-24. You have to KNOW GOD (John 17:1-3). Moreover His word and not your thought, TELLS YOU. You do not explain away clear and repeated testimony on any point; you cast away any contrary philosophy you may have. In short, you LEARN from Him. In this,  Calvin TELLS the Bible what it really means, alas, daftly; for it is simply not at  all what it says.

In the Lord's own  reported dealings with man,  there is what He would like, and the total cost He is willing to pay, and the way of love with liberty, so that in HIS divine knowledge, its way is consulted and enabled. The entire scope of endless divine appeals, exhortations, lamentations, enablements and new and tender appeals (as in Jeremiah 13, 17) is of this kind. IF the time comes for truth to have shown itself, THEN the judgment may indeed fall. This may come suddenly or otherwise, but  in a way and a day for what by no means is innocent, mysterious, or without reason! Quite the contrary. Abundant reason is often cited, at times covering  centuries, as in I Kings 17 and II Chronicles 36, and sometimes in prospect in much the same way, as in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy. It is so with individuals, nations ...

The way out is free; the way in is paid  for, the love back of it is practically demonstrated, and it is not a pushy product from  some trickster which is offered, but God  Himself in person. Nor is what is offered with pardon, in effect a guilt-ridden  Communist State or the like, as if something to  which you inadvertently (as many of them  do) might enter, what is in view. Nay, it is rather the presence of your redeeming Creator, who knows  you well enough to have  made you, and loves  well enough  to  die for you, whose love is the proto-type of your own, who is in view.
 

DEFINING THE BEGINNING FROM THE END
IS ALWAYS A DANGEROUS PRESUMPTION

As to Calvin: what then ? By abstracting  sovereignty from  the ONE who  IS the  sovereign, by making  decrees invest  foreknowledge instead of the biblical  way, the other way around, which is  having foreknowledge prepare the way for decrees to follow on, Calvin has created a problem which is not there, a schema which is not biblical, a word which is not fitting. He reaches what is in effect the reductio ad absurdum, and even uses the term  'horrible'  for one of God's ways. In this, he refers to certain divine decrees, and a word which is as unnecessary as it is inept, for the work of our God, namely "we cannot  comprehend it." Alas for man, we can comprehend it all too well and join in the lament!

Calvin's  meaning is not simply that there is a vast terrain of truth yet  to be found by the to-be-resurrected children of God; but  rather  that the problem facing him as he regards his system, shows  no way of resolution.

It is true  that there are  national as well  as individual equations, and  social and whole realms of analysable  components in the totality of history; but God having no need of a Cray Computer, having Himself made the exquisite brains masterfully which we use, and knowing far beyond  any merely human process, each phase having its  testimony of the power of evil, its abuse, treachery, folly, infamy, or the power of good and its  evincing, of courage and the importance of Christian  character and the twistiness of diabolical lust: He applies His principles and the desires of His heart. It is not too hard for Him.

There is no discord, bifurcation or lack of unity of heart. A vast gulf of evil, having been inserted freely by those abusing their privileges,  is emptied in time by a following vast  ocean of love, mercy and truth. On the way,  a vast  multitude of sin pollutants is dispersed to the depths and covered. Some follow the dispersed pollutants, being unwilling to forego them. That is horrible, but on the part of man, not God.

His decrees do not  produce a mystery for comprehension, but a testimony for digestion. His ways are eternal,  deep and instructive for eternity. When it is finished, the laboratory of history closes on its last student. God always  knew, but knowledge grew in its display unit, this earth, and the testimony of reality becomes at last wholly inseparable from  fact.  This is  SO  comprehensible that it is hard to find Calvin talking of horrible things, or of matters incomprehensible. In his system, indeed, it is so; but then this is one at simple contradiction multiply with the Bible. In the Bible, as Proverbs 8:8, declares there is nothing twisted. It is all clear to the one who understands; and if God enlightens us by  His grace, it is but to what is there in principle already.

Calvin declares (section 1), that

 "whom God passes over, he condemns; and this he does for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines for his own children." 

Small wonder on this model of Calvin, we find it "his incomprehensible plan." 

But such talk in its incomprehensible decisions, voids what is given from the revealed nature and motivation of  God for  ALL, as repeatedly and to the uttermost,  revealed in history, principle and personal applications (as in Jeremiah 13, Ezekiel 20). Likewise it is shown in His many "how  often" laments and expressions, as so poignantly notable in Jeremiah 13:27. The reason why He passes over many is so often and in so many ways and in such detail, and in such contravention of what He would  like,  and goes to vast extent to  secure, yet  does not cause to happen, that it is a tribute to ingenuity that anyone even tried to avoid it, or sought to overcome what is written in this or in any other way. Such is the clarity of the word of God.

This clarity of God, it is not hard to find, for He tells us. His lovingkindness, His mercy,  while showing  that His  love not willing to be make a descent to force or fraud. Pity for His name (as in Ezekiel 36) means continuity in His grace and purity. It operates. He will not change and make accordingly, a derelict situation, with no sponsor of heaven available!

He has His reasons, and   to imagine  we lack the reason is to  delete a  large  portion of the Bible.
I WOULD ... YOU WOULD NOT.  It is written  large and  small, directly and indirectly and often.

That foreknowledge is the site for transcending the limitations of the pollution of sin in the very act of choice is not directly relevant to the ultimate point:  in this, God gets outside sin and before it.

HOW AND WHY

HOW He does it is one thing. WHY, it is another. WHY God operates is this. It is a matter of  WHO He is, and being Himself, "I AM WHO I AM", the case is that love is never contrary to Him, for He is love (I John 4:7ff.). Further, even polluted man, impenetrable to his own will  relative to God, through the paralysing propensities of sin, is not obscured from the divine action as the Lord wills. God can see even where man is blind, just as He can know even before the (spiritual) accident that at the first befell mankind!

With God, nothing is impossible, and what He wills can be done,  and it is done the way it is, in terms of who He is, so that without prostitution of love, or its redefinition, He acts and enacts! He investigates, He knows, and  wisdom is like that. It ponders. It is aware. Nothing escapes it when it is the God OF wisdom who is in view.

To be sure, He hardens whom He will, and in II Thessalonians 2:10 we see the parameters in principle. DO NOT receive the love of the truth, and such becomes your liability. That is the way for the wayward.

It does not alter love, and as to man, he is limited, so that the Lord will not  always strive with him, since the spirit would  fail before Him, as He states (Isaiah 57:15ff.). If Calvin were relevant here in his view that WHY God so willed " is not  for reason  to enquire",  then we might forbear to give a reason for so basic a feature of the faith (contrary to I Peter 3:15 and II Cor. 3:5ff.). However, we do not need in essence to enquire much, since it is GOD who  Himself, GIVES the reasons, basically, in principal, in illustrations aplenty, and sometimes in direct statements of analysis in an operational, long-term manner. He tells us. All we need to do is listen, and so give a  reason  for the faith, amongst other things.

The question for Calvin here, is rather this. Why are God's statements of the reasons in principle for His actions, not heeded ? That certainly is something about which reason should  enquire; so  that it becomes wholly necessary to  correct this aversion,  evasion or at any rate omission of Calvin. 

If God's judgments are unsearchable as to the intimacies of judgment, this being the context in Romans 11, and we presume who imagine we can act as barristers in His realm,  yet this does not bear on the elements of His operation, which is the matter in point. Things are by no means to be dug from nowhere accessible, when it comes to what is true IN PRINCIPLE,  for the principles of mercy and justice,  and the ways of love, He has not only revealed, but masterfully invoked with eloquence and imagery of the first order. The word of Paul proceeds, in Romans 11,  is in the realm of the wonder of the WISE way in which God showed mercy amid the circumstances which sometimes were extraordinary.

In the Romans  11 setting, we find that God is He who acts with depth ON those principles. Instead of the result being unsearchable, in its nature, in the end Paul makes a paean of it,  for it ILLUSTRATES the very comprehensible principles that have been operative all through. Detailed data may not become evident till later on as tests proceed, whether with Job or the Jews (though in fact they were TOLD of the reasons for coming history in great detail in sites such as Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 32, Ezekiel 36-37).

This is the case with Paul in Romans 11, where the reason and the nature of things for Jew and Gentile alike,  is not only now revealed, but biblical passages indicative of this, before the end, are given attention, so fulfilling Amos 3:3-7. Here God assures Israel that He will do nothing without telling them: that is to the point of their covenantal relationship. He DID tell them, repeatedly and in detail, together with the reasons for His actions, in detail and direly. He reminded them  that He had told them (as in Isaiah 41-48), stressed it, and lamented their failure to take heed. THIS is a problem indeed, but all to comprehensible.

We cannot replace God in judgment (marvellous,  for what depth is involved), but we must not displace Him in comprehension of what BEING REVEALED, is given. When that  latter fault, as here with Calvin,  is committed, then we have a new form of displacement theology, that of God from His own word.

Again and again He shows precisely WHY in terms of His stated character and nature, He has so acted; and justice and mercy, knowledge and consideration,  rank high. Again He shows WHAT is His overall motivation and disposition in the scriptures already shown. We do not know enough detail, nor do we have the wisdom, to DO the judging; but we do have the revelation to show relevant divine principles, ways, workings,  cost, sacrificial bounty, intense longing and vast and deep plans. We see the  sort of scope of the matter in Ezekiel 37 and 39 for example, where the Lord having disciplined Israel (in a way some, quite blindly, might not have realised, for it WAS told), uses history or is going to use it in predicted fashion, to TEACH certain things which should not be ignored, but be known. They are comprehensible, pointed, in accord with His word and exquisitely effective.

Thus, having intervened to bring them back to their land, at the  appointed time (now past since 1948,1967, 1973 in particular), in the process God SHOWS the nations WHY He did this to Israel, and THAT theirs is not the power, but a mere opportunity for which they are accountable (cf. Ezekiel 39:23-29, Micah 7:15ff.). The pure perspective is thus shown in its time, with the multitude of events which made it at last, so clear. Indeed, God shows to Babylon even more about His and their actions, concerning Israel (as in Jeremiah 50-51, and Isaiah 10).

Thus, while  God WORKS it all  out (Ephesians 1:11), and  we could by no  means have the wit to  do it, for this is a matter of facility and  planning, strategy and the attestation of truth, without which man is not only incomplete, but incompetent and virtually deprived of his humanity: yet the procedures of implementation are filled with comprehensibility, meaning, and the stated nature of God in operation. Not only is it  perfectly comprehensible in principle,  as stated and so  very much exposed, when  the word of God is taken to heart and mind, but it  has a  lustrous appeal and teaching significance, making us the more alert to His operational principles, wisdom and consistency as He repeatedly shows us what He has done, and why, and often enough, remonstrates on our not taking in the revelation of explication and implication, when we  should!

HOW it is all done is the Lord's  own  affair in practice. He shares abundantly with us, WHY He does it. Horribleness is precisely what the Lord repeatedly shows is not at  all relevant, except in man and his works and their facility in bringing evil, the nature of which is constantly exposed,  as is the Lord's mercy. There is no excuse for Calvin's word, however he thinks it may turn out in the end; for it is NOT the case that decree determines foreknowledge, but that WITH His own mercy and love and truth God has ACTED in foreknowledge, so that it is INSTILLED with His wisdom and counsel to the uttermost, the decrees simply being the resultant (Romans 8:30), and nothing in themselves at the problem level. In this, He knows how to implement the foreknowledge of this calibre, and it is a technical matter, and a strategic one, to have it wrought out. It is very easy to understand; but HE does it.

Reality is demanding, and without the chosen mode of divine mercy, its rejection is fatal for sinners. But the ground of trouble is always in MAN, and in his preference in the very face of a divine desire of the uttermost profundity (John 3:16-19), shown in its uttermost bearing of the uttermost cost with the uttermost parts of the heavens and the earth in view,  for its impact. This being presented,  as in John 15:22ff., leads starkly in the end to the  realm of final destiny. Thus,  when the Lord having in person or in equivalent COME and SHOWN, with such MOTIVATION (John 15:22ff.), is nevertheless rejected, then "they have no excuse for their sin."  

Exposed before the light of the God of power and wisdom, foreknowledge and understanding, if THEN they make their final recession, turning away even from this, then the wonder of the cover becomes the wound of the uncovering. They are lost indeed (cf. Luke 9:23ff.). Into sin man comes first, but if shown the truth, he proceeds into the snipping off of salvation, it is the second breach. THIS IS the condemnation in the face of the divine light.

It is there that it statedly lies. It is in no other will; except in this, that God has the operation in His own hands, because of pathological man. This the more certainly binds the reasonableness and indeed the fact that He has gone as far as love goes, keeping in His own hands the final understanding, and knowing the end from the beginning, in terms of the outreach of love and power, and the in-reach, in the outworkings and the results of such a prodigy as His. Wrought in ultimate mercy and searching, yes in the highways and byways, what it uncovers is found or resides in the darkness of desire, foreknown, folded away without light.

If love can find it, it does so as foreknown and worked out in the light. If it could do so only by changing, then that barrier is love's limit, correlative to the limited atonement, or as it might be put, the limited attainment. But love's limit is love's triumph, and man's joy, that God could SO love as this, that freely GOD opens the way, in every way, to make it operable and free; and when it is closed, the one responsible BEFORE GOD, is not God, who so acted when so loving, but man, who so reacted, so impervious to love, which does not throw its weight around, and does not transmute into something else in order to have a merely meretricious fulfilment.

On the miserable concept of Calvin, the  'decretum horribile', for the thing alleged to be, in its misery  production, simply because it was so willed (in an unwieldly piece of theological reductionism - like a face without a nose, or a dictum-producer without a heart), see for example:

Outrageous Outages, Awesome Inputs and the Courage of Christ Ch.  9
(including John 3:16,and Calvin's 'no other reason');

The Christian Pilgrimage Ch.   3, referring to John 3:16, and the concept of parts, including Appendix

Possess Your Possession  Vol. 10, Ch. 6 (includes Calvin, Wesley, Whitefield, Spurgeon, and the wise addition  to the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church of  Australia, and the unwise mistreatment of this)

The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch. 4 (includes Calvin's 'no other reason' and esp. see re headings on John 3:16);

Celestial Harmony ... Ch.   2 (and his word on Romans!),

To Know God ... Ch.   7,

The Unsearchable Riches ... Ch.   6,

Massifs of Pure Splendour Ch.   7,

Serenity, Not Serendipity Chs. 5, 14;

Christ's Ineffable Peace ... Ch.    2 (extensive, includes the class of ' alls' , covers decretum horribile, also relevant  in

Possess Your Possesions   2;, 10, 6  , 12,  4 ,

Christ Incomparable ... EPILOGUE* k

Light of Dawn Ch.  1, 

Trust God ... Ch.   6,

         Three Anzas and One Answer Ch.   6).

For the entirety on the theme, see the Predestination and Freewill Heptad.

*2

See for  example:

SMR Appendix B, and

Ancient Word: Modern Deeds  Ch. 8,

 Great Execrations... Greater Faith Chs.   7 and  9,

Beauty of Holiness Ch. 2,

The Glow of Predestinative Power  Chs.   1,   4,   8

SMR Appendix B,

The Uncomprehending Darkness and the Self-Revealing Light Ch.   11

 

The Christian Pilgrimage Ch.   3, including Appendix;  

How Great is the God We Adore Ch . 3, 3 Epilogue.

The Kingdom of Heaven Ch.   3; 

To Know God ... Ch.   7 (a very broad coverage of many issues with emphasis on the core and uniqueness of it, Peter an expository pivot, Christ the pearl)

  See also:

To Know God ... Ch. .  1,

Keys to the Comfort of the Kingdom of Christ Ch.   7,

Helpless Hitches ...and Divine Dealings Ch.   2 ,

The Open Door, The Closed Mind and the Call of Christ Ch.    1,

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