W W W  World Wide Web Witness Inc.  Home Page    Contents Page for Volume  What is New

Chapter 14

 

THE PURITY OF THE HEART OF GOD IS SO ABSOLUTE

THAT PREDESTINATION SIMPLY SEALS WHAT

 FOREKNOWLEDGE FINDS AND LOVE SEEKS IN GRACE

WITHOUT FRUSTRATION WHEN IT IS CALLED NAMES

"IT PLEASED THE FATHER ...

TO RECONCILE ALL THINGS T O  HIMSELF ...

HAVING MADE PEACE  THROUGH THE BLOOD OF THE CROSS"

Colossians 1:19

Putting it all together from all the Bible

and so enabling many in extremes to be one in Christ Jesus,

the Bible in itself the extreme against all extremities

 

THE DOMAIN OF LOVE

It is not come IF you like, but God KNOWS you and SO you will  come. It is not the juggernaut of manipulation, but the investigation of the reality of a creation neither amorphous nor autonomous, but in the love of God open to His all-discerning eye, even before this world, works foreseen or other, or the question of differential  merit in sinners so much as arose (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:29ff., Romans 9:11). GOD FOREKNEW HIS OWN. He  WOULD have all. He  SAYS so. He laments for what does not come, to the uttermost, and did just that publicly; but in no way, direct or indirect, does He avoid the image of God which He made, as if to nullify what it is. Hence history is what it is.

Indeed, the whole matter of the destiny of each member of this human race, it is not an "if" proposition, except as an hypostasis for envisagement in a simple demonstration of the rationality of declaring man responsible for his judgment, even in the face of the declared  scope of the nature of the love of God for  lost sinners in  toto (Colossians 1:19).

It is a matter, biblically, of KNOWING. God knew because He foreknew His own.  This is not a mystery - except as with all the glory of God,  in its munificence and magnificence - for you either know someone or you don't. When the knowledge of God is concerned, it is a thing of totality.  In His knowledge of all, lies the difference for any.  Indeed, from this comes the predestination  of  any, statedly (Romans 8:30,17).

What does He know ? The Bible makes it clear that the ultimate ground of the crucial destiny of  man has nothing to do with merit, differential  or otherwise (Romans 3:22-27, 9:1-16, Ephesians 2:1-12). In fact, it not only specifies and testifies to the  total scope  of His divine desire toward the  lost, as a total  category,  but to Himself as the resistant  cause of any avoidable exclusion  from His grace, which follows  from His knowledge, itself independent from any consideration of future works (Romans 9:11-12). 

What resists is grace and love, mercy in  the very domain of truth. God IS love (I John 4:7ff.),  so that any effort so to twist His word as  to deny that ULTIMATELY all must conform  to  this criterion, is mere verbal twitter. While then  love distinguishes who are its own, this is HIS  love, and  not some abstraction, just as His sovereignty is HIS, and not that of some  abstraction.

It is He, the Lord who discriminates in one sense of the word, KNOWING and seeing who are His own; but it is non-discriminatory discrimination, for God indeed is no respecter of persons. It is discernment, not prejudice.

In haste  to  make  sovereignty of some kind run God, some  speak of a horrible  decree of predestination; but it is not so. There  is NOTHING horrible in love;  and God is  love.  The horror throughout all the Bible is one,  utter ingratitude shown in complete hostility and alienation,  moving even in His own all-knowing divine sight past any temporal constraint, to the abhorrence of salvation sufficient  for its eventual exclusion  by the heart of man.  While it is a pre-temporal utter knowledge in the mind of God, it is one of truth,  and while sin gives  cover  to all,  each being under its diseased blinding sight of the ultimate (I Corinthians 2:14, Ephesians 4:17ff., Romans 1), nothing covers from the eye of Him with whom we have to  do.

What God knows, logically before sin's  entrance and final judgment, the will of the soul, negativing the truth whether with gross avaunt!  to God, with rebellion aflame, surreptitious and insidious lurking or ostentatious divergence, so that this then is the registration in truth, or else in an inclination past the realms of history and all that happens, known to God,  is the basis of all  destiny. Sin is merely an intensification of disablement that makes dysfunction towards God so fatal that He cannot even be found, except He Himself should liberated. Yet this liberation so far from being an act of mysterious division, leaving some unhappily out, is scripturally asserted to be the attainment of love, the evacuation triumph of mercy which, known before the ages, has secured in advance its targets. Love does not blush for its restraint; nor does mercy fail because it is not stuffed into the back trouser pockets of those departing.

Quite simply, the God who would have ALL, as He repeatedly states, grieved that some fail to come, foreknown works apart, yet bears it. Love is noble, pure, constant, persistent, insistent but not depraved,  and gathers its won neither  by devices subtle nor deviousness absurd, but by that purity which is its own perfect fulfilment.

None  of this is guesswork; it is direct  from the word of God, or by certain and necessary inference,  as rightly stated and required for all doctrine and teaching in the Westminster Confession  faith. One dare not teach atom or iota beyond His word, or below it; but of it must come each statement, guarded as more precious the crown jewels of any sovereign, since this Sovereign, the banner over whose banquet is love (Song of Solomon 2:4, Ephesians 3:17-21, I Corinthians 13, is infinite in capacity, truth intrinsic, creation His donation that man should be with all things to His glory (Isaiah 45:11ff., 51:16), that liberty with love should adorn His people made in His image (John 8:34-36), that consummation should be in truth (Ephesians 1:9-10), and glory should fill the earth (Luke 1:14, Jeremiah 4:14-5:2, Isaiah 45:15-25).

Indeed, were it not for Him,  the earth would become unlivable (Matthew 24:22), just as in the end, it will become void, a nullity (II Peter 3, Matthew 24:35), because of the warrant out for sin (II Peter 3:7-13), when all the agents of evil,  spirits or mankind, find their come-uppance (Revelation 19-20).

It is not because He CANNOT (Ephesians 1:11, Luke 1:37) save all, through any deficiency of love or power (I John 4:7ff., Ephesians 3:20); but because He WILL not violate the sanctity of man's image, in His own likeness, to  MAKE him puppet, spiritual lobotomee, however vile the misuse and however wretched the abuse. Nor will He suffer the impulse of a moment to sully the salvation of man, or anything of cost or payment by Himself to reduce the efficacy of His salvation (Philippians 2)  as if man could choose in the state of sin (John 1;12, Ephesians 1:4); but the divine has made the human holy through an intervention before any sin could mar, or any downfall obscure.

Sin, then, never damns in view of the grace of God (I Timothy 2),  EXCEPT it be against the blood of Christ, against His mercy itself. There is nothing of mystery in this, and everything of chaste love, constantly attested from the word of God (Ezekiel 33:11, Luke 19:42ff., Matthew 23:37ff., Hosea 7:1, II Chronicles 36, Ezekiel 20, Hebrews 10). Labours many does He make,  travails of mercy, before the end shows its bulking shame; and this to man, and not to God, as if to deny what he continually affirms,  or to expose what never had any truth,  nor will have. It is indeed THIS which is the condemnation before Him who SO loved that His only begotten Son was a gift for salvation, and loved the world, not coming in judgment but with this mandate where judgment has no place,  where amplitude has no bounds, where the will of man is made manifest in history as before it, and horror blazes, as a domicile does, when set on fire. 

John 15:21-23 shows that at least, because of principle, the equivalent of knowing and rejecting redemption through Jesus Christ the  Redeemer, is required before love lets go: and this, not because it is lax or tired, or languid, but because its infinitely costly redemption ultimately is denied, in man before he was made, known to God before time was. History has much to reveal, whether in the pangs of doubt and fighting for or against conviction of sin (John 16); or in the blessed oblivion of shame secured by the overwhelming power of the working of the Spirit of God; but it all comes from the fact that GOD HAS KNOWN what man was, each one, and executes in HIS power what is neither a type of spiritual shanghaiing, nor a testimony to truth in man, but an infinite comprehension; for the Lord KNOWS who are His (II Timothy 2:19). It is He who liberates all who may be, could be, might be if only this or that ... saved; for ALL is provided and nothing lacks from God, that any man might be won, saved, liberated, made whole, and eventually, entirely holy when the tempest  past,  peace is infinite over all! (cf. Psalm 7, Revelation 21-22).

THIS IS the condemnation, that light has come and darkness is preferred; and THAT IS the situation in the light and face of the non-judgmental thrust towards the whole world, of the cost-constant heart of God, who spares, will spare and above all HAS spared nothing that so it might be. To decry THAT love is to play other tunes while Rome burns,  to make a new song that is sad indeed, mournful in its imaginary decree so horrible, which neither was nor could be. It is a sublime decree which liberates any, and which was made visible in the death of Christ, that all the world should be reconciled, and if not, then in the uttermost and last resort, because of the special and self-sinning blight of man, inveterate in tenacity, immaculate in misconception, a blinding binding which would rather darkness than light, even before the soul-searching wisdom of God,  whom no sin can  blind, and before whom no  circumstances can prevail.

It  is  MAN and not circumstances which is the final recourse of ruin, despite the intense spiritual amours of God.

Such is the word of God, consistently,  coherently, from the first to the last (Genesis 1,  3, Revelation 22:17, John 3:17, Colossians 1:19ff.), and whoever falls on this Rock, the reality of Christ who weeps and laments, but does not bash in the bastions, is confused, just as is the one who is concussed similarly,  as if man could evacuate from his sin in himself, and find power  to sign a purchase order from Christ, intact in his errant and erratic follies. To be sure, God penetrates  past the restraining force and power of man's  psyche to know His own, but equally THIS is the work which was discerned before time, and its betrayals; for known to God are all His works before the foundation of the world (Acts 15:18).

But what is this! to have God, to make of Him such an ogre! Such is the shame from those who would have Him create  some not an emblem of  self-appointed shame before endlessly expansive love, as His word constantly shows (cf. Jeremiah 50-51, where He would have healed even Babylon),  but devotees  to destruction and  damnation without light, evacuees from opportunity,  despite all His importunity; and such is no small distortion.  "And this is the condemnation, that He  MIGHT have loved  to the uttermost, but did not, being concerned  to have an exclusive where mystery selected, and love had its repose  short of the uttermost." This might be the new unbiblical substitute.  When GOD says where the  ground of condemnation lies, in the face of His light, love and payment repeatedly defined  to the  uttermost extent,  then one had better believe Him. Calvin has  great things for the Church; but his error here is not one of them. How foolish,  on top of countermanding  so  many scriptures, to violate this command, that  one should  NOT follow any man or theologian or teacher,  saying I AM  A CALVINIST,  or even  a PAULINIST.

It is the word of God which stands, and whoever is used to  write it is not an author, but one  used  to transmit according to the word of God, ALL of which is equally His and not man's (cf.  I Corinthians 2:9-13). God must be given the majesty which is His due, and not some alien mystery which is untrue,  a logos horribilis, made by man.

When a system, such as Calvin's,  therefore,

	depends on violation of what God has to say in this field
	(and the case*1 of Matthew 23:37 for example, this by Christological mayhem,  separating into an entire diversity, the thoughts of the Father and the Son, and making a cleft between them),
	in its orientation towards  His  outgoing will, from eternity,
	thus departing from conformity to His  stated nature,
	and thereby makes another piety, diverse from the divine purity thus revealed:

it cannot be scripturally held. 

Predestination does not direct  foreknowledge^*1A, but the biblical  order is the opposite! Sovereignty does not direct God;  God directs events,  AS sovereign, and as to that, the One shown  and known  throughout the Bible.

Secondly, to  differentiate and diffuse such a thought in the name of "Calvinism" is doubly forbidden. Yet it goes on. If Calvin makes one  colossus of an error, amidst the  myriads of fine things which flowed from his pen, is the world to follow him in this, like  some  sporting  idol! May the Lord forbid.  Or is  it to  ignore the excellent other things  so often found in his presentations,  because many love to wander, and extremes become a norm!  May the  Lord preserve  from  such a folly.

Hence,  in  view of the dangers  of such extraneous extremes, was the  Declaratory Statement of the  Presbyterian Church of Australia, so wisely and blessedly added to the substance of the Confession in the notable union of 1901. In this lies the enlightened stress on the need to  add to that Confession certain emphases without which it might prove offensive indeed  to some, and the scope and quality of the love of God is one of these things. Indeed, just reason  for  this  concern we have been considering,  and the background for it which might well have been operative, in whole or in part. Nor did the Scotch themselves fail to seek more scope for evangelical emphases, as in The Marrow of Divinity. 

UNLOVELY LURCHES

Thus when in 1991, this Declaratory Statement was unconstitutionally declared a zero addition to the Confession, this once great Church fell. It had turned from a vast lapse in  attacking the Bible with fruitless vehemence (1935-1974), when something of this long decline was admitted in a Church publication in Victoria, one that  spoke of some 40 'years ín the wilderness', to this reactionary severity to elevate a system instead of the word of God, a Confession^*2 as ground for variance, and not the word of God, above all, in Christ beyond all and for all. This was achieved by a manipulation so contrary to its foundation that it became a new assault, as if the beauty of the original could not be  tolerated, but the flower of its function has to be attacked, if not by acid, then by the smart clippers of casuistry. Whatever the intention, such was the  appearance of the result, a clammy compression into the format of man, a voiding of an update on the Confession, giving to it the scope it needed, in preliminaries before Calvinistic system, in the domain of the love of God for the lost.

Put differently, this body had turned  from Liberalism in its prodigious emptiness and irrationality, linked in the end to the secondary infection of neo-orthodoxy, that changes the meaning of terms gratuitously, so constructing a new religion on the basis of the form of the old and fulfilling the biblical admonition  that in the last days there would be a form of religion without godliness (cf. II Timothy 3). It had turned to an unmitigated Calvinism, exposed in this 1991 General  Assembly divorce from the Constitution.

By then, piracy in the first place from 1935, and what in effect was a Calvinist coup in the second, these  alike had disturbed the peace and stolen much from the treasures of the Church. Small wonder, then, that a most prominent Church officer, around 1974, admitted to the author and another elder with him, that while he did not believe in  Calvinism, he would vote for the changes on this basis, since he with his friends, could see no other effective RALLYING POINT for the Church! Is this then  'faith' ? and is this how it was done,  that the Church so lapsed a second  time!

CALVIN, APOLLOS ET AL.

I  Corinthians 3:3-11,18-23

Calvin was not by any means entirely bereft. His one enormous failure was in a pre-systematic setting that made correction necessary; and in 1901 when the Union occurred for the major Presbyterian bodies in this country, the Church had not failed to make this, thus being exceptionally blessed in vigilance. Now, however, some 90 years later, barren and bereft on this topic, so well addressed by John Wesley in a letter to Whitefield^*3 (viewed in  isolation of the former's Arminian system), as by Spurgeon in one exposé, the Church has suffered its second cou'p, its coup d'église, and is captive to a lapse so grave in itself, that its excision  of its  own original care in its  Declaratory Statement makes it almost inconceivably grave!

It is awesome and wonderful how the Lord turns the Church this way and that,  from this error and its  companions in  extreme reactions and adventurous leanings to the  merely adventitious, and while  vast multitudes using the name of Jesus Christ (as in the follies of  the faithless Inquisitions of  Romanism*4, and  latter in the sects) may seem  to  carry the day as did Arius for a  little, yet the core and the germ in it, the word of God and its own crushingly clear message continues and  abides forever. Rebellions ruin; but grace reigns. Evils multiply but Christ exposes and restores in the midst of this world's various illicit versions of Christianity, a people for Himself. It is as shown in the references of *3 below, not a matter of rushing to condemn PERSONS, though this is necessary often enough when the basics of grace and truth are  disregarded in the  Church, but to expose  errors in  themselves  and call all back to the  Bible itself, far from  the erratic and  often abusively intrusive traditions of men (cf. Mark 7:7ff.).

Will the PCA be  delivered, restored  to its  former free biblical  stature and scrupulous care  ? An ear open  to the only actual remedy for its spiritual defalcation (it is nothing  less than this!) is  something only the  Lord can achieve; but His  love is long and large.  Meanwhile it is necessary to preach the whole counsel  o0f God  and not snippets of  convenience,  and to  this task,  where not a theologian but the Bible itself is the rallying ground, His people must continue, despite  slander or shame, lest the very stones  rise up; for His people  must stand not  to be crushed under the  Rock (Matthew 21:44), but ON the  Rock as foundation, whose word is incisive, decisive and  to be  followed in  ALL things (Matthew 5:17-20, 7:15ff.).

Let no man impugn the love of God, nor yet the  sovereignty of God, nay nor let  any add to it for imagined system, nor subtract from  it to  remove it.  All the theologians that ever were, rolled into one, will never improve  on the word of God.  Their  task is rather to show it in its beauty, and not distort it for  any imagined duty.

GOD'S WORD IS TRUTH

As to God, His word is light, and the darkness of human hearts does not increase it. His word goes its own way at its own direction, like a galloping horse.  Let none try to reign it in, or catch  a train on a track beside it. It  foes wheresoever He will; His people follow it, and rejoice in discovering from it,  all of it,  and spreading it abroad, a s it is. he understanding of the word of God does not detract let alone distract from it, but faithfully exposes it:  all of it. 

He did not cause it to be inscribed that it might be spirited away with the ideas, intrusive or delusive schema, or presumptuous philosophical philanderings of men. When He declares an absolute sovereignty where His actions accord with his changeless morals, principles and purpose,  and  show love to be the principal one (I Corinthians 13),  without which the rest becomes vanity,  He does not imply or even suffer the thought that He disparages, departs from or denies it in anything, as if His own actions were  to become  vain  (Isaiah 14:27). As He asseverates in Isaiah, "the Lord of hosts has purposed, and who will annul it." His works are known to Him before the world was founded (Acts 15); for if even a human architect and engineer can consider a thing in principle before it is done, how much more the Lord in practice to the last detail, before it comes to pass.
 

Indeed, it is impossible for Him to lie (cf. Barbs 6   -7,  Repent or Perish Chs. 2, 7), as seen in Titus 1, for since He IS the truth, this would be like saying that zero has be infinity, meaningless. His words are SEVEN TIMES REFINED, and it is to that level of care, one must come and in this abide, when teaching it, codifying or seeking to present it (Psalm 12:6, cf. Psalm 111).

Thus when He says that He would have all things, whether in heaven or on earth, reconciled to  Himself, but at once allows  that some (as in Matthew 13:20-21) are like shallow soil for the seed to  settle upon, that seed of HIS WORD, so that they rejoiced only for a season,  for a little while, so that these may not continue where they never began, being unbroken in the underlying hard soil, and never admitting the seed to its due lair, He  meaning does not change.

He here divulges  neither that He retracts the first statement of what He would have,  or will, after  all,  retract the second, of fallen man merely trifling with truth. Man, in God's image, is a wonder precisely because, not programmed in spirit by design, he may despise both the power, the wisdom  and the pleas of God, and seek  either to instal or obliterate the  glorious depositions of God in his heart, at times listless or at times impassioned in  excruciating variabilities and wanderings before God sees fit to  produce the finale. 

That man, simply in himself, can neither know nor understand God (I Corinthians 2:14), being a miscreant through sin and the sinfulness of his heart is not to deny that he can be made to be able to  draw near to God, his design  splendour of freedom being preserved in God's predestinative omniscience. This is implemented in truth in the event of salvation, as foreknown in truth before time; and this therefore not is not an irrelevance to His will, but a fulfilment of that very thing. This does not cease to be so,    however aborted in distortion may be the  experience of man, something about which God Himself has known in advance, and can make as  clear as He may desire, from time to time, as the soul wavers  and  wanders, God being not incapacitated by philosophers  or a product of man's machinations, but their effectual source, in that He made man free (not autonomous,  for he is no god), and uses him so.

And who will despise the knowledge of the Almighty, who does not plead in  vain with man innumerable times in the word of God as in history, as a show, a performance or publicity ad, but because His heart will not, at the ultimate level, dispossess the potential (Psalm 107) of a blessed destiny for  any, for any reason other than that cited in His word (John 3:19), wherein lies wisdom. There it is in universal  terms  as in  Colossians 1:19ff.,  relative to  the  light of the Gospel. It is there,  and not in the different lies, positions, approaches,  engendered in the ready wit and witless extravagances of presuming man.

Sovereignty, then IS  of love, and in love God is sovereign;  for He IS  love and it is as broad as  He  makes it; and it is not captured in some fabled,  fictitious, spurious, presumptuously intoned Maker as in Calvin's  'decretum horribile'. That is a horrible mistake of Calvin, who has fused together scriptural  concepts in the furnace of his own illicit thought,   and in this, aborted the word of God, stifling this and expanding the other,  like a watchmaker who fills the back of the timepiece with the mainspring while forgetful of the time. Yet there is never time to be forgetful of the love of God (Ephesians 3, John 3, I Timothy 2, Ezekiel  33:11).

The mystery of God is not an opacity of colliding concepts but the very clarity of heaven, that He not only could, not only would be loving to the uttermost, but would even, even for such as we are  (Romans 5:1-12), seek out a way to love that neither is explicit nor implicit dictation, nor submission to dictation on the other side, but is love's summit (Ephesians 3, Romans 5, I John 4:7ff.) as well as grace's quintessence. It is a way where neither is anything in  man able to  congratulate itself, his condition being acute and hopeless and his will itself hapless (John 1:12), nor is any aspect of God's nature at variance from His most holy and blessed word, where greater grace supervenes over great sin.

Nor is an unsublime aversion beyond all appeal and logically prior to man's  fallen estate divinely indulged; for God did not so  love a  part of the world that He sent His  only begotten Son so that everyone who believes from that part of the world, in Him, might have eternal life; but rather  so loved the world, to which He then came not  to judge, but to  save that whosoever at all should believe in Him should be  saved, there being no  spiritual apartheid, no nor any exclusion  from  that  love, as if knowing in advance in some way intruded on the WAY He knows,  or interred the stated  divine principle in the face of this love for this world, that He sought to save, on which and not on something else,  exclusion from a benign destiny depends.

That principle  for  exclusion  from  the  stated  domain of the love is found in John  3:19, and just as man is given FULL  responsibility without qualification for the negative result, so God who paid all, sought all, expanded dispositionally toward  all, bears  not the shame of a limited love, but the name of lover beyond all,  who for any would give His life. That the ransom, offered to  all (I John 2),  is not paid to  any who does not receive it is not a deficiency in  love, but a clarity of vision; for  to be delivered  up for any,  and  to bear t heir sins IS to have saved them (as in Romans 8:32). To such,  ALL things are  given.

While  segmental was the result, in the judgment  that was  consequential  for  some,  this is sequential  on  the  application of grace, known before hand but wrought by that same Christ - who wept as in Luke19:42ff. - in those regions of eternity. Indeed, the impulse of the love of God in eternity,  it is not there quashed, but accords with precision with what Christ displayed on earth, He who never changes yesterday, nor today, nor tomorrow (Hebrews 13). Salvation in and through the boundless  impartative love of  God was borne into reality in the very knowledge of God, before  man or the earth or the scope for sin so much as existed together; and while it was set  to  embrace  all, it was  met to  embrace some, where wisdom dwells and the image of God is precious, not subject  to spiritual  press-gangs or illicit because unscriptural mysteries.  What a garden is this love (cf. Song of  Solomon 2), and what a grace abounds from Him who is the Saviour of  all men, especially of those who believe (I Timothy 4:10). If His  scope is all as in  Colossians 1:19ff.,  so His blessed attainment in His circumspect  and  chaste love, is many.

The mystery is the mastery of  love,  its delicacy no less, the intransigence of truth, the vastness of divine fidelity, and the depth of His power, the grandeur of His grace, the height of His creation and this with the depth of man's depravity; and it proceeds in this. The Lord is neither permitting self-built  salvation nor excluding the sensitivity of  love in compassion, knowing all about His own, and the division in the  resultant, as He faithfully implements it (Romans8:30).

Love holds sway; and it loves the truth (I Corinthians 13), and  will not let it go, no, not for the lovers of some contra-Biblical mystery that slips in what contradicts His word, nor for any iimagined  godlike autonomy of man, who remains always as much under the unswayable sovereignty of God as discerned from the outset, in His availing true love.  After that, in logical order, as in biblical progression (Romans 8:30) comes predestination that incorporates the consequence of that divine wisdom that foreknew His own. This, it was not from the tampered ruin of its historical works and predicament, but in Himself before whom  are no barriers, and who, knowing all, rightly confronts those who prefer darkness in the face of such love as His, whose  is no fictitious responsibility, but an actual one!

The principle is seen a much in John 15:21-23, as in 3:19, in Colossians 1 as in Luke 19:42, in  I Timothy 2 as in I Timothy 4:10, in Ezekiel 33:11 as in Isaiah 55, in Hosea 7:1 as in Jeremiah 51:9, in Jeremiah 13:27 as in I John 2:1, in Matthew 23:37 as in Jeremiah 48:31, in John 3:16-19,36^*4 as in  II Timothy 1:8ff..

God  has not written a matrix for philosophers  to shape, but the thoughts of His heart. Let us keep it and hold fast  to its each blessed segment while contemplating the whole with His gracious aid, neither obliterating nor distorting any of it.

There is no greater counsel than His, nor any to equal it,  to abut into His premisses nor to  ajut into His grace, to re-apportion His  love nor to  ostracise  its engendering  scope.

We are  called  to be saints, and let every one consider this, that the answer in time is eternal in significance, wherever the Gospel is preached (John 15:22-23),  and there is no mistake with God.  Let us then be assured in His love, and let not the wicked either seek to dampen the appearance of His aridity nor the saint reduce the severity of sanctity, but let all be honest and straightforward as God is, who may indeed show Himself shrewd to the devious, but to the pure shows Himself pure.  Seek by all means  a pure heart, for without this, where is the vision of God! It is God who makes pure (Isaiah 6), and His is a hand that does not stay! (Titus 3:3-7),  for which one  can  only thank Him in praise for  ever, who gives for ever, eternal  life. Without this,  man is but a leaf, but with it,  more than an  oak dwelling in the heart of the forest, whose strength grows and towers;  for it is GOD Himself who is strength to the upright!

NOTES

*1

 See Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 2,    *1.

*1A

See Ch. 4 of Sums, Summits and In Sum, for further observation in this sphere.

*2

The Biblical Workman Ch.  8, incl. pp. 125ff., and End-note 2.

*3 See Anguish, Ecstasy and the Mastery of the Messiah Ch. 9. See also Ch. 8, op. cit., on the consideration of Wesley and  Calvin, their doctrinal formulations, and Wesleyan protestation. In Ch. 8 is to be  found the particular considerations given by Spurgeon, notable in this area.

*4 See The Christian Pilgrimage Ch. 3.