Moving on, now, from the doctrine of election, to that of sovereignty particularly. The order still is: Misters Taylor, McClurkin, and Mackay (X); Scripture (Y); The Westminster Confession of Faith (Z.)
(X) “Calvin exalts the sovereignty of God, and this is right, but he errs in placing his root-idea of God in sovereign will rather than in love. Love is subordinated to sovereignty, instead of sovereignty to love.”
(Y) “The LORD hath made all for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil” (Proverbs 16.4.) “Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth…Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?” (Romans 9.18, 21.)
(Z) “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass…By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death.”
Again, obviously and glaringly, as well as embarrassingly and shamefully, Misters X are all alone (with Dr. James Orr, whose inversion it is they chose for support), while Scripture and the Confession are close enough to kiss each other. If God makes everything for himself, ‘even the wicked for the day of evil,’ is love not subordinated to sovereignty, as Scripture, Calvin, and the Confession teach? And is this idea not reiterated in Romans 9 where it says that God ‘hath mercy on whom he will’? If the root-idea of God is love, would the Bible not say that God has mercy on all, or at least on whomever his love compels him to have mercy on? God is not just love; he is also holy, eternal, omnipresent, and omniscient. Are these not ‘root-ideas’? But as far as actions are concerned, the root-idea of God is his will, which is another way of saying, his sovereignty, or his sovereign will. To be sovereign is to have the right and power to do what you will. Indiscriminate love is not the deciding factor in who gets saved; discriminating will, is. If God chooses from eternity to have mercy, as Scripture teaches, then a sovereign choice lies behind his love, even if the Bible says that ‘God is love.’ If he chooses not to extend saving love, as Scripture also teaches, then a sovereign choice governs, and even rules over, his mercy. Sovereignty is never subordinate to love, grace, or mercy. Mercy may rejoice against judgment when the elect are saved by grace and gathered in; but sovereignty has already ruled over all. Someone might say, How is the Lord ‘not willing that any should perish,’ then? (2 Peter 3.9.) The answer is that we accept the statement, as we do all others in the Bible, on the authority of the Bible. We accept it, rejoice in it, and preach it, along with sovereignty. It may be, though, that only elect Christians are referred to in that verse, for it says there that the Lord is ‘longsuffering to us-ward’; that is, to the persons being addressed in the letter. If the whole world is alluded to by the statement, that is to say, every single sinner (which is doubtful considering the context), we leave the problem in the secret counsel of God’s will where it belongs. The word of God is clear, regardless, that God wills whatever will cause him the most glory; thus, he wills to meet out mercy to this person and not to that person. Is this an offensive thought? “What if God, willing to shew wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction” (Romans 9.22.) If God wills that no one perish, this will, or desire, does not override the fact that God wills to glorify himself through the manifestation of his wrath. That might not be a soothing thought. But the word of God is abrasive sometimes; it is not all balm. He accomplishes the glorification of himself by a demonstration of his fearsome holiness; and he accomplishes this through a sovereign choice from eternity to predestinate negatively as well as positively. Moreover, God is patient toward vessels of wrath—those who are fitted for ultimate destruction, “that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory” (verse 23.) Why be ashamed or embarrassed by the fact that God will show the magnificence of his mercy by contrasting it with the fearsomeness of his wrath? The following phrase from the Confession, ‘foreordained to everlasting death,’ is not objectionable. God has the right to do it, and he does it in order to magnify his attributes, which is to say, in order to glorify himself. So if love, not sovereignty, is at the bottom of who God is, it is self-directing love: love among the members of the Trinity. His love and his will are consistent with each other. What we know for sure—because we know it explicitly from Scripture—is that where love toward creatures is concerned, sovereign will lies at the bottom. If a shepherd has two herds of sheep running blindly toward a cliff, and he has decided beforehand to divert one herd but not the other, that is his right. Having chosen to divert one herd alone, he has ordained both: each to a different end. Whether God’s decree is active or passive, it is a decree nonetheless. That some souls are ‘foreordained to everlasting death’ may not be a pleasant thought. But this death is via guilt for sin. God punishes the guilty. It sounds good that God is bound to will mercy and that mercy must govern every decision that he makes. It is a consoling assumption. It reassures the idolatrous tendency in our sinful selves. We want the potter to have merciful power over the clay, and this is good. But if we would take away his right to withhold mercy if we could, this is evil. It is best to let God be God, lest we find ourselves on the wrong end of his power for not consenting to his word. God does not have mercy on sinners because he has to, because we want him to, or even because of faith, but because he wills to—sovereignty is the cause of mercy. Sovereign will is like an inscrutably directed river from parts unknown. Mercy comes down the river. Who gets to drink mercy from the river depends on who has been determined to be in the way as mercy winds its way through history. Or, it depends on who is made thirsty to drink. “And let him that is athirst come” (Revelation 22.17.) We would like to decide the question of mercy. We would choose it for both our sons. But what did Isaac do? His choice was caught in the stream of what God had chosen, for what is written? “And Isaac answered and said unto Esau, behold, I have made him [Jacob] thy lord” (Genesis 27.37.) Isaac’s unintended choice in time ends up being God’s discriminating choice from eternity, for what choice did God make? He chose one, not both; Jacob, but not Esau. “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated” (Romans 9.13.) The odds are that if you pick up a modern commentary, maybe even an old one, and turn to the page dealing with this verse, you will find its meaning diminished. If the verse will be explained away, so must that part of Malachi 1 from where the statement comes. How much of the Bible must we be cunningly crafty with before we get the god that our flesh would rather have? Do we believe that unbelievers will come to faith if we can show them how nice God is? Is our faith in God that weak? Can’t we trust God to save whomever he has decided to set his mercy on? God does not want to appear nice. If he did, Romans 9 would be a romance instead of a revelation, Jacob and Esau would be identical twins on equal footing, and Pharaoh’s heart would have been softened. Romans chapter 9 is true to life. There are Jacobs and Esaus in our families, and sometimes a Pharaoh. No one can comprehend the divine, eternal will, and why one person is chosen to a good end while the other is not. God’s love for his creatures is not the arbiter of his decrees; if it were, his decrees would end in happiness for every one of his creatures, even the fallen angels; a sovereign God could make that happen. The kind of God that we want, and the kind of God that we find most agreeable, is not the kind of God that we have. The God of the Bible is a sovereign, holy, just, loving God who does what he pleases with what he has created. A Confession will protect us from creating a god in our image instead. It will protect us from views that are designed to cushion the Almighty blow of who God really is. And after we have accepted what the word of God teaches about God, we are on our way to becoming more comfortable with that than we were formerly comfortable with falsehoods and lies.
The notion that love determines what God will do is a denigration of his power, for if God wills to be merciful to all, yet all will not receive his mercy, then God is powerless to overcome his own creatures—powerless to regenerate or even soften hearts. Therefore, in that case, it must be man, and man alone, who decides to populate God’s kingdom. God’s mercy goes out as an uncertain offer, then. Some resist; some don’t; all can. God has no say in it. But the Scripture assures us that that is all wrong, for ‘who hath resisted his will?’ (Romans 9.19.) The Confession is true to that: “God, the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least.” Love over sovereignty means that God is so controlled by that one attribute that he can do no other but what we wish him to do. And if God is powerless to save everyone, why should we believe that he has power to judge anyone? If sinners can resist his grace, why can’t guilty parties defy his judgment? How can his will be powerless one way (to save every sinner) and powerful in another (to judge every rebel?) Can he have power one way but not the other? Can he be like that and still be God? If he can’t put everyone into heaven, neither can he consign anyone to hell. But the Bible is clear that many sinners do go to hell, and that multitudes are in hell already. If we are not content with God’s will as it is written in Scripture, we end up with a God who might save, can’t judge, and does not rule. He does not know (for he has never determined it) who will be saved and how many. We avoid inevitable reductions of divinity by coming to terms with a Confession of Faith. Love over sovereignty is a slippery slope that can take us over many a precipice. We need a good Confession.
That is a dire sign of how backslidden Christendom is, and of how thoughtless and man-centered our churches are, when the sovereignty of God is no longer regarded as the preeminent characteristic of God’s person. Men think to have been so kind by raising his love to such a degree that even God’s sovereign will hangs from it; but the switch has changed our faultless Creator from being and doing what his word says he is and does, to being characterized by the desires, decisions, and whims of his sinful creatures. If God’s will is subordinate to any attribute, he is not sovereign. If sovereignty exists, it must, by definition, overtop all. ‘Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will’ cannot be unless the sovereignty of God decides the matter. The statement means that he extends mercy according to his will; it does not mean that he must be mercifully willing. The crowning jewel of The Westminster Confession is how God is correctly and respectfully represented. He is absolutely sovereign, and man is entirely responsible, no matter if God has chosen or not, to have mercy on impotent man. The Assembly of the Westminster Confession was right to allow the full weight of both Sovereignty and Responsibility, without trying to solve the mystery. The Sacred is left alone when finite man is told to abstain from things too wonderful. That is meeker than trying to peer into a secret book that even angels do not get to open. That is more humble than attempting to explain something that an apostle passed over in silence, wiser than trying to unravel a scroll that an archangel wouldn’t dare touch, safer than jamming a puzzle together that only God is qualified to assemble. That vain effort of ours to figure out what we are told to leave alone leads to our running down one line of truth for the sake of another, by which unholy act we distort both, resulting in a quarrel with the LORD of hosts that will be settled on Judgment Day. “The doctrine of this high mystery of predestination is to be handled with special prudence and care,” the Confession says. An author should be especially watchful and reserved wherever great men have confessed great difficulty. When Solomon wrote that a threefold cord is not quickly broken, he was not prophesying of Taylor, McClurkin, and Mackay, apparently. Their flimsy cord is quickly broken by the holy use of a Confession of Faith. By their anxiety to answer the unanswerable—by their attempt to unravel a sealed scroll—they end up face to face against Almighty God for erasing his election from ‘before the foundation of the world.’ They end up asserting that God’s will must be to have mercy on all, when the Bible so clearly tells us that he will have mercy on whomever he wills, or has willed, to have mercy on. Mr. Mackay says this in his conclusion: “For many years now, I have sought to shepherd the flock of God, and in my pastoral ministry I have stood with hundreds of individuals and families in ‘the valley of the shadow’ as they have reeled in grief and bewilderment under the blows of stunning adversity and bereavement. I could not, and I did not, tell them that this inexplicable sorrow, this ghastly tragedy, this sudden bereavement, had been decreed in Eternity past by their loving, Heavenly Father.” That would have been safer to do, though—safer than having to stand before God one Day to explain to him why sinners were solaced at the expense of the Will, Nature, and Providence of God! By thinking to be able to fathom the unfathomable—by approaching the unapproachable to try and solve the unsolvable—these three men have traded the ‘high mystery’ of God’s decrees for an irrational view that evacuates the essential meanings of sovereignty, predestination, and election. Isaiah would say that they ‘have eaten up the vineyard’ (3.14.) Their view is as irreverent as it is irrational, for if God loves all men alike, he must be powerless to save them all, since multitudes end up in hell; and if he is powerless to save everyone he loves, he must be powerless to judge the wicked, which means that sinners cannot and will not be held responsible for their evil deeds. That God favors the elect with a predestined love is the only way out of this heap of heresies. Let’s hear Jesus Christ preach it: “I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine” (John 17.9.) Jesus Christ discriminates in favor of the elect; he will also judge all sinners who have not been given to him: those who are not foreordained to life everlasting. Where does Calvinism spring from except Jesus Christ?
In light of the significance of what must be rewritten after extenuating the subject matter of Romans 9, should we not warn that there might be hell to pay for trying to untwist knots that God has chosen to leave tied up? Discreet preachers are content to work on either side of the knot, and to preach the full force of each disclosure and leave the problem alone. But along come these wise-guys who must think they are more informed than an apostle! They will explain away the paradoxical by effacing doctrines! And they will rail at someone like Calvin, misrepresent him, and discourage everyone they can from reading his godly books! For the welfare of our souls, we would be wise to trade the tiny teachers of the 20th century for the masters of bygone ages, and let a blasphemous book like Biblical Balance on Election & Free Will politely slip from our fingers and into a garbage can. We need a Confession of Faith for our protection—and should read the works of men who drew the Westminster Confession up, books by William Bridge, Thomas Goodwin, and Jeremiah Burroughs. By this we may avoid being cheated of our inheritance: the august doctrines of the Bible by which we may get to know what God is truly like and what he really does. That is a marvelous thing to meditate on: why God wills to have mercy on this person and not that person, from a decision made in eternity, without basing his decision on anything that will take place in the world. It is a marvelous thing to think about and to get lost in the reflection of—if we accept it. If we do not accept it, some of the most awesome truths of revelation are just a vexation to us, and we are left tormented with wanting God Almighty to be someone that he is not. Humble men do not demand answers after God interjects with, “Who art thou that repliest against God?” And they are blessed by glorying in the fact that God is sovereign to do as he pleases with his creatures. The men of the Confession were not only able, but able because they were abased.
There are some marvels of divinity that we have no business knowing. The secret that connects man’s responsibility with God’s predestination is only one of many that are none of our business. When ‘caught up into paradise,’ the apostle Paul ‘heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’ (2 Corinthians 12.4.) The apostle John, at the ready to write what the seven thunders uttered, was told to ‘write them not’ (Revelation 10.4.) The KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS has a name known only to himself (Revelation 19.12.) Persons who insist on an answer as to how God can find fault with souls who have no predestined mercy are dealt with right in the passage where both man’s responsibility and the sovereignty of God are asserted. They stupidly put themselves in the crosshairs of God’s lecture: “Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, why hast thou made me thus?” (Romans 9.20.)
It is essential to follow a Confession of Faith because errors are popular in our churches and because we are not as wise as we think we are to detect them. As Patrick Simpson informed parliament in 1606: “Remember, that spiritual darkness, flowing from a very small beginning, doth insinuate and thrust itself into the house of God, as men can hardly discern by what secret means the light was dimmed, and darkness creeping in, got the upper hand; and in the end, at unawares, all was involved in a misty cloud of horrible apostacy” (John Howie, The Scots Worthies, p 105.) We need a Confession of Faith for our helper. Indeed, why not use more than one? I mostly recommend The Westminster triad, The Belgic Confession, The Heidelberg Catechism, and The Canons of Dort. I use these the most; and I would be willing to swear, under oath, that God, in a remarkable way, led me, seemingly against my will, to use those few in particular. These Confessions contain no major differences of opinion among them. For the sake of accuracy on major doctrines like the person of the Lord and election, an emphasis on a lesser matter like the baptism of infants can be tolerated. By the use of a reliable Confession, we will find, moreover, with the passage of time, that some things that we once hated have become precious and that some things that once irked us we now barely disagree with. Some of us will always take issue with the baptism of infants—and we should—but we should not overreact any more than Spurgeon did. The Prince of Preachers got believer-baptized as a teenager, against the wishes of his father; but he was wise to retain his respect for the Westminster triad, even to the point of placing a copy of the Westminster Shorter Catechism under the foundation stone of his church years later. If it was not this Catechism, it was the Baptist Confession of Faith from 1689, which is essentially the same. He did not throw the whole away for the sake of one minor irritant. About the Westminster Shorter Catechism, he said this in a speech before the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland in 1866:
“We have a sort of catechetical seminary connected with our church, in which we teach a little book that is known by you all, your Shorter Catechism with Proofs, in which, of course, I have made a slight alteration in regard to baptism. Now, the fashion across the border is to laugh at this book, and say it is out of date, and so on. Well, I should like to see someone write a better summary of Scripture doctrine. Until somebody gives us a better book, we’ll stick to it” (C. H. Spurgeon, Speeches at Home and Abroad, p. 60.)
We have wandered away from the compendiums of our Christian Faith. Pastors, with good intention, but on the basis of indoctrination and/or because of prejudice, dismiss them, and tell their brethren that they all should get back to the Bible instead. In spite of such remarks, though, pastors read the Bible alongside poorly executed theses from modern book stores, incorporating into their system a variety of opinions that are unbiblical and heretical; then these harmful ideas are propagated in the sermons they deliver. It is discouraging and humiliating to think that our favorite contemporary authors are so often weak and wrong when compared with scholars in divinity of centuries ago. But the Christian who cares enough to look into it will see that this is the case. A Christian author who is both dependable and alive is an endangered species.
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