Devotional 20: Of God's Eternal Decree: I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in t

The Confession Read

The rest of mankind God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of his own will, whereby he extendeth or withholdeth mercy, as he pleaseth, for the glory of his sovereign power over his creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 3, Section 7

Introduction

I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh. Those are not the words of a hard man. They are not the words of a theologian who has lost his humanity in the labyrinth of abstraction. They are the words of the apostle Paul, writing to the church at Rome, and he is weeping over the destiny of his fellow Israelites. The very man who, a few verses later, will ask the unanswerable question, Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? begins not with polemical swagger but with pastoral anguish. Before he defends the righteousness of God in election and reprobation, he lets us see his tears. This is the posture in which to approach Section 7 of the Confession. We come now to what is, by any honest reckoning, the hardest sentence in the entire Westminster Confession of Faith, a single tightly coiled paragraph that addresses the eternal destiny of the non-elect, those whom Scripture calls the rest of mankind. Here the Divines set down in unflinching prose what the Bible teaches about reprobation: that God passes by some, ordaining them to dishonour and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice. The language is weighted, the doctrine is searching, and no amount of pastoral softening can blunt its edge. Notice the tone the Divines chose, or rather the tone Scripture chose for them. Listen to how Paul handles this subject in Romans 9:1-5. He does not coldly recite a catalogue of the damned. He weeps. His conscience bears witness in the Holy Ghost, and that inward testimony is not of smug satisfaction but of great heaviness. The apostle who understood sovereign grace more deeply than any man who ever lived was also the apostle whose heart broke over those who rejected it. Section 7 is not the product of theologians who enjoyed contemplating wrath. It is the product of men who, like Paul, could not say everything the Bible says without also saying this, and who judged that love for Christ's flock required them to speak the whole counsel of God, including the parts that wound before they heal. This section cannot be skipped. If the Confession is to be a faithful summary of what Scripture teaches, it includes what Scripture includes. And Scripture does not remain silent on this matter. It speaks. And when it speaks, it speaks with a gravity and a restraint and a purpose that we dare not dismiss.

Scripture Foundation

The divine prerogative to extend or withhold mercy rises from the very heart of God's self-disclosure to Moses on Mount Sinai. After the apostasy of the golden calf, when the covenant seemed broken and Israel's future hung by a thread, Moses made a bold request: I beseech thee, shew me thy glory. God's answer took the form of a proclamation of His own name — and embedded in that proclamation is the fountainhead of everything the Confession teaches about reprobation. Exodus 33:19 records the divine word: And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy. The Hebrew is emphatic. The doubling of the verb, I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, is a Hebrew idiom that expresses absolute freedom. It is as if God were saying: My grace is Mine to give, and I give it to whom I choose. The right to extend mercy belongs to God alone, and the corollary, which the text does not state but which Paul will later draw out with remorseless logic, is that the right to withhold mercy belongs to Him as well. If mercy were owed, it would not be mercy. If God were obliged to extend it to all, it would not be grace. The very nature of grace requires that God be free in its distribution. The apostle Paul takes up this text in Romans 9:14-18 and draws the conclusion that the Confession will later codify. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. Here Paul anchors the entire doctrine of reprobation in the character of God as revealed at Sinai. He will not allow the questioner to evade the implication: if God says I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, then there are some upon whom He does not have mercy. And if He hardens some (the Greek verb is sklērynō, meaning to make stubborn, to render unyielding) then that hardening, no less than the mercy, serves His purpose. Pharaoh was not an innocent man whom God arbitrarily destroyed. He was a proud and defiant king who had already hardened his own heart repeatedly before God sealed that hardness in judgment. Yet Paul does not rest the explanation on Pharaoh's prior sin. He rests it on the sovereign purpose of God: Even for this same purpose have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee. The word translated mercy in this passage is eleeō, a verb that appears four times in these three verses. Paul is driving home a single point: mercy is God's to give. He owes it to no creature. The creature who receives it receives what he does not deserve. The creature who does not receive it receives justice — and justice, by definition, is what every sinner deserves. There is no injustice with God because God is not withholding a debt. He is withholding a gift. The apostle Peter, in his first epistle, applies this same principle to the person and work of Christ. 1 Peter 2:7-8 reads: Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed. The final clause is the weight-bearing one: whereunto also they were appointed. The Greek verb is tithemi, a common word meaning to set, place, or appoint. But the construction here is passive (they were appointed) and the appointment has a specific object: to stumbling, to taking offence at the cornerstone. Christ is not a neutral presence in the world. He is either the foundation upon which men build their eternal hope or the stone over which they stumble into ruin. And Peter does not hesitate to say that those who stumble were appointed to that end. The language is sober and restrained. Peter does not say God forced them to disbelieve. He says they were disobedient, their unbelief is real, their guilt is real. But behind their disobedience stands a divine appointment. Turn now to the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, where the same truth is stated with proverbial brevity. Proverbs 16:4 declares: The Lord hath made all things for himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. This is a hard saying, and we need not make it harder than it is. Solomon is not saying that God created wicked men wicked. He is saying that the wicked, in their wickedness, serve God's purpose. The day of evil, the day of judgment, the day when wrath falls, is not an accident in the divine plan. It is appointed, and even the wicked whom it consumes are part of the larger design by which God displays His justice. The Confession's language echoes this wisdom when it says that God ordains the non-elect to dishonour and wrath for the praise of his glorious justice. One final passage grounds the doctrine in the universal human condition. Romans 2:5-6 contains what may be the most sobering description of the reprobate in all of Scripture: But after thy hardness and impenitent heart treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his deeds. The Greek word Paul uses for righteous judgment is dikaiokrisia, a compound of dikaios (righteous) and krisis (judgment). The judgment that falls on the reprobate is neither capricious nor arbitrary. It is dikaiokrisia, a judgment righteous in its grounds, its measure, and its execution. The sinner treasures up (the verb is thēsaurizō, to store up as in a treasury) his own wrath. Every sin adds to the store. Every hardening of the heart increases the deposit. And on the day of wrath, the treasury is opened and the sinner receives precisely what he has stored. The reprobate is not punished for a decree. He is punished for his deeds. These five passages, taken together, form the biblical substructure beneath the terse language of the Confession. God claims the right to extend or withhold mercy. Those who are passed by stumble over Christ, being appointed to that stumbling. Their existence, even in rebellion, serves the purpose of God. Their punishment is measured by their own sin. And through it all, through the mercy that saves some and the justice that condemns others, the name of God is glorified.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines were not composing in a theological vacuum. They were writing in the aftermath of the Arminian controversy, which had shaken the churches of the Netherlands and was now agitating the Church of England. The Remonstrants, following Jacobus Arminius, had argued that election was based on foreseen faith and that reprobation was based on foreseen unbelief. The decree of God, in their view, was fundamentally reactive: God looked down the corridor of time, saw who would believe and who would not, and then decreed accordingly. The Synod of Dort had answered this error in 1619, and the Westminster Assembly, meeting a generation later, incorporated Dort's conclusions into the Confession. The earlier sections of Chapter 3 had already established that election is not based on foreseen faith and that the decree is unconditional. Section 7 now addresses the necessary counterpart: if God does not elect all, what of those He does not elect? The Divines chose their words with a precision that rewards careful attention. God was pleased to pass by the rest of mankind. The verb to pass by translates the Latin praeterire, from which we derive the theological term preterition. Preterition is not the same as active reprobation. It means that God, in the execution of His decree, does not extend saving grace to the non-elect. He leaves them in their fallen condition. He does not need to push them into sin; they are already there. He simply does not rescue them from it. The distinction is crucial, and it preserves the Confession from the charge that God is the author of sin. Yet preterition, as the Divines understood it, does not exhaust the content of the decree concerning the non-elect. God also ordains them to dishonour and wrath for their sin. Here the Confession moves from what God does not do (He does not save them) to what He actively does: He appoints them to a specific end. And that end is not arbitrary. It is for their sin. The ground of condemnation is not the bare will of God; it is actual transgression. The non-elect are not innocent people whom God punishes for His own pleasure. They are sinners who receive the wages of their sin. The decree does not make them sinners; it determines the outcome of their sin. Why does God do this? The Confession gives a double answer. The first purpose is for the glory of his sovereign power over his creatures. God's power is displayed in creation, providence, and judgment. When He consigns the impenitent to wrath, He demonstrates that He is Lord over all, that His authority is absolute, and that rebellion against Him will not go unpunished. The second purpose is the praise of his glorious justice. Just as election redounds to the praise of His glorious grace (the language of Section 5), so reprobation redounds to the praise of His glorious justice. Grace and justice are both attributes of God, and both are displayed in His dealings with mankind. The glory of God is the ultimate end of all His works, and that glory would be diminished if His justice were never manifested. As Jonathan Edwards would later argue, a God who never punished sin would be a God whose holiness and righteousness remained forever hidden. The day of judgment is the great theatre in which the justice of God is put on display for all creation to see. The phrase unsearchable counsel sets a boundary. The Divines do not pretend to explain why God chose these particular individuals and passed by those. They acknowledge that the reason lies hidden in the mind of God. Deuteronomy 29:29 sets the rule: The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever. The fact of reprobation is revealed. The reason for the selection of one individual rather than another is not. And where Scripture draws a veil, the Confession refuses to lift it. This restraint distinguishes the Reformed doctrine of reprobation from two errors that the Divines were careful to avoid. On one side stood the Arminians, who denied the doctrine altogether and insisted that God desires the salvation of every individual equally. On the other side stood a certain hyper-Calvinist tendency, later to be associated with the supralapsarian extreme, that spoke of reprobation as if God created some men for the express purpose of damning them, without regard to their sin. The Confession steers between these errors with its careful distinction between preterition and condemnation, its insistence that condemnation is for sin, and its acknowledgment that the grounds of God's choice are unsearchable.

Theological Depth

The doctrine of reprobation is not an invention of the seventeenth century or of the Reformed tradition. It is woven into the fabric of Christian orthodoxy wherever the Bible has been taken seriously. But within the Reformed tradition, it has received particularly careful and pastorally sensitive treatment. Jonathan Edwards, the theologian of Northampton and Princeton whose penetrating intellect probed the depths of divine sovereignty, took up the question of reprobation in a sermon that presses the subject with uncommon force. In The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners, Edwards argued that every lost sinner is condemned not by an arbitrary decree but by his own wickedness. The sinner's mouth is stopped, Edwards wrote, because his own conscience will testify against him on the day of judgment. No one in hell will be able to say, I am here because God decreed it and not because I deserved it. The decree and the desert will be seen to coincide perfectly. Edwards insisted that the justice of God in damnation is not a separate principle from His justice in general. It is the same justice that would condemn every human being, were it not for the intervening grace of Christ. What requires explanation is not that some are condemned but that any are saved. Reprobation is justice; election is mercy. And mercy, by its nature, is not owed. This insight shapes the entire pastoral burden of Edwards's sermon. He does not attempt to soften the doctrine by minimising the horror of hell or by suggesting that the damned suffer less than Scripture says they suffer. Instead, he magnifies the grace that rescues the elect from what they equally deserved. The darker the backdrop of justice, the brighter the jewel of mercy shines. And if we find the doctrine of reprobation difficult, and we should, Edwards would have us ask whether our difficulty arises from a proper love for our fellow men or from a suppressed resentment that God should be God. The natural man, Edwards observed, does not like a God who is sovereign. He wants a God who asks his permission, a God who submits His decrees to human review, a God who can be managed. The doctrine of reprobation, perhaps more than any other, forces the surrender of that idol. William Ames, the English Puritan who spent his most productive years teaching at the University of Franeker in the Netherlands, addressed reprobation in his Marrow of Theology, a work that became the standard textbook of Reformed divinity throughout the seventeenth century. Ames treated reprobation not as an isolated doctrine but as the necessary implication of the divine attributes. God is just. Justice, by its nature, must punish sin. If God did not punish sin, He would not be just, and a God who is not just is not God. The question, then, is not whether God punishes sin (He must, or He would cease to be Himself) but why He does not punish all sin immediately and finally. The answer is grace. Grace stays the hand of justice for the elect. For the non-elect, justice takes its course. Ames saw in this an answer to the ancient charge that the doctrine of reprobation makes God arbitrary. On the contrary, it makes God consistent. He is always just. He always punishes sin. The difference between the elect and the reprobate is not that the elect are less sinful or more deserving. It is that grace interposes for the one and not for the other, and grace, being grace, is free. Samuel Rutherford, the Scottish covenanter whose letters were read beside the fires of cottages and castles alike, brought the doctrine of reprobation down from the lecture hall into the sickroom and the prison cell. Rutherford never denied what the Confession teaches. His letters are filled with a robust acknowledgment of divine sovereignty in election and reprobation alike. But when he wrote to a doubting soul, Rutherford did not point him to the decree. He pointed him to Christ. The decree, Rutherford said, is written in heaven, and you cannot read it. But the gospel is written in blood on the pages of Scripture, and you can read that. Do not try to climb into the secret counsel of God to discover whether you are elect. Come to Christ, and in coming, you will discover that you were elected from before the foundation of the world. The pastoral wisdom of letting the decree drive you to Christ rather than away from Him appears throughout the Reformed tradition. Rutherford knew that the honest reader of Romans 9 and of WCF 3.7 will feel a tremor in the soul. That tremor, properly directed, becomes the fear of the Lord. Improperly directed, it becomes despair or resentment. The difference lies in whether we let the doctrine humble us and send us fleeing to the Saviour, or whether we let it become an occasion for arguing with God. Stephen Charnock, in his Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God, devoted sustained attention to the relationship between divine sovereignty and divine justice. For Charnock, the two attributes are never in tension. God's sovereignty is not a raw power that acts without regard to righteousness. It is a holy sovereignty, a sovereignty that always acts in accordance with His nature. When God passes by some, He does so as the righteous Judge of all the earth, who will by no means clear the guilty. When He ordains the non-elect to wrath, He ordains them to what their sin deserves. The mystery (and Charnock did not deny that a mystery remains) is not that a just God punishes sin. The mystery is that a just God ever pardons it. And that mystery is resolved only at the cross, where justice and mercy meet, where God is both just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. Robert Shaw, whose nineteenth-century exposition of the Confession has served generations of Presbyterian students, noted the precision with which Section 7 distinguishes between the two aspects of reprobation. Preterition, Shaw observed, is a sovereign act: God passes by whom He will. Ordination to wrath is a judicial act: God condemns for sin. The former rests on the unsearchable counsel of His will. The latter rests on the demerit of the creature. The distinction preserves both the sovereignty of God in the distribution of grace and the justice of God in the infliction of punishment. Without the distinction, the doctrine becomes either a cold fatalism that makes God the author of sin or a sentimental universalism that denies His holiness altogether.

Puritan Application

The doctrine of reprobation is not given to satisfy our curiosity. It is given to humble our pride, to deepen our gratitude, to quicken our evangelism, and to drive us to Christ. How does this hard truth, rightly received, bear fruit in the life of faith? First, handle this doctrine with tears, not swagger. Any man who can speak of reprobation without a trembling heart has not understood it. The apostle Paul did not debate the fate of his kinsmen as an abstract theological puzzle. He wept. He said he could wish himself accursed from Christ for their sake, language so shocking that commentators have struggled with it ever since. If the great apostle to the Gentiles approached this subject with heaviness and continual sorrow, what excuse do we have for coldness? The doctrine of reprobation, rightly held, makes us tender. It reminds us that apart from grace, we would share the same end. It fills us with compassion for the lost, not a compassion that denies the justice of God, but a compassion that echoes the heart of Christ, who wept over Jerusalem even as He pronounced its coming judgment. Never let Reformed orthodoxy become a fortress in which you hide from the sorrow of the world. Let it be a window through which you see that sorrow more clearly, and let what you see send you to your knees. Second, let the terror of divine justice drive you anew to Christ. There is a use of the doctrine of reprobation that the Puritans called the awakening use. When the soul realises what it deserves, that apart from grace it would be among those whom God passes by and ordains to wrath for their sin, the only sane response is to flee to the only refuge. The cross of Christ is the one place where justice and mercy kiss. At the cross, the justice that would otherwise fall upon the sinner fell upon the Son of God instead. And at the cross, the mercy that the sinner does not deserve is extended freely to all who will receive it. Do not let the doctrine of reprobation paralyse you with speculation about whether you are elect. Let it terrify you with what you deserve, and then let that holy terror propel you into the arms of the Saviour who receives all who come. Rutherford's counsel remains the best: look not to the decree but to the cross. The decree is hidden; the cross is proclaimed. The decree is secret; the gospel is public. Come to Christ, and you will find that you were elected. Stay away from Him, and you confirm by your own choice what the decree has determined. Third, worship God for His justice as sincerely as you worship Him for His mercy. The Confession says that reprobation is to the praise of God's glorious justice. This means that the justice displayed in the condemnation of the wicked is a proper object of praise. We are not embarrassed by God's justice. We do not apologise for it. We do not suggest that God would be more loving if He saved everyone, as if love could exist without holiness or mercy without righteousness. The God of the Bible is not a grandfatherly figure who overlooks sin because He lacks the stomach for judgment. He is the Holy One of Israel, whose eyes are too pure to look upon evil, whose wrath is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. When the smoke of judgment rises, as it does in the closing chapters of the Revelation, the saints in heaven do not cover their eyes in embarrassment. They sing, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. They praise God for His justice because justice is one of His perfections, and every perfection of God is worthy of praise. Train your heart to adore the God of Exodus 34, a God merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty. The same verse that celebrates His mercy also proclaims His justice. Both are glorious. Both are God. Fourth, be humbled that you are not among those whom God has passed by. The doctrine of election, which the earlier sections of this chapter have expounded, finds its dark background in the doctrine of reprobation. The elect are not better than the non-elect. They are not wiser, not more virtuous, not more receptive to spiritual truth. They are sinners who deserve exactly what the non-elect receive. If you are in Christ today, the only explanation is the sovereign grace of God. You did not choose Him; He chose you. You did not come to Him by your own wisdom; the Father drew you. You did not believe by your own power; the Spirit gave you faith. Every link in the chain that binds you to glory was forged by grace. Let this truth mortify every particle of spiritual pride. You are not a Christian because you made a wise decision. You are a Christian because God, before the foundation of the world, set His love upon you, and that love, as Section 5 taught us, was not because of anything in you. It was mere free grace. When you contemplate the destiny from which grace has rescued you, let gratitude, not pride, be the posture of your soul. Fifth, let the reality of reprobation quicken your evangelism rather than extinguish it. There is a temptation, especially among those newly introduced to the doctrines of grace, to reason thus: if God has already determined who will be saved, then my efforts at evangelism make no difference. The Confession has already answered this error in Section 6, which insists that the God who appointed the end also appointed the means. But Section 7 adds a further motive. The reality that some are passed by should fill us with urgency, not indifference. Paul, the theologian of election, was also the greatest evangelist the world has ever seen. He travailed in birth until Christ was formed in his hearers. He became all things to all men that he might by all means save some. He did not preach as if the decree rendered his labours unnecessary. He preached because the decree had rendered his labours necessary. The God who ordained the salvation of the elect also ordained the preaching through which they would be called. Your witness, your prayers, your patient and persistent love for the lost, these are the means by which the decree is executed. And while you cannot see the roll of the elect, you can love every sinner you meet with a love that desires his salvation and that leaves the secret things to God.

Prayer

O Lord God Almighty, whose judgments are unsearchable and whose ways are past finding out, we bow before Thee in holy fear. Thou art the potter; we are the clay. Thou hast mercy on whom Thou wilt have mercy, and whom Thou wilt Thou hardenest. Who are we to answer back to Thee? We confess that our hearts recoil from the doctrine of reprobation because we have not yet learned to love Thy justice as we ought. We have imagined Thee to be a God who owes mercy to all, forgetting that mercy is no mercy if it is owed, and that grace is no grace if it is compelled. Forgive us for the pride that would summon Thee to our bar and judge Thee by our measures. Teach us to tremble at Thy Word and to worship Thee for all that Thou art: not only for the mercy that saves but for the justice that vindicates Thy holiness. We thank Thee, O God, that Thou hast not passed us by. We were children of wrath, even as others. We treasured up wrath against the day of wrath. We were disobedient, stumbling over the cornerstone. And yet Thou didst look upon us in Christ, and Thou didst call us by name, and Thou didst place us among the vessels of mercy prepared beforehand for glory. Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory, for Thy mercy and for Thy truth's sake. Make us tender, we pray, toward those who perish. Let the doctrine of reprobation never harden our hearts but break them. Let Paul's tears be ours. Let Rutherford's compassion be ours. Let the love of Christ, who wept over Jerusalem, constrain us to love our neighbours, to speak the gospel with boldness and tears, and to labour while it is day, knowing that the night cometh when no man can work. And at the last, O God, when the drama of redemption is complete and the full number of the elect is gathered in, grant us to stand before Thy throne and to praise Thee for Thy grace, which we did not deserve, and for Thy justice, which we could not have borne apart from Christ. In that day, every mouth will be stopped and all the world will acknowledge that Thou art righteous in all Thy ways and holy in all Thy works. Hasten that day, Lord Jesus. Even so, come quickly. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our only hope and our eternal refuge. Amen.