Devotional 30: Of Providence: Stand on the western shore of the Red Sea at dawn, and watch

The Confession Read

As for those wicked and ungodly men whom God, as a righteous Judge, for former sins, doth blind and harden, from them he not only withholdeth his grace whereby they might have been enlightened in their understandings, and wrought upon in their hearts; but sometimes also withdraweth the gifts which they had, and exposeth them to such objects as their corruption makes occasions of sin; and, withal, gives them over to their own lusts, the temptations of the world, and the power of Satan, whereby it comes to pass that they harden themselves, even under those means which God useth for the softening of others.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 5, Section 6

Introduction

Stand on the western shore of the Red Sea at dawn, and watch. The waters, only hours ago parted like curtains drawn back by an unseen hand, now roll back into their ancient bed. Beneath those returning waves are the bodies of Egypt's finest — charioteers, captains, horses, all the strength of a superpower brought to silence under forty feet of salt water. And on the eastern shore, a nation of former slaves stands singing, their bare feet still wet with the spray, their voices lifted to the God who has drowned the army of their oppressors in the sea. There is no ambiguity in Scripture about who hardened Pharaoh's heart. God declares it before Moses ever sets foot in the palace: "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 7:3). Before the first plague, before the first confrontation, before the first opportunity for Pharaoh to relent, God announces His intention. And across the chapters that follow, the hardening is attributed to God, to Pharaoh himself, and to the passive weight of a heart already inclined toward rebellion — all woven together in a fabric that no human mind can fully separate but that Scripture refuses to simplify. This is the truth that Chapter 5, Section 6 of our Confession sets before us, and it is perhaps the most sobering paragraph in the entire document. We have followed the doctrine of providence through five sections, each marking a step deeper into mystery. In Section 1 we saw the grand vision: God upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all things. Section 2 taught us that genuine creaturely agency operates under and within divine sovereignty — the doctrine of concurrence. Section 3 declared God's freedom over means: He ordinarily uses instruments but is not bound by them. Then Section 4 delivered the hardest truth — that God's providence extends to the fall of Adam and all sin, yet God is not the author of sin. Section 5 descended from the cosmic theatre into the tender garden of God's paternal dealings with His children, showing us that even the Father's withdrawal serves holy ends of chastisement and restoration. But Section 6 takes us into territory that the modern mind, even the modern Christian mind, would rather not enter. It speaks not of God's children but of "wicked and ungodly men." Not of paternal chastisement but of judicial hardening. Not of withdrawal for a season with restoration in view, but of abandonment to destruction. The God who in Section 5 drew near as a Father now stands forth as "a righteous Judge." And what He does to these wicked men — withholding grace, withdrawing gifts, exposing them to occasions of sin, giving them over to lusts, the world, and Satan — is performed, not merely permitted. God blinds. God hardens. God gives over. Let us be clear about what Section 6 is and is not teaching. It does not teach that God creates fresh evil in the human heart. The men in view are already "wicked and ungodly" — that is their settled character before the hardening begins. The hardening is judicial, not creative. It is punishment for prior sin, not arbitrary caprice. And yet it is also more than mere permission. The Confession, consistent with the whole Reformed tradition, refuses to reduce God's role in reprobation to passive observation. God is the righteous Judge who, for former sins, actively blinds and actively hardens and actively gives over. To say less than this is to say less than Scripture says. To say more than this — to make God the author of the sin itself — is to blaspheme. The path between these two cliffs is narrow, and the Confession walks it with the precision of men who knew exactly where the precipices lay. These truths are not comfortable, but the church needs them — especially when the fear of God has grown so rare. If you do not understand why some are hardened, you cannot fully understand why you have been softened.

Scripture Foundation

The Confession does not invent this doctrine out of logical deduction from other doctrines. It finds it, as all sound theology must, in the words of Scripture — words that are often harder than anything the Divines themselves wrote. Four passages must anchor our thinking. The most sustained treatment of judicial abandonment in the New Testament runs through Romans 1. In Romans 1:24, Romans 1:26, and Romans 1:28, Paul uses the same devastating verb three times: paredōken — "God gave them up," "God gave them over." The repetition is not accidental. It marks three descending stages in the ruin of a culture, each triggered by a prior human decision, each sealed by a divine response. First: "Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves." The exchange is explicit in the verses leading up to this — they "changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man" (Romans 1:23). They traded God for a substitute, and God responded by giving them what they wanted. The punishment fits the crime with terrible precision: they exchanged the truth for a lie, and God handed them over to the consequences of that exchange. The second paredōken goes deeper: "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections" (Romans 1:26). Again the causal chain is clear. The prior sin — idolatry, the worship of the creature rather than the Creator — has consequences, and those consequences are not merely natural outworkings of a bad decision. They are divinely administered. God gives them over. The verb is active, the subject is God, and the object is human beings who have already turned away. This is not God creating their sin but God removing the restraints that held their sin in check. The dam is breached, and the flood that follows is the flood of their own corruption — but God opened the gate. The third descent is the most terrifying: "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient" (Romans 1:28). The Greek word translated "reprobate" is adokimos — literally, a mind that has failed the test, a mind that no longer functions as a mind was designed to function, a mind incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood, good from evil. This is not simply intellectual error. It is judicial blindness. It is the withdrawal of that common grace by which even the unregenerate are kept from the full expression of their depravity. And the terrifying thing about a reprobate mind is that the person who possesses it does not know it. The very organ by which he would diagnose his condition has been disabled. He thinks himself enlightened precisely when he is most blind. The pattern is unmistakable. Human sin — divine withdrawal — deeper human sin — deeper divine withdrawal. Each link in the chain is forged both by human hands and by divine judgment. And Paul's purpose in laying out this chain is not merely to explain the moral condition of the pagan world. It is to make every reader tremble. "Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest" (Romans 2:1). The same principle operates wherever the gospel is heard and rejected. The abstract pattern finds its most concrete historical illustration in Exodus. In Exodus 7:3-4, God says to Moses: "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you." Before Moses speaks a word, the outcome is settled — God will harden, Pharaoh will resist, and God's power will be displayed in judgment. But the narrative alternates between three formulations: "the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart" (Exodus 9:12), "Pharaoh hardened his heart" (Exodus 8:15, Exodus 8:32), and the passive "Pharaoh's heart was hardened" (Exodus 7:13). All three are true, and none cancels the others. The Hebrew verbs are instructive: chazaq, meaning to strengthen, describes how God confirms Pharaoh's resolve along the path already chosen; kabad, meaning to be heavy or dull, describes the weight of judgment settling on a resistant soul. God does not infuse evil — He removes restraint, confirms direction, and turns the king's stubbornness into an instrument of His glory. Paul makes the application explicit in Romans 9:17-18: "Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth." The hardening of Pharaoh is not an exception to God's ordinary dealings — it is a revelation of how His sovereignty operates wherever the gospel is proclaimed. The darkest of these texts speaks of a delusion sent by God Himself. In 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12, Paul describes those who perish "because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved." And then he adds: "And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." The sequence matters. The cause of the delusion is their own rejection: "because they received not the love of the truth." The delusion is judicial. It is punishment for a prior refusal. And yet the delusion itself comes from God: "God shall send them strong delusion." The Greek is energeian planēs — literally, a working of error, an activity of deception that operates with divine effectiveness. Those who will not love the truth are given over to believe the lie, and the giving over seals their damnation. This is not mere permission. God sends. God acts. And He acts righteously, because the delusion is the fruit of their own prior rejection of the truth they had. A final text completes the biblical picture, drawing the doctrine uncomfortably close to the people of God themselves. In Psalm 81:11-12, Asaph records God's lament over Israel: "But my people would not hearken to my voice; and Israel would none of me. So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lust: and they walked in their own counsels." Here the subjects are not Pharaoh, not the pagan nations, but "my people" — Israel, the covenant community, the church of the old dispensation. They would not hearken. They would have none of God. And God's response was to give them up. The Hebrew verb is shalach, to send away, to let go, to release — but the release is not liberation. It is abandonment. God removed His restraining hand from a people who insisted on walking their own way, and the result was that they walked exactly where their hearts wanted to go — into ruin. The warning to those who sit under the means of grace and grow hard could hardly be sharper. These four passages together establish the biblical foundation for what the Divines confess. Romans 1 lays out the structure of judicial abandonment. Exodus traces its operation in a single life across time. 2 Thessalonians reveals its culmination in eschatological delusion. Psalm 81 brings it terrifyingly close to the visible church. Together they teach that God's hardening of the wicked is not a distant abstraction but a present reality, unfolding wherever the truth is known and rejected, and that no one who hears the gospel can afford to treat it with anything less than holy fear.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines drafted Section 6 in a theological environment that made this doctrine both necessary and controversial, and we need to grasp what they were arguing against to understand what they were arguing for. The Assembly faced three errors. Socinianism denied God could actively harden anyone — if God could not foreknow free future acts, He could not ordain hardening. Section 1 had already answered this. Arminianism reduced God's role to bare permission: God foresees and permits but does not ordain. The Confession's language is chosen to exclude this — God "doth blind and harden," God "withdraweth," God "exposeth," God "gives them over." Every verb is active, and every subject is God. But the third error terrified the Divines most: making God the author of sin. The Antinomians twisted sovereignty into license. Section 4 had already answered that "the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature, and not from God." Section 6 applies the same principle to reprobation. God acts upon existing wickedness — He does not create it. The structure of the Confession's language reveals the Divines' careful balancing of three truths that must never be separated. First, the judicial character of the act: God does this "as a righteous Judge, for former sins." The hardening is not arbitrary. It is not the capricious act of a tyrant. It is the verdict of a court. The wicked men in view are already guilty. Their sins precede and provoke the judgment. God is not punishing the innocent — He is giving the guilty what justice requires. Second, the graduated nature of the judgment. The Divines trace a progression: first God withholds His grace — the ordinary means by which even the unregenerate are enlightened and restrained. Then He withdraws gifts already given — those common operations of the Spirit that can illumine the mind and restrain the will without regenerating the heart. Then He exposes them to objects that their corruption will seize upon — circumstances, relationships, opportunities that become occasions of sin. And finally He gives them over to a threefold abandonment: their own lusts within, the temptations of the world without, and the power of Satan above. This is not a single act but a process, and at every stage the sinner's own corruption is the engine driving the descent. God's role is to remove the restraints, strengthen the resolve, and direct the circumstances. The sin itself belongs to the creature. Third, the terrible irony of the concluding clause: "even under those means which God useth for the softening of others." The same Word that melts one heart hardens another. The same providence that draws one sinner to repentance confirms another in rebellion. The same gospel that is the fragrance of life to those being saved is the fragrance of death to those perishing. The Divines are not teaching that God has two different gospels or two different providences — one for softening and one for hardening. The means are the same means. The difference lies in the divine purpose and the human response, neither of which operates independently of the other, yet neither of which is reducible to the other. The Divines were also making a crucial distinction between the reprobate and the elect that the previous section had carefully guarded. Section 5 spoke of God's leaving "for a season" His own children to manifold temptations and the corruption of their hearts — but always as a Father, always for their ultimate good, always with restoration in view. Section 6 speaks of God's dealings with "wicked and ungodly men" — and here there is no "for a season," no promise of restoration, no mention of "his own children." The difference between paternal chastisement and judicial hardening is the difference between a Father disciplining a son He will never disown, and a Judge pronouncing sentence on a criminal who has exhausted every reprieve. Both are acts of providence. Both are acts of God. But the relationship in which God stands to the recipient determines whether the act is medicine or execution. The Divines do not attempt to explain how God can actively harden without becoming the author of sin. They assert both truths and leave the reconciliation to God. This restraint is not intellectual laziness — it is theological wisdom. The Confession preserves divine sovereignty and human responsibility side by side because Scripture does the same, and Scripture's unresolved tensions are not problems to be solved but mysteries to be adored.

Theological Depth

The Reformed tradition has not flinched from this doctrine, though it has spoken of it with the tremble that such holy ground demands. Four voices from that tradition guide us deeper. Thomas Manton, the Puritan whose sermons on Romans were among the most widely read of the seventeenth century, lingers over Paul's threefold paredōken with the eye of a spiritual physician. The first giving over, Manton observes, is to "uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts" — God withdraws the restraint of natural modesty, and the sinner does what his heart already wanted to do. The second giving over is to "vile affections" — the sinner passes from committing sin to loving sin, from doing evil to calling evil good. The third giving over — to a "reprobate mind" — is the most terrifying because it is the loss of the capacity to return. A man given over to a reprobate mind has lost the instrument of recognition itself. He is like a ship whose compass has been demagnetized — sailing full speed in the wrong direction with no way to know it. Manton makes an observation that should stop every hearer of the gospel in their tracks. The threefold giving over is not, in the first instance, to spectacular wickedness. It is to what the heart already wants. The judgment is precisely that God ceases to oppose the sinner's will. The restraint is removed, and the sinner discovers — too late — that what he thought was freedom was merely the absence of opportunity. When God gives a man over to his own lusts, He is not injecting new evil but removing the dam that held the reservoir of existing evil in check. The resulting flood is not God's creation — it is man's corruption, finally unleashed. And yet the unleashing is God's act. This is a harder truth than any crude doctrine of divine compulsion would be, because it makes the sinner's own desires the instrument of his destruction. Hell is not an alien punishment imposed from without — it is the full flowering of what the sinner already loves, now given eternal scope. Thomas Brooks, whose Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices has strengthened saints for nearly four centuries, contributes a different dimension. Brooks is attentive to the clause that says God "gives them over to... the power of Satan." He notes that Satan cannot touch any man without divine permission — this we learned in Section 4. But there comes a point in the hardening process when God moves from permitting Satan to tempt to actively delivering the sinner into Satan's power. The distinction is crucial. A temptation that comes from without may be resisted. But when God gives a man over to Satan's power, the resistance itself is withdrawn. Satan does not merely suggest sin — he is empowered to blind the mind, to strengthen the will in its obstinacy, to make the gospel seem foolish and sin seem reasonable. The sinner under Satan's power does not feel himself in bondage. He feels himself enlightened, liberated, finally thinking clearly. The lie that deceived him has become the lens through which he sees everything else. Brooks adds a pastoral warning: the path to being given over to Satan's power does not begin with notorious vice. It begins with small disobediences, quietly entertained, slowly habituated. The hardening is progressive, and its early stages are almost imperceptible — a slight dullness in prayer, a diminished hunger for the Word, a growing comfort with what once troubled the conscience. By the time the sinner recognizes what is happening, the process may be irreversible. Samuel Rutherford, the Scottish Covenanter whose letters breathe a devotion that still kindles the heart, approaches the same mystery from the angle of divine righteousness. Rutherford insists that God is never the efficient cause of sin, but He is always the righteous Judge of it, and the distinction demands vigilance. When God hardens, He does not infuse hardness as a new quality — He withholds softening grace that He is under no obligation to give. Grace is grace precisely because it is not owed. The question, Rutherford says, is not why God hardens some but why He softens any. When we understand that all mankind lies under a common sentence of condemnation, we will stop asking how a righteous God can harden sinners and start asking how a righteous God can save any — and the answer to that question is the cross. Rutherford presses further: the sinner who is hardened receives what his own deeds deserve. The withholding of grace is the withdrawal of a gift to which he never had a claim. The withdrawal of gifts is the removal of a loan that was never his property. The exposure to occasions of sin places the sinner in circumstances his own corruption turns to temptation. And the giving over to Satan is the handing of a rebel to the jailer whose authority over rebels God Himself established. At every point, God acts as righteous Judge — not as tyrant — and at every point the divine purpose is ultimately doxological: the hardening of the wicked displays the glory of God's justice and the riches of His mercy toward the vessels of grace. John Flavel, whose Mystery of Providence we met in Section 1, returns here with a different emphasis: the withdrawal of common gifts as a stage in the hardening process. Flavel distinguishes between saving grace — which God gives only to the elect and never withdraws — and common grace, those gifts of illumination, restraint, and outward reformation that God bestows on many who are never saved. Common grace is real grace. It genuinely restrains sin, genuinely enlightens the mind, genuinely reforms the outward life. But it is not saving grace, and it can be withdrawn. When the Confession says God "sometimes also withdraweth the gifts which they had," Flavel identifies these gifts precisely: the convictions of conscience, the outward restraints of providence, the fear of consequences, the influence of godly company, the power of a Christian education. All these are real goods. None of them is regeneration. And God, as righteous Judge, may remove them all, leaving the sinner with nothing but his own corrupt heart and the accumulated guilt of all the mercies he has despised. Flavel makes an observation that should search every hearer. The greatest judgments often fall not as catastrophe but as spiritual quiet. When a man who once trembled under the Word now sits unmoved — that is judgment. When convictions that once kept him awake now barely register — that is judgment. The withdrawal of gifts is sometimes the quiet departure of convictions the sinner never valued until they were gone. And Flavel's counsel is stark: if you have any conviction, any trembling at the Word, any hunger for righteousness — do not presume upon them. They are gifts that can be withdrawn. Treasure them. Act on them. Flee to Christ while they last. Between Manton, Brooks, Rutherford, and Flavel, the full pastoral weight of Section 6 comes into view. The doctrine of judicial hardening is not speculative curiosity — it is a map of the road every impenitent sinner travels, and the road ends in the complete disabling of the capacity to repent. The time to turn is now — the sinner does not know how close to completion the hardening may be.

Puritan Application

If the truths we have been considering are weighty — and they could hardly be weightier — then they demand a response that goes beyond intellectual assent. The Puritan preachers who taught this doctrine never taught it as mere information. They taught it as warning, as summons, as the thunder that drives the sinner to the shelter of the cross. Consider five applications. First, tremble at the reality of judicial hardening, and examine whether any of its early signs are present in your own soul. The hardening process described in Section 6 does not begin with atheism or blasphemy. It begins with the quiet entertainment of sin, the gradual neglect of the means of grace, the slow cooling of first love. Pharaoh did not begin by defying the God of Israel — he began by simply not knowing Him: "Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice?" (Exodus 5:2). The ignorance was culpable, but it was not yet the full hardening that would come. The hardening arrived through a series of confrontations, each one an opportunity to repent, each one refused. And with each refusal, the heart grew harder, until the man who had said "I know not the LORD" became the man who pursued Israel into the sea against every dictate of reason and self-preservation. Do you feel the weight of the Word when it is preached? Does sin still trouble your conscience? Is there any hunger for Christ, any longing for holiness, any grief over your coldness? If these things are present — even weakly, even fitfully — they are evidence that God has not yet given you over. But do not presume upon them. The fact that you are not yet hardened is not proof that you never will be. It is an invitation to flee to Christ before the hardening comes. Second, never mistake common grace for saving grace, and never rest in gifts that can be withdrawn. The Confession speaks of God's "withdrawing the gifts which they had" — illuminations, convictions, and outward reformations that many experience without ever being truly converted. It is possible to sit under the finest preaching, affirm the soundest doctrine, maintain the strictest morality, and yet be in the condition described in Hebrews 6:4-6 — enlightened, having tasted the heavenly gift, and yet never truly united to Christ. The difference between common grace and saving grace is the difference between tasting and feeding. A man may taste the feast and yet starve because he never eats. Examine yourself. Do you rest in your outward conformity, or do you cling to Christ Himself, conscious that apart from Him all your gifts are loans that can be called in? Third, understand sin's progression, and repent at the first stage, not the last. Paul's threefold paredōken is diagnostic. The first giving over is to uncleanness: sin that still carries some shame. The second is to vile affections: the heart embraces what the conscience once rejected. The third is to a reprobate mind: the faculty of judgment is destroyed, and the sinner calls evil good with complete sincerity. The tragedy is that repentance remains possible at stage one and increasingly impossible at stages two and three — not because God's arm is shortened but because the sinner's will has been hardened. If there is sin in your life that still makes you uncomfortable, do not suppress that discomfort. It is the rope thrown to a drowning man. Grasp it now, while you can still feel its pull. Fourth, let the doctrine of judicial hardening drive you to evangelism with holy urgency. The unbelievers around us are not merely mistaken in their opinions. They are, if they remain outside of Christ, under a process that leads to irreversible hardening. We do not know where in that process any particular person stands — how many more sermons they can hear, how many more offers they can refuse before the offer is withdrawn. This should make us urgent in witness, patient in pleading, and prayerful beyond our natural inclination. The doctrine of reprobation is not an excuse for fatalism — it is the sharpest conceivable motive for evangelism. We do not know who the elect are, and we are commanded to offer the gospel to all. Fifth, let the darkness of this doctrine make the light of sovereign grace shine all the brighter. The immediate question that Section 6 raises is: why am I not among the hardened? Why has God not withdrawn His grace from me? Why do I still feel conviction, still hunger for righteousness, still grieve over my sin? The answer is not that I was wiser than Pharaoh or less corrupt than the men of Romans 1. The answer is that God, for reasons hidden in the depths of His own will, chose to show me mercy. He withheld the hardening that I deserved. He gave the softening that I did not deserve. He sent His Spirit to open my eyes when He could have sent delusion. He drew me with cords of love when He could have given me over to the cords of my own sin. The doctrine of judicial hardening is the black velvet against which the diamond of electing grace is displayed. The more clearly we see what God righteously does to the reprobate, the more astonished we will be at what He mercifully does for the elect. And that astonishment is the root of all true worship. The saints in heaven do not sing about their free will. They sing about the Lamb who was slain and who purchased men for God from every tribe and tongue and nation. They know what they were saved from, and they know Who saved them, and their worship is the eternal overflow of that double knowledge.

Prayer

O righteous and holy Lord God, whose judgments are unsearchable and whose ways are past finding out, we bow before Thee with fear and with hope — fear, because we know that we deserve the hardening Thou dost justly administer to the wicked; hope, because Thou hast not given us over but hast instead given us Thy Son. We confess, O Lord, that we have sinned against the light Thou hast given us. We have heard Thy Word and too often walked away unchanged. We have felt the prick of conscience and suppressed it. Righteous wouldst Thou be if Thou shouldst withdraw Thy Spirit from us, remove the gifts we have squandered, and give us over to the lusts we have served. We stand before Thee as debtors who cannot pay and as rebels who deserve the sentence. But, O Lord, Thou hast not dealt with us according to our sins. While we were yet enemies, Christ died for us. Thou didst not give us over — Thou didst give Him over for us all. He bore the abandonment that we deserved. He cried out, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" so that we would never have to cry those words in judgment. Because He was given over, we are received. Because He was forsaken, we are adopted. Keep us, we pray, from the path that leads to hardening. Grant us tender consciences, hungry hearts, and wills that bend easily to Thy Word. When we are tempted to neglect the means of grace, awaken us. When we grow comfortable with small sins, alarm us. When we begin to love the world, wean us. Do not leave us to ourselves, for we know that left to ourselves we would drift into the very ruin this doctrine describes. Hold us fast, O Lord, for we cannot hold ourselves. And for those we love who are walking the path of resistance — the family member who no longer hears, the friend who has grown cold, the colleague who scoffs at the gospel — we plead with Thee, O God. Stay Thy hand of judgment. Withhold the hardening. Grant instead the gift of repentance. Open eyes that have grown dim. Soften hearts that have grown hard. We know that Thou canst do this, for Thou didst do it for us. Let not one soul for whom we pray pass the point of no return. Teach us to live in the light of these truths — with trembling, for the way of the transgressor is hard; with gratitude, for we are what we are by grace alone; with urgency, for the night cometh when no man can work; and with adoration, for the Judge of all the earth has become our Father, and the throne of judgment has become for us a throne of grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.