Page 47 - Absolute Predestination With Observations On The Divine Attributes

it must have been His will from eternity, since His will is, as Himself, the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

The actions of God being thus fruits of His eternal purpose, we may safely, and

without any danger of mistake, argue from them to that and infer that God
therefore does such and such things, because He decreed to do them, His own
will being the sole cause of all His works. So that, from His actually leaving

some men in final impenitency and unbelief, we assuredly gather that it was His
everlasting determination so to do, and consequently that He reprobated some
from before the foundation of the world. And as this inference is strictly
rational, so is it perfectly Scriptural. Thus the Judge will in the last day declare

to those on the left hand, "I never knew you" (Matt. 7.23), i.e., "I never, no, not
from eternity, loved, approved, or acknowledged you for Mine," or, in other

words, "I always hated you."

Our Lord (in John 17.) divides the whole human race into two great
classes—one He calls the world; the other, "the men who were given Him out of

the world." The latter, it is said, the Father loved, even as He loved Christ
Himself (ver. 23), but He loved Christ "before the foundation of the world" (ver.
24), i.e., from everlasting; therefore He loved the elect so too, and if He loved

these from eternity, it follows, by all the rules of antithesis, that He hated the
others as early. So, "The children being not yet born, neither having done good
or evil, that the purpose of God," etc. (Rom. 9.). From the example of the two
twins, Jacob and Esau, the apostle infers the eternal election of some men and

the eternal rejection of all the rest.

POSITION 2.—Some men were, from all eternity, not only negatively excepted
from a participation of Christ and His salvation, but positively ordained to
continue in their natural blindness, hardness of heart, etc., and that by the just
judgment of God. (See Exod. 9.; 1 Sam. 2.25; 2 Sam. 17.14; Isa. 6.9-11; 2

Thess. 2.11,12.) Nor can these places of Scripture, with many others of like
import, be understood of an involuntary permission on the part of God, as if
God barely suffered it to be so, quasi invitus, as it were by constraint, and

against His will, for He permits nothing which He did not resolve and determine
to permit. His permission is a positive, determinate act of His will, as
Augustine, Luther and Bucer justly observe. Therefore, if it be the will of God

in time to permit such and such men to continue in their natural state of
ignorance and corruption, the natural consequence of which is their falling into
such and such sins (observe God does not force them into sin, their actual