Page 74 - Absolute Predestination With Observations On The Divine Attributes

rejoice are taught to rejoice not in their own merits (quæ paria esse vident
damnatis, for they see that they have no more merit than the damned), but in the
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Lord."

VI.—Hence results another reason nearly connected with the former for the
unreserved publication of this doctrine, namely, that, from a sense of God's

peculiar, eternal and unalterable love to His people, their hearts may be
inflamed to love Him in return. Slender indeed will be my motives to the love of
God on the supposition that my love to Him is beforehand with His to me, and

that the very continuance of His favour is suspended on the weathercock of my
variable will or the flimsy thread of my imperfect affection. Such a precarious,
dependent love were unworthy of God, and calculated to produce but a scanty

and cold reciprocation of love from man. At the happiest of times, and in the
best of frames below, our love to God is but a spark (though small and
quivering, yet inestimably precious, because Divinely kindled, fanned, and
maintained in the soul, and an earnest of better to come), whereas love, as it

glows in God, is an immense sun, which shone without beginning, and shall
shine without end. Is it probable, then, that the spark of human love should give

being to the sun of divine, and that the lustre and warmth of this should depend
on the glimmering of that? Yet so it must be if predestination is not true, and so
it must be represented if predestination is not taught. Would you, therefore,
know what it is to love God as your Father, Friend, and Saviour, you must fall

down before His electing mercy. Until then you are only hovering about in quest
of true felicity. But you will never find the door, much less can you enter into
rest, until you are enabled to "love Him because He hath first loved you" (1

John 4.19).

This being the case, it is evident that, without taking predestination into the
account, genuine morality and the performance of truly good works will suffer,

starve and die away. Love to God is the very fuel of acceptable obedience.
Withdraw the fuel, and the flame expires. But the fuel of holy affection (if

Scripture, experience and observation are allowed to carry any conviction) can
only be cherished, maintained and increased in the heart by the sense and
apprehension of God's predestinating love to us in Christ Jesus. Now, our
obedience to God will always hold proportion to our love. If the one be relaxed

and feeble, the other cannot be alert and vigorous, and, electing goodness being
the very life and soul of the former, the latter, even good works, must flourish or

decline in proportion as election is glorified or obscured.