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Greetings to all our forum members:
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Before I continue with our discussion of God’s dealings with the human race, I must turn to a question sent in by one of our forum members. He writes that although he agrees with the sharp antithetical teachings of the Psalms, he is puzzled by Psalm 68:18: “Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive: thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the Lord God might dwell among them.”
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Psalm 68 was written by David at the time the ark was brought to Jerusalem. The event was a type of the ascension of Christ 40 days after His resurrection, and of Christ’s exaltation to the glorious position at God’s right hand. It speaks especially of the blessings that come to the church from the exalted Christ, but it also speaks of Christ’s sovereign rule of the wicked for the benefit of the church. Concerning this sovereign rule of the wicked, the Psalm says three things: 1) The exalted Christ shall destroy in His fury these wicked (verses 1); 2) the exalted Christ shall so use His sovereign power over the wicked to further the cause of His own church. He leads captivity captive; that is, He uses those great powers of darkness that held His people in the captivity of sin and death to serve His own purpose (verse 18); and He saves His elect from all these nations. The perspective is, of course, Israel, God’s people, the church of the Old Dispensation. But this salvation of a catholic church is the idea of the expression in verse 18 and is one of the blessings of the exalted Christ: “Thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the Lord God might dwell among them.” This same truth is mentioned again in verses 31 and 32. All these are the mighty deeds of the ascended Christ. A part of the work of the ascended Christ is the gathering of a church from every nation.
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In my last letter to you, I spoke of the fact that while all men, believers and unbelievers alike, have everything of this creation and everything that happens in this creation in common, nevertheless, God’s attitude towards the wicked and righteous is essentially different. God is favorable towards the elect, but is angry with the reprobate.
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All God’s favor and love can be bestowed only in strictest justice. I have emphasized that God is inherently and essentially good. That is, God is good in Himself and therefore, to Himself. His absolute holiness cannot allow Him to be anything but angry with anyone who is a sinner. To love or look with favor on a wicked person is to deny Himself as the only good. He must hate sin if He is to be God. He must defend holiness, for it is an attribute of His own being. Sin must be punished if God’s goodness is absolute.
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Because it is true that God’s goodness prevents Him from being anything but wrathful towards the sinner, it is possible for God to be favorable to some only in the cross of Christ. The cross, planted on Calvary, now nearly 2000 years ago, was the central act of God in all history. It is as if God planted the cross, on which His own Son hung, right in the middle of the stream of history. From the beginning of history to the end, the stream of the human race rushes towards Calvary and flows past the cross. The cross makes division between men. It divides the human race into two streams: the stream of the wicked and the stream of the righteous. This fact was true already on Calvary itself where the cross brought division between two thieves, equally sinners, but divided by the power of Christ’s atoning sacrifice.
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The cross of Christ means judgment upon the wicked. Shortly before He died, Christ Himself described His imminent death on the cross as judgment: “Now is the judgment of this world: now is the prince of this world cast out” (John 12:31; see also John 16:11). But while His cross brings judgment upon all the wicked, at the same time it brings blessings upon the righteous. For, as the judgments of God fall upon sinful men because of their wickedness, these same judgments become in the cross, not God’s fury, but God’s love upon the righteous. God’s judgments are, so to speak, changed for the righteous from wrath, which all men deserve, to blessing, from curse to favor, and from hatred to love, for Christ bore the fury of God’s wrath, the curse and God’s punishment for sin, in Himself, by atoning for all the sin and guilt rightfully belonging to the people of God.
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To teach a love of God for all men, no matter what kind of love that may be (if, indeed, there are different kinds of love in God), is to deny the judgment of the wicked by means of the death of Christ. It is to say that Christ died for all men as atonement for sin. Such an unbiblical conclusion is forced on those who teach universal love. And so proponents of common grace are compelled to resort to a universal atonement in support of their position.
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It is true that defenders of common grace who want to retain a semblance of being Reformed talk of two different ways in which Christ died. He died fully and completely for His people, earning for them salvation. But He died partially for the reprobate wicked earning for them only a non-saving love. This partial atonement of Christ for all men is said to be an atonement for all in intention, sufficiency and availability, but not in efficacy. (The terminology I use here is one way of explaining a partial atonement; other terminology is sometimes used. We will discuss this whole concept in connection with the gracious offer of the gospel, in connection with which it is usually used.) As anyone who has any knowledge of Scripture knows, there is nothing like this in the Bible. And I challenge any man to demonstrate from God’s holy Word that Christ’s death is, in any non-saving way, for all men.
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That sharp antithesis that happened on Calvary is revealed in history. The judgment of wrath and the curse is always on the wicked, while God’s favorable judgment of love and mercy is always on the righteous. Everything God does to the human race for its sin expresses God’s attitude towards both parts of the human race as this attitude is mediated through the cross. Because the wicked hate God, they are cursed; but in Christ there is only blessing for the righteous, for they are made righteous through Christ’s work.
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Prosperity is also, therefore, the expression of God’s judgment upon the wicked (Psalm 73:18, 19). But so is sickness, suffering, loss brought by earthquakes, drought and pestilence. Prosperity for the righteous is blessing, but so is poverty, disease, suffering and disappointment. The latter God uses to chastise His people and work in them His salvation. The cross of Christ is the great divider.
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Behind all that happens in history is the eternal purpose of God. What took place on Calvary is the realization of God’s eternal decree of election and reprobation. One could even say that the cross of Christ is the historical realization of election and reprobation. It is not strange that one hears less and less of sovereign predestination from the lips of those who promote common grace. I must call attention to this crucially important truth. Without predestination one is at a loss to understand things properly – that is, if one wants to maintain with Scripture, a sovereign God. I probably will get at what I want to say in what some might consider a roundabout way; but it is, I think, the best way.
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From our human and earthly point of view, sin is always the reason for God’s hatred of the wicked. The wicked do that which is contrary to the will of God, deliberately defy Him who holds their very lives in His hand, turn their backs to Him in loathing, spit in His face and crucify His Christ. Can God do anything else but punish such glaring wrong? To do good to such people, I say again, would only mean that God is, after all, not good to Himself, not good in revealing His own divine being in all its pristine holiness – including his just and righteous punishment of the ungodly in this life and in the life to come. The searing wrath of God and the horrors of hell are justly given to the wicked as retribution for the monstrous evil of which they are guilty.
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To teach that it is otherwise is to do dishonor to the name of God. You understand what I mean. If God can indeed be good to the wicked, love them, be kind towards them, then God is not God any longer: just, righteous and pure in all His actions. It seems to me that this point is part of the abc’s of justice. If a man tortures and kills a father and mother with a new born baby in their home by forcing entry, and if when tried for his crime, the judge says to him: “I see your sin as terrible, but I am going to forgive your sin and show you mercy and kindness; I will let you go free,” is that judge good? And if the brute commits a yet more terrible crime and appears before the judge a second time; and if the judge says to Him, “I will be yet kinder towards you and more merciful than the last time you stood in the prisoner’s dock; I will let you go free, and furthermore, I will give you $1000.00 a week for all your expenses,” do you not think that the citizenry of that area will plead for the removal of such a merciful judge? Is such a judge showing goodness and mercy? People will say, “Deliver us from the mercy of this judge, or we will all perish.”
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That God gives good gifts is true. This creation, though nothing compared to the new heavens and the new earth, is still a very beautiful and verdant earth. Anyone who cannot see the goodness of God in the corn fields ripe for harvest, in the deep blue of the sky against which stands the rugged profiles of the mountains, or hear it in the song of the meadow lark and small wren and in the rippling of the sparkling clean waters of a mountain stream, is blind and deaf to God’s goodness because he has set himself against God and despises the One who made it all. He is guilty of the most heinous crime, for he sneers at the goodness of God; he is worthy of God’s just judgment.
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From God’s point of view, however, God is accomplishing an eternal purpose. Behind all that happens in this world is a sovereign God who reveals all His virtues throughout history; not only His goodness and grace in the salvation of His elect, but also His justice and deep wrath against the sinner in His decree of reprobation. Article 16 of the Belgic Confession reads in part: “. . . God then did manifest himself such as he is; that is to say, merciful and just: merciful, since he delivers and preserves from this perdition all whom he, in his eternal and unchangeable council, of mere goodness hath elected in Christ Jesus our Lord, without any respect to their works: just, in leaving others in the fall and perdition wherein they have involved themselves.” The Westminster Confession follows the same thought. In 3/3 the confession states: “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.” After defining election more fully, the Confession says: “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 dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice” (3/7). “To ordain them to wrath.” Not, “to ordain them to love.”
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It is a contradiction of the confessions to say that God takes an attitude of favor towards the reprobate, for an attitude of favor towards the reprobate is totally incompatible with that eternal decree to “pass them by” and to “ordain them to dishonor and wrath.”
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Yet, some effort to salvage their precious error goes like this. The evident contradiction between God’s decree of eternal predestination is said to be explained by the difference between God’s secret will (His eternal counsel) and His revealed will (His desire for the salvation of all). This distinction has the sound in it of desperation to try to justify that which cannot be justified. But because this distinction is the paper fort behind which defenders of common grace hide in defense of every doctrine that forms a part of common grace (including the gracious and well-meant gospel offer), we will defer treatment of it for some later date.
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The sovereign and eternal decree of God is carried out in history in the way of the sin of the wicked. I am, of course, aware of the fact that the workings of God in His sovereign execution of the decree of reprobation are mysterious and beyond our understanding. Reformed people have always confessed the mystery of God’s decree. But at the same time, they have repudiated the Arminian conception of reprobation (and election for that matter) that unbelief is the basis or ground of the decree of reprobation, while faith is the basis or ground of election. That is, God reprobates those who do not believe. Reprobation is the punishment for man’s sin.
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With the same discernment, the Reformed people have also rejected the idea that reprobation is the cause of sin. That is, that man sins because God reprobated them. (See, for example, Canons 1/5 and the Conclusion to the Canons.)
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God is, therefore, according to our Confessions, neither the cause of sin nor is sin the cause of God’s rejection. Rather, our fathers and spiritual forebears spoke of God as reprobating in the way of sin. This expression is important. It means on the one hand that man is himself responsible for all the sins that he commits. He may not and cannot blame God for them. They all arise out of his depraved will. But this careful expression means, on the other hand, that reprobation is the eternal decree of a sovereign God.
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It is not surprising that in those ecclesiastical circles where common grace is taught, reprobation is either minimized or denied. Those who appeal to a hidden will and a revealed will of God cannot really maintain sovereign reprobation. The hidden decree is finally so well hidden that no one remembers that it exists. The result is that the sovereignty of God is compromised and eventually lost. To lose God’s sovereignty is to lose God.
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With warm regards,
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Prof. Hanko
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