“The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”
Ex. 34:6-7
“Do I have any pleasure at all that the wicked should die?” says the Lord GOD, “and not that he should turn from his ways and live?”
Eze. 18:23
“For He does not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.”
Lam. 3:33
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Subsections
God’s Signified Will
Revealed Will has a Foundation in God
Antecedent / Consequent Willing
Conditional Aspects of God’s Will
God’s Expressions of Desire
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Order of Contents
Disposition 28+
Inclination 40+
Willingness 46+
Contra 4
. Response to Owen
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On a Divine Disposition
Order of
Articles 2
Quotes 24+
Historical 3
Articles
1900’s
Venema, Cornelius P. – ‘Dr. Cornelis P. Venema on Christ’s Disposition Toward Jerusalem; With His Refutation of James White on Matt. 23:37’ from “Election & the ‘Free Offer’ of the Gospel (Part 2 of 5)” in The Outlook 52.4 (April 2002), pp. 18–19 ed. Tony Byrne at Theological Meditations
Sproul, R.C. – ‘R. C. Sproul (1939–2017) on God’s Will of Disposition’ from Can I Know God’s Will? in The Crucial Questions Series, vol. 4 (Reformation Trust Publishing, 2009), pp. 20–24 ed. Tony Byrne at Theological Meditations
Quotes
Order of
Luther
Calvin
Tossanus
Udall
Polanus
Rutherford
Stock
Norton
Sibbes
Roberts
Watson
Newcome
Newcomen
Gurnall
Goodwin
Charnock
Manton
Poole
Ashwood
Turretin
Rijssen
Henry
Edwards
Houston
Murray
MacArthur
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1500’s
Martin Luther
Luther’s Works, vol. 2: Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 6–14, eds. Pelikan, Hilton & Lehmann (Concordia, 1999), p. 22 HT: Tony Byrne
“This disposition [in Eze. 18:33] proves that God is ready to pardon, to forbear, and to forgive sins if only people were willing to come to their senses. But because they continue to be stubborn and to reject every remedy, He is tortured, as it were, by their wickedness.”
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John Calvin
The Sermons of Mr. John Calvin upon the Fifth Book of Moses called Deuteronomy... (London: Middleton, 1583), Sermon 162, the 10th upon the 28th Chapter, p. 1,005 on Dt. 28:63, “And it shall come to pass, that like as the Lord thy God rejoiced over thee to do thee good, and to multiply thee: even so will the Lord rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought…”
“We see that God is (as ye would say) wayward towards us; we see that He does not only bereave us of his blessings, but is also angry with us; and to be short, we perceive in Him nothing but all manner of rigor. And what is the cause hereof? Verily that we shut the gate against his goodness and will not suffer Him to use (as ye would say) his natural disposition.
Lo here [is] a thing that should make us the better to acknowledge our faults and not to accuse God of any excessive cruelty when He deals not with us after our liking. For it is certain that He will take pleasure in doing us good, but on the other side let us consider also that He must in likewise delight to do us evil. And why so? Verily because that He is just.
Indeed, if we did suffer God to use his own inclination towards us, He would bestow infinite benefits upon us and we living in this world should be as in Paradise. But because of our sins, we must live here like wretched wanderers; we must languish in many miseries, we must dwell in continual fear and in doubt and we must groan in great unrest: it must be even so. And wherefore? Because God is just.
This is the very pleasure that is spoken of in this text, according whereunto it is said that God will rejoice and be glad when He has punished the wicked and maintained his majesty against them, for that they have despised Him and set Him at nought. Nevertheless, it is likewise true that He says by his prophet Isaiah [1:24] that He does it unwillingly. ‘Alas’ (says He) ‘must I needs revenge Me of mine enemies?’ God cries there ‘Alas,’ as if He were in sorrow and anguish for it. ‘I must’ (says He) ‘take comfort in avenging Me of mine enemies.’ Those whom He terms his enemies are the children whom He had adopted, and which boasted themselves to be his people. And how does He comfort Himself in them? Even by giving them over and by driving them away.
But in the meanwhile He shows that it is against his will when He must so beat men down with main strokes, howbeit that He can none otherwise do. Yet notwithstanding, in very deed God is able to tame the hearts of men without any great violence: for (as we have said) He is not subject to our passions. But hereby we be to consider how his intent is to declare that our unreformable naughtiness is the cause why He is faine to pursue us after such manner as is spoken of here and that He is faine to take pleasure in doing us harm, wherein the order of nature is after a sort quite altered and changed: but all is through our own fault and we ourselves are to blame for it, and it is not for us to seek any other reason thereof than our own sin which has kindled his vengeance to the uttermost.”
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“Their heavenly adoption ought to excite them to the exercise of beneficence, that they may imitate their Father’s disposition, “who makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good,” (Mt. 5:45) There is nothing in which men resemble God more truly than in doing good to others.”
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“Christ sets before us a picture of this kind in the character of the publican, who beats on his breast and begs for pardon with a dejected countenance. (Lk. 18:13). Thus also the sons of God throw down their prayers in that spirit of humility which springs from penitence. Then they raise their prayers by faith for when God invites them to Himself, and gives them the witness to his propitious disposition, they raise themselves up and overtop the clouds, yea, even heaven itself.”
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Commentary on Jonah, ch. 4, verse 2 HT: Tony Byrne
“Jonah would not have shrunk from God’s command, had he been sent to the Ninevites to teach what he had been ordered to do among the chosen people. Had then a message been committed to Jonah, to set forth a gracious and merciful God to the Ninevites, he would not have hesitated a moment to offer his service. But as this express threatening, Nineveh shall be destroyed, was given him in charge, he became confounded, and sought at length to flee away rather than to execute such a command. Why so?
Because he thus reasoned with himself, “I am to denounce a near ruin on the Ninevites; why does God command me to do this, except to invite these wretched men to repentance? Now if they repent, will not God be instantly ready to forgive them? He would otherwise deny his own nature: God cannot be unlike Himself, He cannot put off that disposition of which He has once testified to Moses [Ex. 34]. Since God, then, is reconcilable, if the Ninevites will return to the right way and flee to him, He will instantly embrace them: thus I shall be found to be false in my preaching.”
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“The Gospel of God (Mt. 4:12, 17; Mk. 1:14–15; Lk. 3:19–20; 4:14–15)” in In the Power of the Spirit: Sermons on Matthew, Mark & Luke, tr. Robert White (Banner of Truth, 2024), pp. 154–55 HT: Tony Byrne
“We are told, then, that because the kingdom of God is near we must be converted and believe the gospel. We have already explained, though rather briefly, what is meant by ‘the kingdom of God.’ It means that God has chosen to reveal Himself to men from whom He was formerly estranged, and who were more or less cut off from Him. We have all been banished from the heavenly life by Adam’s sin and fall. God therefore sends his only Son and, as it were, with outstretched arms asks us to turn back to Him, for He is willing to receive us. Although we have strayed and are lost because of our demerits, He still wills to show us mercy. Because the kingdom of God is near, our Lord Jesus Christ urges men to repentance and faith.
Notice first of all that nothing should move or inflame us to yield to God more than his offer of infinite grace and goodness. When Paul, for example, seeks to pierce men’s stony hearts and to soften their hardness and obduracy, he appeals to ‘the bowels of God’s mercy’ (Phil. 2:1). In speaking thus, he is really saying: ‘Will you now continue in our madness? Must you be worse than the devils? And when God comes to you, displaying his mercy and opening his heart to welcome you as his own children—when he gives you his own Son, will you be so unfeeling as not to be softened or inflamed by love for his grace? Will you not allow Him to lead you, and will you not delight in the goodness He shows you?’
It is in just this way that Jesus Christ urges men to repentance and faith. But on what does he base his appeal? On the fact that God wishes to draw near to those from whom He was once estranged. God, therefore, in receiving us in mercy, sets his goodness before us without waiting for us to seek Him out; he forestalls us with such exceptional grace that we cannot grasp even a hundredth part of it. Since He is so kindly disposed toward us, we should be rightly and deeply touched, to the very core of thought and feeling.”
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“As the term God is more distinctly expressive of majesty, so the term ‘Father’ conveys the idea of clemency and benevolent disposition. It becomes us to contemplate both as existing in God, that his majesty may inspire us with fear and reverence, and that his fatherly love may secure our full confidence.
Hence it is not without good reason that Paul has conjoined these two things… At the same time there will be no inconsistency in saying, that he contents himself with the single term, ‘Father’. Farther, as it is necessary that his incomparable grace should be expressed by the term ‘Father’…”
[Note that Calvin taught the fatherhood of God over all creatures by creation: ‘John Calvin on the Fatherhood of God Over All People’.]
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Daniel Tossanus
The Lamentations & Holy Mournings of the Prophet Jeremiah… (London: Windet, 1587), ch. 3, p. 131-32
“(Verse. 31) ‘He forsakes not forever.’… Moreover, this is most sure, that the nature of God is such as that He delights not in our afflictions, being Himself naturally good, gentle, slow to anger and of great compassion. Thus we see how God is described unto us throughout the whole volume of the scripture, namely, in the 34th chapter of Exodus, insomuch that whenas Isaiah in his 28th chapter says He punishes and afflicts us, it seems rather that He deals like a stranger, and not like Himself. And namely, in the midst of all our afflictions, He makes his singular goodness always appear in the moderating of our punishments, turning them all to our benefit and welfare.
And according hereunto, most notably wrote Saint Augustine in his epistles to Felix and Rusticus, saying, What is it that our good God will not mercifully do unto man? And how can it be but that He will show him all the favor He can, considering that all the tribulations which He sends are more benefits…”
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John Udall
A Commentary upon the Lamentations of Jeremy... (London: Orwin, 1593), ch. 3, on v. 33, p. 127
“[For He does not punish from his heart] it arises not from God’s voluntary desire, but from the sin of man that God punishes; [and makes sorrowful the children of men] gives them cause by afflicting them to be vexed and grieved.
Doctrine. [for etc.] sin constrains the Lord to afflict his dearest children: for the reasons hereof, see verse 27.
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Doctrine. [not punish from his heart] God takes no delight in afflicting his children, Ps. 81:13; Isa. 1:24. The use is to teach us, first, to abhor their profaneness that say God sports Himself in punishing man. Secondly, by his example, to censure others with all remorse and pity, not delighting to disgrace them.”
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Amandus Polanus
Analysis of the Book of the Prophet Malachi (Basil: Waldkirch, 1597), p. 10 tr. Damianus Cathedralulus (Domke), “Reading the Book of Malachi with Polanus #2,” A Bear to be Loved: Thoughts on Zacharias Ursinus and Amandus Polanus (blog), March 18, 2023 HT: Tony Byrne
“When love is attributed to God in Scripture, it does not mean a passion or an affect, for God is dispassionate [ἀπαθής], the freest, the most blissful, the most blessed, the most perfect. Nothing slavish happens to Him, nothing lowly, and finally nothing that indicates any imperfection. But God’s love denotes three completely, perfect things: eternal benevolence, actual beneficence, and actual delight in the thing loved.
For he who loves something is well-disposed towards it, does it whatever good he is capable of, and delights in it. These three things are found in the love of God. Now this love is first the love of God in Himself, and then towards his creatures. For God loves Himself and above all things: the Father: the Son and the Holy Spirit; the Son: the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit: the Father and the Son.
God’s love for his creatures is first general and then special. That general love is the one by which He fully embraces all things created by Him, blesses them, and preserves and sustains them. In this way there is no one, no man, and no devil either, who can say that He is not loved by God. The special love is that by which alone He leads the elect to eternal life, as He acknowledges them to be his own children in Christ: this passage [Mal. 1:2] here must be understood from this special love.”
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1600’s
Samuel Rutherford
Rutherford’s Examination of Arminianism: The Tables of Contents with Excerpts from Every Chapter tr. Johnson & Fentiman (1639-1642; RBO, 2019), ch. 2, ‘On God’, Section 20, ‘Whether because God amiably invites and by supplications solicits, entreats and calls upon reprobates, and as He mourns over them, is grieved by them and laments on account of the disobedient, whether He, therefore, intends the obedience of them?’, pp. 57-58
“1. Because out of the amiable invitation, this only is concluded: the simple obligation of the creature to obedience, an earnest [seria] approbation and complacency which God has with respect to the obedience, inasmuch as the thing is holy, has been required of Him, is morally pleasing, and as it is unto the convenience and salvation of a man.
On account of this disposition [affectus] in God, nothing is further added by the simple complacency of God around obedience except a certain quasi-intention and vehemency of divine obligation to the thing, which testifies to the obedience of all by an earnestness from the precept and from having obliged men to the thing; and thus it is to Him singularly and vehemently pleasing in his sight inasmuch as salvation is made glorious to men; but except He decree it, by the corruption of men, it will not come to be.”
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Richard Stock
A Stock of Divine Knowledge, being a lively Description of the Divine Nature, or the Divine Essence, Attributes & Trinity particularly explained and profitably applied… (London: T.H., 1641), ch. 13, pp. 133-34 Stock (c.1568-1626) was an English puritan.
“Objection: Again it is objected, the apostle Paul says in 1 Tim. 2:4 that God would have all men saved: How should it be then that any should perish, unless his will be changeable?
Answer: Ambrose upon this place of the apostle expounds it thus: God will have all men to be saved, but so as they come to Him, He will have them saved; if they will salvation to themselves; and if this sense be admitted, there is no shadow of change in God, though many be not saved, because those many that are not saved, do not seek salvation…
God will have all men saved, He wills the salvation even of the reprobate, as a thing in itself good and suitable to the disposition of a gracious God: but yet He does not determine or appoint it, and therefore though many perish, there is no change in God’s will: this place showing what God might approve of being done, not what He determined to do; He wills it by an antecedent will, as in itself considered; but not with a consequent will, and here is no change in God’s will;”
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John Norton
The Orthodox Evangelist… (London: Macock, 1654), ch. 1, ‘Of the Divine Essence’, pp. 12-13
“Goodness according to some admits of a threefold consideration: Of nature, which is called perfection. Of manners, called holiness. Of beneficence, id est [that is], a disposition to do good to others; this is properly called benignity: ‘Thou art good and doest good,’ Ps. 119:68.
Goodness is either essential or by participation. God is essentially good: He is good of Himself; He is goodness itself: the creature is good by participation, i.e. by a goodness received of God.
…the peculiar affection in parents towards their children renders them propense to do them good: and the soul full of matter (like wine which has no vent) propends to pour out itself; so is the Lord affected to do good according as He has willed concerning the creature.
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God, who is the increated good, communicates Himself without division, effusion, or multiplication of Himself: all that He communicates, notwithstanding, He remains infinite and the same. God were God blessed forever though He had never willed of his goodness unto any, but if He were not a God of benignity, He were not our God.”
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Richard Sibbes
A Learned Commentary or Exposition upon the First Chapter of the Second Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians... (London: J.L., 1655), verse 23, pp. 510-11
“It should be the care both of ministers and of all those that deal with others first of all to use mild and winning, and gaining courses. Now to prove this:
First, they are more suitable to the nature of man: for the nature of man is best wrought on by rational courses suitable to his nature…
Again, they suit most to God’s disposition, for God is love [1 Jn. 4:8], and his course to man is love: if He take any course contrary to love, it is not his own work, as He says to punish man, it is not his own work [Isa. 28:21]. He is forced to that alway: to show love and mercy, that is his work, that that comes from his own principle, from his mercy: He is love; He does not say He is justice, or rigor, but He is love. It agrees with the nature of God to deal mercifully; if He deal otherwise, it is forced from us.”
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Francis Roberts
Mysterium et Medulla Bibliorum: the Mystery & Marrow of the Bible... (London: R.W., 1657), bk. 2, ch. 2, aphorism 1, p. 64
“‘His mere mercy.’ By mercy God is disposed to
favour his creatures in misery.”
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Thomas Watson
The Saint’s Delight (London: T.R., 1657), “Christ’s Loveliness”, pp. 353-54
“Oh how lovely is Christ in his disposition! He comes with his supplying oil to pour into sinners’ wounds; He would fain break their hearts with his mercies: He labors to overcome their evil with his good.”
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Henry Newcome
The Sinner’s Hope... (London: E.C., 1660 [1659]), ch. 4, pp. 25-27
“1. The first ground is the Lord’s disposition and nature of mercy and placableness towards a poor sinner, which gives him footing for his hope abundantly in any particular case, as:
(1.) From his Name and attributes, whereby He has made Himself known to his people. God proclaims his Name to Moses to be ‘the Lord, the Lord God, the powerful, the mighty Jehovah’ (Ex. 34 [vv. 6-7]), which ministers comfort when annexed to his manifestation of Himself in this way of mercy.
‘Merciful,’ inclined to pity the sin and misery of his people, ready to relieve them in their distress and not only just to require the due service and punish the defaults;
‘Gracious,’ of an affable condescending descending nature, not standing upon the distance that He is in as a great King above all his creatures; He may be petitioned, sought unto and prevailed with by his poor suitors.
‘Long-suffering,’ that is, not hasty to use severity with the worst of sinners, usually taking all other ways first with them, willing that all men should repent and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4): Trying many that repent not with much goodness to draw them to it. Enduring with much patience the very vessels of wrath before He brings destruction on them (Rom. 9:22). In all cases He forgives iniquity, transgression and sin.”
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Matthew Newcomen
The Best Acquaintance & Highest Honor of Christians, or a Discourse of Acquaintance with God (London: Parker, 1679), ch. 4, pp. 48-49
“The Greeks and Romans of old were wont always to have their feasts at supper; therefore when it is said here, ‘I will come in to him, and sup with him,’ [Rev. 3:20] it is as if He had said, ‘I will come in to him and feast with him.’ And feasting together was of old a symbol of perfect reconciliation, and intimate friendship and acquaintance. Now, behold here the wonderful goodness and condescension of God, and his gracious disposition and inclination towards peace and acquaintance with his poor creatures…
Behold therefore, I say, and admire the gracious disposition of God towards sinful man, and the great desire He has towards peace and renewed acquaintance with Him.”
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William Gurnall
The Christian in Complete Armor (†1679), 1:116-17
“At other times, He parleys and works with them, and makes gracious overtures and offers of the gospel to them. He opens a door of hope and woos and beseeches them to throw down their rebellious arms and come to Christ for life. He reveals how Christ is in a present disposition to embrace their first motion towards mercy.”
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Thomas Goodwin
The Object & Acts of Justifying Faith, pt. 1, bk. 1, ch. 8, on Ex. 34:6-7 in The Works (d. 1680; Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), vol. 8
“I come now to the next attribute expressed in this proclamation, merciful: ‘The Lord, the Lord God, strong, gracious, merciful, abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin,’ Ex. 34:6-7. Things attributed to God here are of three sorts:
1. The inward disposition or inclination, or aptitude and readiness to mercy, that is in the four first attributes, merciful, gracious, long-suffering, much in goodness, and truth is added.
2. There are his purposes and resolutions of mercy, keeping mercy for thousands; and they are immanent acts in God, kept and laid up in God’s own breast.
3. There are extrinsical acts of mercy issuing from both: ‘pardoning iniquity, transgression, and sin.’
The meaning plainly is, first, God is merciful as He is Jehovah; that is his nature. Secondly, He fully resolves to show mercy; there is his heart. Thirdly, He has done it, and does it every day, in pardoning sin; there is his wont and practice. So that God is every way merciful: in his nature, in his purposes, and in his deeds and performance.”
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“2. The next thing in God is love, and that arises from goodness. The goodness that is in God inclines Him to love, and to be the most profuse lover. You read in 1 John 4:7-8, ‘God is love.’ The question is whether this speech does not import that He is love in Himself, as well as that He shows love.
There are these reasons why it imports what He is in Himself, when He says, ‘God is love.’ Says He, verse 7, ‘Every one that loves is born of God, and knows God,’ that is the affirmative; and verse 8, ‘He that loves not knows not God, for God is love’; that is, he knows not God in what is most proper to Him, as to what does most abound in Him, for God is love. We ordinarily say of a man that is of such a disposition, I know him, he is so and so; so the believer knows God to be love…
He speaks it of his love, which none sees but as manifest by effects; but God is love essentially. Says Aquinas, Whoever has a will, has a proneness to love. Says Musculus, As every one is in goodness, so in love. If God then has a will inclined to anything, it is to love; He has hatred in Him to sin, He has the opposite: He has a love also to something, only it is guided by his will towards creatures.”
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Stephen Charnock
Several Discourses upon the Existence & Attributes of God… (London: Newman, 1682)
pp. 655-56
“Christ ushers in the promise of answering prayer with a note of great assurance. ‘I say unto you, ask and it shall be given you.’ I that know the mind of my Father, and his good disposition, assure you, your prayer shall not be in vain…
‘Your heavenly Father shall give his Holy Spirit to them that ask Him,’ which in Mt. 7:11 is called ‘good things’. Of all the good and rich things divine goodness has in its treasury, He delights to give the best upon asking, because God does act so as to manifest the greatness of his bounty and magnificence to men; and therefore is delighted, when men by their petitioning Him own such a liberal disposition in Him and put Him upon the manifesting it.”
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p. 665
“‘Tis a fume of the Serpent’s venom first breathed into man to suspect Him of cruelty, severity, regardlesness, even under the daily evidences of his good disposition.”
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p. 686
“Can anything more delightful enter into us than that of the kind and gracious disposition of that God who first brought us out of the abyss of an unhappy nothing [at Creation] and has hitherto spread his wings over us?”
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p. 821
“2. His patience is a ground to trust in his promise. If his slowness to anger be so great when his precept is slighted, his readiness to give what He has promised will be as great when his promise is believed. If the provocations of them meet with such an unwillingness to punish them, faith in Him will meet with the choicest embraces from Him. He was more ready to make the promise of redemption after man’s apostasy than to execute the threatening of the Law. He does still witness a greater willingness to give forth the fruits of the promise than to pour out the vials of his curses. His slowness to anger is an evidence still that He has the same disposition, which is no slight cordial to faith in his Word.”
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p. 826
“Rest not then upon bare patience [of God], but consider the end of it; ’tis not that any should sin more freely, but repent more meltingly; ’tis not to spirit rebellion, but give a merciful stop to it. Why should any be so ambitious of their ruin as to constrain God to ruin them against the inclinations of his sweet disposition?”
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p. 827
“When God has his glory every day bespattered, yet He keeps his sword in his sheath; what a woe would it be to the world if He drew it upon every affront? This is to be like brutes, dogs or tigers that snarl, bite and devour upon every slight occasion: But to be patient is to be divine and to show ourselves acquainted with the disposition of God. ‘Be you therefore perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.’ Mt. 5:48.”
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Thomas Manton
Works, vol. 21, Two sermons on Eze. 18:23, pp. 463-79
“I. How God delights not in the death of a sinner… If God has more pleasure in the conversion of sinners than their destruction, why are there not more converted than we find to be? The greatest part of mankind are perishing in their unbelief and impenitency. Answer:
(1) I might answer, that this text speaks not absolutely, but comparatively. God rejoices in the execution of his justice, as well as in all his other works; but if you compare things with things, He rejoices rather in acts of mercy than in acts of vengeance. His disposition inclines Him to mercy rather than to wrath: ‘Mercy pleases Him,’ Mic. 7:18; and mercy rejoices over judgment in the conflict. Justice is alienum opus, ‘his strange work,’ Isa. 28:21; Lam. 3:33, ‘He does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men;’ not with his heart. Mercy, like live honey, drops of its own accord. He is forced to the other [judgment]; it [judgment] is wrested from Him. Though the properties are equally infinite in God, yet they do diversely exert themselves towards men as to the effects. Now the world is upon its trial. God’s primary end is the conversion of a sinner; his secondary end the honor of his vindictive justice.”
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Matthew Poole
Annotations on the Whole Bible
on Isaiah 28, verse 21
“‘His strange work;’ the execution of his judgment against Israel, which He calls his strange work, to intimate either:
…
2. That this work of bringing total and irrecoverable destruction upon Israel was contrary to the benignity of his own nature, and to the usual way of dealing with his people, whom He used and delighted to protect, and spare, and bless; and whom, even when He is angry with them, and punishes them, He handles more gently than He does other persons, in judgment remembering mercy to them, as was noted, Isa. 27:7-8; see also Isa. 26:11.”
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on Isaiah 55:8, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.”
“My disposition and carriage is vastly differing from yours. If any man provoke or injure you, especially if he do it greatly, and frequently, and maliciously, you are very slow and backward to forgive him; and if you do or seem to forgive, and promise to forget, and pass it by, yet you retain a secret grudge in your hearts, and upon the least occasion and slight offence you forget your promise, and you are soon weary with forgiving, and prone to revenge yourselves upon him:
but it is not so with Me; for I am slow to anger, and ready to forgive all true penitents, how many, and great, and numberless soever their sins be; and my promises of mercy and pardon shall be infallibly made good to them. And therefore you need not fear to come to Me, or to find mercy and acceptance with Me.
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“They have not known Me; which is indeed the only true wisdom; they have not studied my disposition or mildness toward them; they are so sottish, that they have neither regarded my counsels nor threats, but utterly stupid; they know not what is for their own good, have no understanding.”
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on Lamentations 3, verse 33
“In the Hebrew it is, ‘He does not afflict from his heart,’ that is, with pleasure and delight; or (which seems the best sense to me) not from his own mere motion without a cause given Him from the persons afflicted.
Hence judgment is called God’s ‘strange work‘ [Isa. 28:21]. Showing mercy is his proper natural work, which flows from Himself without any cause in the creature. Judgment is his strange work, to which He never proceeds but when provoked, and as it were forced from the creature, whence it follows that He cannot delight in it.”
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Bartholomew Ashwood
The Best Treasure, or the Way to be Truly Rich (London: Marshal, 1681), p. 139 HT: Tony Byrne
“Secondly, another excellent disposition in Christ is his love, not only his philanthropy, or good will He bears to all men, and the desire He has of their salvation, Eze. 33:11, but his αγαπη, his special love, from αγαν valde et παυομας acquiesco, such an ardent affection has the heart of Christ for a person adhering to Him, that it greatly acquiesces in, and is fully contented with him, Eph. 2:4. Such is the sweetness of Christ’s nature, that it is full of love; ‘God is love,’ 1 Jn. 4:16. And as the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you, Jn. 15:9. Now this love of Christ to his people, is:
First, a supreme love, the chiefest love. He has a love of benevolence to all, Mk. 10:21, ‘He beheld the young man and loved him;’ but the love He bears his own, is transcedent and exceeds the love of men and angels, Jn. 15:13.”
.
Francis Turretin
Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. Dennison Buy (1679–1685; P&R, 1992), vol. 1, 3rd Topic, ‘The Will of God’, 15th Question, ‘May the will be properly distinguished into the will of decree and of precept, good purpose (eudokias) and good pleasure (euarestias), signified, secret and revealed? We affirm.’, p. 224
“XX. The will of sign which is set forth as extrinsic ought to correspond with some internal will in God that it may not be false and deceptive; but that internal will is not the decree concerning the gift of salvation to this or that one, but the decree concerning the command of faith and promise of salvation if the man does believe (which is founded both upon the connection established by God between faith and salvation and the internal disposition of God by which, as He loves Himself, He cannot but love his image wherever He sees it shining and is so much pleased with the faith and repentance of the creature as to grant it salvation).”
.
Leonard Rijssen
as translated in Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Baker Academic, 2003), vol. 3, ch. 6.3, Divine Affections & Virtues, A. General Considerations, 3. Doctrinal Conclusions, pp. 560-61
“goodness (bonitas) is that act of the divine will, by which he is disposed to self-communication. Love (amor), that by which God is moved toward created things and bestows blessings on them. Grace (gratia), that by which God is moved to communicate himself to creatures of his own accord, not on grounds of merit or debt. Mercy (misericordia) is the disposition of the divine will to help the wretched, not because of any external cause, but solely of the divine goodness.
Hatred (odium) in God indicates either the disapproval of sin, or the will to punish sinners that follows sin, or the denial of those salutary benefits that flow from the divine will. Longing (desiderium) in God indicates that the obedience of human beings is exceedingly pleasing to him, and not without future reward. Hope and expectation (spes et expectatio) in God signify that something is owed. God is said to rejoice (gaudere) when something is pleasing to him. Dread (metus) is something attributed to him, in order to indicate that he desires to prevent evil. Sorrow (tristia) in God indicates something that is exceedingly displeasing to God and contrary to his virtues.”
.
1700’s
Matthew Henry
Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Ezekiel 18, vv. 21-29
“(3) What encouragement a repenting returning sinner has to hope for pardon and life according to this promise…
he has this to support himself with, that God’s nature, property, and delight, is to have mercy and to forgive, for He has said (Eze. 18:23): “Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? No, by no means; you never had any cause given you to think so.”
It is true God has determined to punish sinners; his justice calls for their punishment, and, pursuant to that, impenitent sinners will lie for ever under his wrath and curse; that is the will of his decree, his consequent will, but it is not his antecedent will, the will of his delight.
Though the righteousness of his government requires that sinners die, yet the goodness of his nature objects against it. ‘How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?‘ It is spoken here comparatively; He has not pleasure in the ruin of sinners, for He would rather they should turn from their ways and live; He is better pleased when his mercy is glorified in their salvation than when his justice is glorified in their damnation.”
.
Jonathan Edwards
Remarks on Important Theological Controversies, ch. 3, “Concerning the Divine Decrees in General, & Election in Particular,” from paragraphs 9 & 13, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Edward Hickman (†1758), vol. 2, pp. 527-28 and in Select Works (Banner of Truth), 2:528
“13. …There is all in God that is good, and perfect, and excellent in our desires and wishes for the conversion and salvation of wicked men. As, for instance, there is a love to holiness, absolutely considered, or an agreeableness of holiness to his nature and will; or, in other words, to his natural inclination. The holiness and happiness of the creature, absolutely considered, are things that he loves. These things are infinitely more agreeable to his nature than to ours.
There is all in God that belongs to our desire of the holiness and happiness of unconverted men and reprobates, excepting what implies imperfection. All that is consistent with infinite knowledge, wisdom, power, self-sufficience, infinite happiness, and immutability. Therefore, there is no reason that his absolute prescience, or his wise determination and ordering what is future, should hinder his expressing this disposition of his nature, in like manner as we are wont to express such a disposition in ourselves, viz. by calls and invitations, and the like.”
.
Sermons & Discourses: 1723–1729 (1723; WJE Online, vol. 14), ed. Kenneth P. Minkerma HT: Tony Byrne
“2. God’s common providence towards mankind teaches us that God is inclined to mercy and is willing to be reconciled, that he is not implacable…
By these things, it plainly appears that God hasn’t utterly forsaken the world of mankind as to any favor or merciful regards. This was the witness which God gave all mankind, and even the heathen, that had direct revelation of his disposition to a reconciliation. Acts 14:16–17,
‘Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.'”
.
1800’s
Thomas Houston
Works Doctrinal and Practical of Thomas Houston (1876), vol. 1, The Adoption of Sons, ch. 3, The Fatherhood of God, p. 128
“In an extensive sense, God is a Father, and is so revealed in his works as well as his Word. The paternal relation among men aids us in contemplating the loving relation in which God stands to his creatures: it is a shadow and representation of the Divine Fatherhood. Fatherly dispositions and dealings are ascribed to Him. By creation, He is the Father of intelligent beings.
Angels are those “sons of God” that shouted for joy when “the morning stars,” at the dawn of creation, “sang together.” (Job 38:7)
Men are “his offspring,” and He is “the Father of the spirits of all flesh.”
To ancient Israel “pertained the adoption,” and with them He expostulates, “Is He not thy Father that hath bought thee?” (Deut. 32:6) And in penitent confession and earnest supplication they plead, “Doubtless thou art our Father.” “Now, O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou art the potter, and we are all the work of thy hands.” (Isa. 36:16; 64:8)
I. But in a peculiar sense, far higher than these, is God the Father of the saints…”
.
1900’s
John Murray
Introduction
“It must be admitted that if the expression [of God’s desiring the repentance and salvation of the reprobate] were intended to apply to the decretive will of God then there would be, at least, implicit contradiction. For to say that God desires the salvation of the reprobate and also that God wills the damnation of the reprobate and apply the former to the same thing as the latter, namely, the decretive will, would be contradiction; it would amount to averring of the same thing, viewed from the same aspect, God wills and God does not will.
The question then is: what is implicit in, or lies back of; the full and free offer of the gospel to all without distinction? The word “desire” has come to be used in the debate, not because it is necessarily the most accurate or felicitous word but because it serves to set forth quite sharply a certain implication of the full and free offer of the gospel to all. This implication is that in the free offer there is expressed not simply the bare preceptive will of God but the disposition of lovingkindness on the part of God pointing to the salvation to be gained through compliance with the overtures of gospel grace.
In other words, the gospel is not simply an offer or invitation but also implies that God delights that those to whom the offer comes would enjoy what is offered in all its fullness. And the word “desire” has been used in order to express the thought epitomized in Ezekiel 33:11, which is to the effect that God has pleasure that the wicked turn from his evil way and live. It might as well have been said, “It pleases God that the wicked repent and be saved.”
Again, the expression “God desires,” in the formula that crystallizes the crux of the question, is intended to notify not at all the “seeming” attitude of God but a real attitude, a real disposition of lovingkindness inherent in the free offer to all, in other words, a pleasure or delight in God, contemplating the blessed result to be achieved by compliance with the overture proffered and the invitation given.”
.
Matthew 5:44–48
“The sum of this study of these passages in Matthew and Luke [6:35-36] is simply this, that presupposed in God’s gifts bestowed upon the ungodly there is in God a disposition of love, kindness, mercifulness, and that the actual gifts and the blessing accruing therefrom for the ungodly must not be abstracted from the lovingkindness of which they are the expression.
And, of course, we must not think of this lovingkindness as conditioned upon a penitent attitude in the recipients. The lovingkindness rather is exercised towards them in their ungodly state and is expressed in the favours they enjoy. What bearing this may have upon the grace of God manifested in the free offer of the gospel to all without distinction remains to be seen. But we are hereby given a disclosure of goodness in the heart of God and of the relation there is between gifts bestowed and the lovingkindness from which they flow. And there is indicated to us something respecting God’s love or benevolence that we might not or could not entertain if we concentrated our thought simply on the divine decree of reprobation.”
.
2000’s
eds. John MacArthur & Richard Mayhue
Biblical Doctrine: A Systematic Summary of Bible Truth (Crossway, 2017), pp. 575–76 HT: Tony Byrne
“The Characteristics of the External Call
…
The God who “has mercy on whomever He wills” and “hardens whomever He wills” (Rom. 9:18) is the God who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. To reason that the former is incompatible with the latter is not an option for the Bible-believing Christian.
The offer of the salvation communicated in the external call of the gospel is conditioned on repentance and faith. For it to be a genuine, well-meant offer on God’s part, He simply has to be sincerely disposed to provide the promised blessings upon the satisfaction of the offer’s conditions. And this is precisely the case; if anyone repents and trusts in Christ, God will forgive and save him.”
Historical
On the Post-Reformation
Richard Muller
Dictionary of Latin & Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology 1st ed. (Baker, 1985)
“affectio: affection; viz. passion or desire, a disposition toward someone or something; synonymous with passio and affectus. Specifically, the affectio animi, or affection of soul, that is the faculty of desire.
[While the above is speaking of affections in general, that is for living creatures, and God does not have passions, yet note the Reformed Orthodox teaching that affections are attributed to God improperly: ‘On the Affections of God’.]
affectus voluntatis Dei: affections of the will of God; viz., those divine attributes which, according to the strict faculty psychology held by the Protestant scholastics, appear as dispositions or conditions of the divine will; i.e., amor or love, benevolentia or goodness of will, clementia or clemency, gratia or grace, ira or wrath, longanimitas or longsuffering, misericordia or mercy, odium or hate, and patientia or patience.”
.
“favor Dei: the favor of God; viz., the gracious disposition of God toward mankind.”
.
Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Baker Academic, 2003), vol. 3
“…the omnipraesentia Dei [omnipresence of God] refers to him in positive relation to the world and indicates his ‘dwelling’ in all places in the world. (Rijssen, Summa theol., II.xvi; cf. Turretin, Inst. theol. elencticae, III.ix.2.) Owen indicates that the omnipresence or ‘ubiquity of God is the habitude of his immensity to the creation’: namely, omnipresence is the disposition of God in relation to things spatially considered. (Owen, Vindiciae evangelicae, in Works, XII, p. 93.)”
.
“The affections are, therefore [after quoting Venema and Ames], either inward and inalterable dispositions of the divine will or figurative attributions based on ad extra manifestations. Furthermore, what makes the attribution of an affection to God figurative or metaphorical is its apparent variation, temporality, or alterability.
Significantly, this figurative or metaphorical understanding of some of the divine affections as inward, permanent dispositions and others as ad extra manifestations of permanent dispositions in no way lessened the Reformed interest in the topic–nor did it in any way undermine the discussion of the divine affections in the works of popular piety written during the era of orthodoxy. It is even possible to argue the opposite, that the Reformed orthodox reading of the biblical language of divine affections as not indicating alterations of the divine essence but, nonetheless, as descriptive of genuine patterns of relationship between God and his creation, enhanced the interest of theologians, pastors, and authors of treatises of popular piety in the divine affections…
…Nor, indeed, has the basic doctrinal assumption shifted: like the Reformers, the orthodox assume that God has affectiones that characterize his relationship to the world and that some analogy can be drawn between these ‘divine affections’ and the affections that belong to human willing–with the major qualification that, unlike human affections, the divine affections do not indicate essential change in God and that they are permanent rather than transient dispositions. Because of the difficulties inherent in the term ‘affection,’ some of the Reformed prefer to speak of the divine ‘virtues.’ (Thus, Leigh, Treatise, II.x (pp. 78-79); Mastricht, Theoretico-practica theologia, II.xv.18-19.)
The question of the ‘affections’ (affectiones or adfectiones) and ‘passions’ (passiones) of the divine will arises rather naturally as a result of the definition and discussion of the voluntas Dei, granting the context of traditional, Christian Aristotelianism and scholastic faculty psychology within which Protestant discussions of mind and will took place, both in the time of the Reformation and afterward. (See Muller, Unaccommodated Calvin, pp. 159-173; and idem, God, Creation, and Providence, pp. 143-149, 167-169, 191-207.) The terminology is itself interesting: the language of affections and passions is typically a language indicating the changeableness of a living being, specifically of the soul, in its sentiments or dispositions. Strictly, an affection or passion is an acquired quality. (Francois Bremondy, “Affection,” in Encyclopedie philosophique universelle, II/1, p. 49.) An affection is usually favorable or positive, whereas a passion is usually negative.
Thus, an affection is a disposition of nature or an inclination of will toward an object and, as such, it can indicate either a transient disposition (in contrast to a habitus) that is caused by an external object or a permanent disposition or virtue. (Cf. Heidanus, Corpus theol., II (p. 172); Venema, Inst. theol., viii (p. 180).) It is the latter sense of the term, as a permanent disposition or virtue, that the orthodox accept.
A passion, most strictly, is a form of suffering and would not have the connotation of a permanent disposition and certainly not of a disposition positively directed toward an object. Passions, moreover, indicate a declension from an original or natural condition that is at variance with the fundamental inclination of the individual–and, therefore, a loss of power or self-control. (Venema, Inst. theol., viii (p. 181).) A virtue is, quite simply, a moral perfection–in the case of God, the perfection of his understanding and/or will.¹
¹ (Ames, Marrow, I.iv.63; note that this understanding of affections and passions reflects the standard categories of predication, in which action and passion denote respectively, the act of a subject and the subject being acted upon: thus, the point of the theological argument is that God act[s] but is not acted upon.)”
.
“The divine affections or virtues are not distinct dispositions or habits that stand as attributes or functions of will, as they do in human beings, but instead are divine perfections that have some analogy to the dispositions or habits of the human will:
‘for though, properly speaking, there are [no affections] in God, he being a most pure and simple act, free from all commotion and perturbation; yet there being some things said and done by him, which are similar to affections in intelligent beings, [sic] they [that] are ascribed to him; as love, pity, hatred, anger etc., from which must be removed everything that is carnal, sensual, or has any degree of imperfection in it.’ (Gill, Complete Body of Divinity, I, p. 112; cf. Synopsis purioris theologiae, VI.xxxix; Turretin, Inst. theol. elencticae, III.xix.1.)
Several writers, most notably Venema, treat these affections not only in relation to the divine will, but also as the affective manifestations of the goodness and holiness of God… The basis for this understanding is the assumption that affections are not essential attributes or original properties but, rather, are ad extra manifestations in which God is known through his effects.”
.
“…just as in human beings, the term ‘virtues’ is reserved for ‘excellent and confirmed habits’ or dispositions that conduce to the proper use of the faculties, so also in God is the word ‘virtues’ applied to the workings of the divine essence, with specific reference to the disposition and use of the ‘faculties’ of intellect and will.
This approach is analogical, given that the divine virtues are not separable from the divine essence as human virtues are separable from humanity. In short, the virtues of God are the divine moral perfections, specifically the goodness and righteousness of the divine willing. These virtues are also the source of all finite or creaturely goodness and righteousness. (Leigh, Treatise, II.x (pp. 78-79).)”
.
p. 572
“Even so God both endures “with much longsuffering” the sins of the reprobate and, at the same time, is patient with the elect prior to their conversion, willing their repentance rather than their immediate destruction because of sin.534 It is, thus, “the most bountiful will of God not suffering his displeasure suddenly to rise against his creatures offending, to be avenged of them, but he doth warn them beforehand, lightly correct and seek to turn them unto him.”535 The divine compassion, similarly, is the disposition of God to deliver creatures from their misery. It is manifest when “the object of the divine goodness of love [is] involved in misery, such as man who is a sinner and subject to death.”536
534. Brakel, Redelijke Godsdienst, I.iii.36.
535. Leigh, Treatise, II.xiii (p. 100).
536. Venema, Inst. theol., VIII (p. 185).”
.
On a Divine Inclination or Propensity
Order of
Quotes 32+
Historical 8
Quotes
Order of
Aquinas
Calvin
Bullinger
Willet
Salkeld
Bruce
Polyander
Weemes
Dutch Annotations
Davenant
Diodati
Twisse
Leigh & Estius
Burgess
Larkham
Greenhill
Gray
Amyraut
Bunyan
Alleine
Grew
Newcomen
Charnock
Goodwin
Manton
Collinges
Pococke
Pierce
Cole
Mastricht
A’Brakel
Edwards
Watts
Gerstner
.
1200’s
Thomas Aquinas
Summa
pt. 1
quest. 3, Simplicity of God
art. 2, Whether God is composed of matter and form?, I answer that
“Third, because every agent acts by its form; hence the manner in which it has its form is the manner in which it is an agent. Therefore whatever is primarily and essentially an agent must be primarily and essentially form. Now God is the first agent, since He is the first efficient cause. He is therefore of His essence a form; and not composed of matter and form.”
.
art. 3, Whether God is the same as his essence or nature?, I answer that
“God is the same as His essence or nature.”
.
quest. 5, art. 5, Whether the essence of goodness consists in mode, species and order?, I answer that
“I answer that, Everything is said to be good so far as it is perfect; for in that way only is it desirable (as shown above, AA. 1, 3). Now a thing is said to be perfect if it lacks nothing according to the mode of its perfection. But since everything is what it is by its form (and since the form presupposes certain things, and from the form certain things necessarily follow), in order for a thing to be perfect and good it must have a form, together with all that precedes and follows upon that form.
…
Further, upon the form follows an inclination to the end, or to an action, or something of the sort; for everything, in so far as it is in act, acts and tends towards that which is in accordance with its form;”
.
quest. 19
art. 1, Whether there is will in God
“I answer that, There is will in God, as there is intellect: since will follows upon intellect. For as natural things have actual existence by their form, so the intellect is actually intelligent by its intelligible form. Now everything has this aptitude towards its natural form, that when it has it not, it tends towards it; and when it has it, it is at rest therein. It is the same with every natural perfection, which is a natural good.
This aptitude to good in things without knowledge is called natural appetite. Whence also intellectual natures have a like aptitude as apprehended through its intelligible form; so as to rest therein when possessed, and when not possessed to seek to possess it, both of which pertain to the will. Hence in every intellectual being there is will, just as in every sensible being there is animal appetite. And so there must be will in God, since there is intellect in Him. And as His intellect is His own existence, so is His will.”
.
art. 2, Whether God wills things apart from Himself?, I answer that
“God wills not only Himself, but other things apart from Himself. This is clear from the comparison which we made above (A. 1). For natural things have a natural inclination not only towards their own proper good, to acquire it if not possessed, and, if possessed, to rest therein; but also to spread abroad their own good among others, so far as possible.
Hence we see that every agent, in so far as it is perfect and in act, produces its like. It pertains, therefore, to the nature of the will to communicate as far as possible to others the good possessed; and especially does this pertain to the divine will, from which all perfection is derived in some kind of likeness. Hence, if natural things, in so far as they are perfect, communicate their good to others, much more does it appertain to the divine will to communicate by likeness its own good to others as much as possible. Thus, then, He wills both Himself to be, and other things to be; but Himself as the end, and other things as ordained to that end, inasmuch as it befits the divine goodness that other things should be partakers therein.”
.
quest. 20, art. 2, Whether God loves all things? reply to obj. 3
“Strictly speaking, therefore, God does not love irrational creatures with the love of friendship; but as it were with the love of desire, in so far as He orders them to rational creatures, and even to Himself. Yet this is not because He stands in need of them; but only on account of His goodness, and of the services they render to us. For we can desire a thing for others as well as for ourselves.”
.
quest. 21
art. 3, Whether mercy can be attributed to God, I answer that
“Mercy is especially to be attributed to God, as seen in its effect, but not as an affection of passion… To sorrow, therefore, over the misery of others belongs not to God; but it does most properly belong to Him to dispel that misery, whatever be the defect we call by that name.
Now defects are not removed, except by the perfection of some kind of goodness; and the primary source of goodness is God, as shown above (Q. 6, A. 4). It must, however, be considered that to bestow perfections appertains not only to the divine goodness, but also to His justice, liberality, and mercy; yet under different aspects. The communicating of perfections, absolutely considered, appertains to goodness, as shown above (Q. 6, AA. 1, 4); in so far as perfections are given to things in proportion, the bestowal of them belongs to justice, as has been already said (A. 1); in so far as God does not bestow them for His own use, but only on account of His goodness, it belongs to liberality; in so far as perfections given to things by God expel defects, it belongs to mercy.”
.
art. 4, Whether in every work of God there are mercy and justice, I answer that
“Mercy and truth are necessarily found in all God’s works, if mercy be taken to mean the removal of any kind of defect. Not every defect, however, can properly be called a misery; but only defect in a rational nature whose lot is to be happy; for misery is opposed to happiness.
…
Now the work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy; and is founded thereupon. For nothing is due to creatures, except for something pre-existing in them, or foreknown. Again, if this is due to a creature, it must be due on account of something that precedes. And since we cannot go on to infinity, we must come to something that depends only on the goodness of the divine will—which is the ultimate end…
In all that follows, the power of mercy remains, and works indeed with even greater force; as the influence of the first cause is more intense than that of second causes. For this reason does God out of abundance of His goodness bestow upon creatures what is due to them more bountifully than is proportionate to their deserts: since less would suffice for preserving the order of justice than what the divine goodness confers; because between creatures and God’s goodness there can be no proportion.”
.
quest. 59, art. 2, Whether in angels the will differs from the intellect?, I answer that
“Now the will has a natural tendency towards good. Consequently there alone are essence and will identified where all good is contained within the essence of him who wills; that is to say, in God, Who wills nothing beyond Himself except on account of His goodness.”
.
quest. 80, Appetitive Powers in General, art. 1, Whether the appetite is a special power of the soul?
“I answer that, It is necessary to assign an appetitive power to the soul. To make this evident, we must observe that some inclination follows every form: for example, fire, by its form, is inclined to rise, and to generate its like. Now, the form is found to have a more perfect existence in those things which participate knowledge than in those which lack knowledge. For in those which lack knowledge, the form is found to determine each thing only to its own being—that is, to its nature.
Therefore this natural form is followed by a natural inclination, which is called the natural appetite. But in those things which have knowledge, each one is determined to its own natural being by its natural form, in such a manner that it is nevertheless receptive of the species of other things: for example, sense receives the species of all things sensible, and the intellect, of all things intelligible, so that the soul of man is, in a way, all things by sense and intellect: and thereby, those things that have knowledge, in a way, approach to a likeness to God, in Whom all things pre-exist, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. v).
Therefore, as forms exist in those things that have knowledge in a higher manner and above the manner of natural forms; so must there be in them an inclination surpassing the natural inclination, which is called the natural appetite. And this superior inclination belongs to the appetitive power of the soul, through which the animal is able to desire what it apprehends, and not only that to which it is inclined by its natural form. And so it is necessary to assign an appetitive power to the soul.
…
Reply Obj. 2: What is apprehended and what is desired are the same in reality, but differ in aspect [ratione]: for a thing is apprehended as something sensible or intelligible, whereas it is desired as suitable or good. Now, it is diversity of aspect in the objects, and not material diversity, which demands a diversity of powers.
Reply Obj. 3: Each power of the soul is a form or nature, and has a natural inclination to something. Wherefore each power desires by the natural appetite that object which is suitable to itself. Above which natural appetite is the animal appetite, which follows the apprehension, and by which something is desired not as suitable to this or that power, such as sight for seeing, or sound for hearing; but simply as suitable to the animal.”
.
pt. 1 of 2
quest. 8, art. 1, Whether the will is of good only?
“I answer that, The will is a rational appetite. Now every appetite is only of something good. The reason of this is that the appetite is nothing else than an inclination of a person desirous of a thing towards that thing. Now every inclination is to something like and suitable to the thing inclined. Since, therefore, everything, inasmuch as it is being and substance, is a good, it must needs be that every inclination is to something good. And hence it is that the Philosopher says (Ethic. i, 1) that the good is that which all desire.
But it must be noted that, since every inclination results from a form, the natural appetite results from a form existing in the nature of things: while the sensitive appetite, as also the intellective or rational appetite, which we call the will, follows from an apprehended form.”
.
1500’s
John Calvin
The Sermons of Mr. John Calvin upon the Fifth Book of Moses called Deuteronomy... (London: Middleton, 1583), Sermon 162, the 10th upon the 28th Chapter, p. 1,005 on Dt. 28:63, “And it shall come to pass, that like as the Lord thy God rejoiced over thee to do thee good, and to multiply thee: even so will the Lord rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought…”
“We see that God is (as ye would say) wayward towards us; we see that He does not only bereave us of his blessings, but is also angry with us; and to be short, we perceive in Him nothing but all manner of rigor. And what is the cause hereof? Verily that we shut the gate against his goodness and will not suffer Him to use (as ye would say) his natural disposition.
Lo here [is] a thing that should make us the better to acknowledge our faults and not to accuse God of any excessive cruelty when He deals not with us after our liking. For it is certain that He will take pleasure in doing us good, but on the other side let us consider also that He must in likewise delight to do us evil. And why so? Verily because that He is just.
Indeed, if we did suffer God to use his own inclination towards us, He would bestow infinite benefits upon us and we living in this world should be as in Paradise. But because of our sins, we must live here like wretched wanderers; we must languish in many miseries, we must dwell in continual fear and in doubt and we must groan in great unrest: it must be even so. And wherefore? Because God is just.
This is the very pleasure that is spoken of in this text, according whereunto it is said that God will rejoice and be glad when He has punished the wicked and maintained his majesty against them, for that they have despised Him and set Him at nought. Nevertheless, it is likewise true that He says by his prophet Isaiah [1:24] that He does it unwillingly. ‘Alas’ (says He) ‘must I needs revenge Me of mine enemies?’ God cries there ‘Alas,’ as if He were in sorrow and anguish for it. ‘I must’ (says He) ‘take comfort in avenging Me of mine enemies.’ Those whom He terms his enemies are the children whom He had adopted, and which boasted themselves to be his people. And how does He comfort Himself in them? Even by giving them over and by driving them away.
But in the meanwhile He shows that it is against his will when He must so beat men down with main strokes, howbeit that He can none otherwise do. Yet notwithstanding, in very deed God is able to tame the hearts of men without any great violence: for (as we have said) He is not subject to our passions. But hereby we be to consider how his intent is to declare that our unreformable naughtiness is the cause why He is faine to pursue us after such manner as is spoken of here and that He is faine to take pleasure in doing us harm, wherein the order of nature is after a sort quite altered and changed: but all is through our own fault and we ourselves are to blame for it, and it is not for us to seek any other reason thereof than our own sin which has kindled his vengeance to the uttermost.”
.
Commentary on Isaiah 42, verse 21, “The Lord is well pleased for his righteousness’ sake; he will magnify the law, and make it honourable.”
“‘The Lord is well pleased.’…
This passage is interpreted in various ways. Some render it, “The Lord has so willed it;” others, “He is merciful;” but, for my own part, I have translated it, “The Lord is willing,” that is, disposed and inclined to deliver his people, and that for the purpose of magnifying his Law and extolling his righteousness. Thus God assigns the reason why He is ready to aid those who are unworthy, that He wishes to spread his glory in their salvation, that in this manner his righteousness may be illustriously displayed, and that his Law may prevail and flourish. As to the heavy calamities that have come on the Jews, the reason is, that of their own accord they have resolved to be blind, and to bring afflictions on themselves, instead of obeying God; for otherwise the Lord would have wished to enrich and exalt them….
Others render it, “For his righteous one,” and refer it to Christ; but they mistake the meaning of the word צדקו, (tzidko) and unquestionably He speaks of righteousness, and means that the Lord would willingly have displayed the magnificence of his promises: and would have given proofs of his righteousness in preserving his people, if they had not shown themselves to be ungrateful and unworthy.
Some think that the Lord here offers an excuse for Himself, because, when the people whom He had adopted were exposed to so many evils, it appeared as if his truth were shaken, and that the prophet intended to meet this calumny, for they were seized and became a prey, not because the Lord delights in their miseries, but because He prefers his righteousness to everything else.
For my own part, I explain it simply to mean, “The Lord, for the sake of doing honor to his Law, was inclined to do good to his people, in order that his glory and righteousness might shine forth in it; but his people showed themselves to be unworthy of so great a favor; and, therefore, by their own obduracy they made their wounds incurable.”
Besides, we ought to learn from this passage the reason why the Lord bestows so many favors on his Church. It is, that he may promote his Law, that is, that He may bring men to honor his majesty, and that his truth may shine more and more. When He says that the Lord is willing and inclined; He shows plainly that He is not induced to it by anyone else than by Himself; but He expresses it more fully, when He adds, on account of his righteousness; for He excludes everything that men could bring. Nor is the Lord prompted by any other consideration to do good, than because He is righteous; for no merit or worth will be found among men.”
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“God shows here, by his prophet, that He was constrained by urgent necessity to deal sharply and roughly with the people. Nothing, we know, is more pleasing to God than to treat us kindly; for there is not found a father in the world who cherishes his children as tenderly: but we, being perverse, suffer Him not to follow the inclination of his nature. He is therefore constrained to put on, as it were, a new character, and to chide us severely, according to the way in which He here says, He had treated the Israelites; ‘I have cut them,’ He says, ‘by my prophets, and killed them by the words of my mouth.'”
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Henry Bullinger
Fifty Godly & Learned Sermons, divided into Five Decades… (d. 1575; London: Ralph Newberry, 1577), 4th Decade, 1st Sermon, Of the Gospel of the Grace of God, p. 529
“But in this place and present argument, ‘grace’ is the favor and goodness of the eternal Godhead wherewith He according to his incomprehensible goodness does gratis, freely for Christ’s sake embrace, call, justify and save us mortal men. Now here me thinks before we go any further it is not amiss to examine and search out the cause of this God’s love to us exhibited.
For we see that there is a certain relation between the favor of God and us men to whom his favour is so bent. It is a matter neither hard nor tedious to be found out. For in us there is nothing wherewith God can be in love, or wherewithal He may be moved or stirred up to embrace us: yea, in so much as we are all unpure sinners, and that God is holy, just and a revenger of iniquities, He has matter enough to find in us for which He may be angry at and with just revengement plague us. So then the cause of God’s love to us wards must of necessity be, not in us, nor in any other thing beside God (considering that nothing is more excellent than man) but even in God Himself.
Moreover, the most true Scripture does teach us that God is of his own inclination naturally good, gentle, and as Paul calls Him, Philanthropon, a lover of us men, who has sent his own Son of his own nature into the world for our redemption: whereupon it does consequently follow, that God does freely of Himself, and for his Son’s sake love man, and not for any other cause. Whereby immediately all the preparaments, incitaments and merits of men being dissolved by the fire of God’s great love, do fade and pass away like smoke. For the grace of God is altogether free, and unless it be so, I cannot see how it can be called grace.”
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1600’s
Andrew Willet
Hexapla in Genesin & Exodum… (London: Haviland, 1633)
on Ex. 15, Doubtful Questions, Question 51, In what sense the Lord says, ‘I am thy healer.’
“3. And further, this promise is grounded upon the natural inclination of God unto mercy: Non vult mortem peccatoris, potior apud eum est misericordia quam ira: ‘He will[s] not the death of a sinner; mercy bears greater sway with Him than wrath.’ [Conrad] Pelican.”
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A Harmony upon the Second Book of Samuel... (Cambridge: Legge, 1614), on ch. 24, 14th Question, v. 16, How the Lord is said to repent Him of the evil, p. 144
“Beside, this phrase shows the inclination of God unto mercy, like as a father is grieved when he is forced to correct his son and had rather that no cause were given him of such chastisement; [Andreas] Osiander.”
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Hexapla, that is a Six-fold Commentary upon… Romans... (Lege, 1611)
on ch. 9, Places of Controversy, Controversy 12, Whether mercy be a natural property in God, or an effect only of his will, against Socinus?
“…these considerations must be premised:
1. That mercy is otherwise in God than in man: in man indeed it is a grief or compassion conceived upon another’s misery: but in God it is only a propension and readiness of the divine will to help those which are in misery.
2. Mercy in God either signifies the inclination, power, faculty and property to show mercy, and this is natural in God: or the act and exercising of that property toward the creature, and this is so natural in God as yet it is directed by his will.
3. A thing is said to be natural two ways: Either that which only proceeds from the instinct of nature, as the fire naturally burns: or that whereunto nature inclines, yet not without direction of the will, as thus a man is said to speak, to understand naturally: So God is both ways naturally merciful, in Himself the first way; toward his creatures the second.
Now to the arguments we answer:
1. The apostle [in Rom. 9:18] speaks not of the natural property, but of the act of mercy, which is directed by the will of God.
2. All the natural properties which are in God He always uses not, nor towards all: as his justice, power, longanimity, mercy: they are always in God, but He exercises them as it pleases Him.
3. Justice and mercy are not contrary, but cruelty is opposed to mercy: neither is there any contrariety in God, but in the effects in diverse subjects: as the Sun with the same heat mollifies the wax and hardens the clay.
4. Neither are these properties unequal in God, but the effects and acts only are unequal, as it pleases God to dispose in his freewill.”
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on ch. 12, Questions & Doubts, 2nd Question, Why the apostle adds, ‘By the mercies…’ (Rom. 12:1), p. 535
“2. And he beseeches them, per miserationes, by the mercifulness of God, rather than per misericordiam Dei, the mercy of God: for this shows only the merciful inclination of God in Himself, the other betokens his actual compassion extended to others; [Francis] Tolet.”
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John Salkeld
A Treatise of Paradise… (London: Griffin, 1617), ch. 64, pp. 319-21 Salkeld (1576–1660) was born in England, studied with Jesuits in the university of Coimbra and in Portugal, but had become a protestant again living in England by the time of this work.
“But God (says Simon Magus) would not that Adam should have eaten of the forbidden fruit, who nevertheless did eat of that fruit; it follows therefore that he remained not as his Creator would have had him to have remained; how then can God be omnipotent, or his will always fulfilled?
It were necessary, if we should fully satisfy this argument, to entreat more largely of the will of God than were convenient for this place: wherefore, that we may briefly answer this objection, we must presuppose with the school-divines a threefold distinction of the will of God, according to the diversity of their proper objects:¹ the first they call his efficient, effectual, or working will, by which God does so effectually intend anything that He performs it actually by some external operation and work, either actually produced or to be produced.
¹ Aquinas, [Summa] pt. 1, quest. 19; the same: Molina, Vasquez, Suarez, Sumel, Bannez and many others.
The other kind of will which the divines distinguish in God, in regard of some objects which He does not really produce, is called inefficax voluntas, a kind of propension or inclination of his divine will to the effectuating of any good effect, which might redound to the felicity of man: yet for the attaining of the end, which out of his unsearchable wisdom He has prefixed, He oftentimes permits the contrary to this his divine inclination and will; the which therefore is called God’s permissive will.
As for example, God would that all men should be saved, according to that of the apostle [1 Tim. 2:4], Deus vult omnes homines saluos fieri; to wit, in his universal grace, calling and inspirations and other general means, offered to all, so that out of his infinite goodness He wishes and wills in this sort all to be saved; and that He might the more manifest his infinite mercy by the efficacy of his working will, He actually saves some; even so, to manifest his justice by his other permissive decree, He permits others to work their own ruin and eternal damnation.”
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Robert Bruce
The Way to True Peace & Rest... (London: Field, 1617), 8th Sermon, on Isa. 38, p. 188
“The second thing that I marked was this, the wonderful inclination that the Lord has to mercy, how well He answers to his names and styles, while He is called a God of compassion, a God of exceeding and infinite mercy.”
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Johannes Polyander
in Synopsis of Pure Theology (Brill), vol. 2, disp. 30, sect. 12, p. 213
“The impelling cause [of the gospel call], whereby God is moved internally by Himself, is God’s grace, his good pleasure and favorably-inclined will to offer, in Christ, his salvation to wretched sinners.”
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John Weemes
An Exposition of the Moral Law, or Ten Commandments… (London: Cotes, 1632), Explication of the Moral Law, bk. 1, 2nd Commandment, Exercitation 18, p. 134
“[Ex. 20:5] ‘And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love Me and keep my commandments.’
God’s justice reaches unto the third and fourth generation, but his mercy to the thousand[th] generation; and hence we may gather that God inclines more to mercy than to justice, and therefore when He punishes He is said, facere opus non suum, Isa. 28:21, that He may do his strange work, that is to punish.”
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The Portraiture of the Image of God in Man... (London: T.C., 1636), pt. 2, ch. 12, Of Despair, p. 215
“…for God inclines more to show mercy than to punish: therefore when He punishes, He is said facere opus non suum, Isa. 28:21. When He punishes, He punishes to the third and fourth generation; but He shows mercy to the thousandth generation, Ex. 20:6. Therefore it must be a greater sin to contemn his mercy than his justice.”
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Synod of Dort
The Dordrecht Bible Commentary ed. Theodore Haak (1637; 1657; North Star Ministry Press, 2019), vol. 4, Prophetic Books, on Isa. 28:21, p. 89
“‘that He may do his work, his work shall be strange, and that He may do his act, his act shall be strange.’
God is a gracious and merciful God who is slow to wrath, and slow to punish, and therefore in comparison of his former loving kindness and mercy continually showed unto his people, his work of justice or punishment is called a strange work.”
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John Davenant
Animadversions upon a Treatise entitled, God’s Love to Mankind... (Cambridge: Daniel, 1641), ‘Answer: Whether the decree of absolute Reprobation is contrary unto the use and end of God’s gifts bestowed upon men,’ pp. 390-93
“That God wills the good of men in bestowing any good gifts or graces upon them, needed no proof at all: We have always willingly granted this proposition. Yet for the true understanding thereof it must be observed that when we say, ‘This is God’s will; this is God’s aim or intent,’ these words have not always the same signification. This author [Samuel Hoard, an Arminian], by confounding the diverse meaning of these and the like words, does strangely entangle himself through his whole discourse.
First therefore: Anything is said to be according to God’s will which, considered in itself, is according to the goodness and pureness of the Divine nature. This is a perpetual and necessary volition in God, qua Deo placet omne bonum [by which God is pleased by every good thing]. (See [Diego] Ruiz [d. 1632], Of the Will of God, disp. 6, §2, p. 38) And this simplex complacentia [simple complacency] towards all good actions of men, or events unto men, is possible circa creaturas omnes etiam nunquam futuras [about all creatures, even which will never be]. For there is no goodness imaginable which has not an agreement with the good will of God which we call amorem simplicis complacentiae [a love of simple complacency]. Satis constat hujusmodi complacentiam Dei versari circa poenitentiam, gratiam et gloriam possibilem Judae aut cujus libet damnati [It is sufficiently clear that this kind of complacency in God has reference to the possible repentance, grace, and glory of Judas, or of any damned person whatsoever]. (Ruiz, disp. 19, p. 214) But this is not it which we now speak of.
2. Secondly, God is said to will, desire or aim-at that good, for the obtaining whereof He affords fitting means, though withal He wills that it shall be in the liberty of the creature to hinder and frustrate those means, and though He have absolutely decreed to permit the creature to abuse them unto his own destruction. This is that which usually is termed by divines voluntas antecedens, voluntas conditionata, voluntas simplicis complacentiae [the will preceding, will-conditioned, will of simple complacency].
And thus God is said to aim-at or to will and desire the conversion, justification and salvation of those who never shall be converted, justified or saved. Neither must we think that by these men God’s omnipotent will is crossed, because his voluntas simplicis complacentiae [will of simple complacency] is not fulfilled. For the absolute will of God was that in such persons their own free-will might hinder the good effect of his gifts and graces, which He was absolutely resolved to permit for some greater good.
Lastly, there is a will in God which strictly and most properly is called voluntas beneplaciti [will of good-pleasure] or his absolute will, which is not only a liking of the good willed unto the creature, and an ordering of fit means whereby the creature (if his own free-will hinder not) may attain it, but a merciful decree of so ordering the means and the very will of the creature, that it shall infallibly and infrustrately obtain the good end whereunto such means were accommodated. And of this will Ruiz truly affirms:
Sola haec voluntas absoluta simpliciter amplectitur objectum, et ideo sola simpliciter et absolute meretur nomen voluntatis Beneplaciti [Only this absolute will simply embraces its object, and therefore only it, simply and absolutely, deserves the name of the will of good pleasure.]. (disp. 18, §4, p. 185)
We grant, therefore, that in the second acception of the word ‘will,’ God truly wills, likes, desires the repentance, faith, perseverance and salvation of all to whom the Gospel is preached and Christ offered. But in the last and most proper acception, God wills the perseverance and salvation only of his elect, in whom He never ceases working till the happy effect be produced.
Our divines at [the Synod of] Dort [1618-1619] granted a true and serious will in God according to the second acception of the word ‘will,’ but not according to the last. Which will simplicis complacentiae [of simple complacency] may stand with absolute reprobation.
If this author can be content to acknowledge that for a true, serious and no delusory will, which affords the creature means of repenting, believing and being saved, though under an eternal absolute decree of permitting the final disobedience and perdition of the creature, we will free him from the trouble of answering the places of Scripture, and with him embrace the interpretation of Damascene, who tells us (Of the Orthodox Faith, bk. 4, ch. 20) that albeit the Scriptures do in such places seem to make God’s benefits causes of man’s sin and ruin, yet they must be understood [Greek], not [Greek].
A physician does give his patient physick with an absolute will to cure so far as his skill and ability will stretch: But God does not always give the means of salvation unto all men out of his absolute will, for then all should be cured and saved. Ps. 135, Omnia quaecunque voluit Deus, fecit in coelo et in terra [All which God wills is done in heaven and in earth]. Fulgentius gives the reason (1 ad Mon., ch. 12), Quia cui semper subest cum volet posse, non aliud est in illo velle quam posse [For to whom there is always present the ability whenever he wills, in him to will is nothing other than to be able.].
The will of God inviting or moving men to perform such good acts as tend to their salvation is God’s true and serious will, though He have not decreed by such means to produce their salvation. (See [Michael] Bajus, Institutes, bk. 1, ch. 104, etc. etc. 115, 116) This will is often despised by men to their own damnation. But there is a will not only ordaining means to the end, but of causing men to use the means unto the consecution of the end. And thus by giving them special grace, God wills the kingdom of glory only unto the elect.
The former will is not to be baffled with the name of dissimulation, because this latter is only it which brings men unto glorification. And we further add that the reprobates in resisting the former will, which is vera voluntas simplicis complacentiae [the true will of simple complacency], do always fulfill the latter, which is God’s absolute will of permitting this resistance and of gathering out of it a greater illustration of his own glory.
The blessings and means which God out of his goodness afforded to the angels, to Adam and which He continually affords unto wicked men, by the ill frame of their hearts may be and have been turned to their own hurt; and yet we cannot but acknowledge in them an antecedent and gracious will to do them good. But we do acknowledge, over and above this will of complacency, an absolute will of efficiency, by which God has mercifully decreed to work in some persons the will and the deed, and by the means of grace, de facto, to bring them unto glory.
These two different manners of willing and working the salvation of men do demonstrate an absolute will in God of saving some, which we call the absolute decree of their election, and an absolute will of permitting others to draw upon themselves damnation by voluntary abusing the means of grace, which we call absolute reprobation. Chrysostom (who is no depressor of man’s free-will) was not ignorant of this absolute will of God turning and bending man’s which way He pleases: Si Deus voluerit, nullus impediet [If God wills, none impedes]. (See many times in homily 2 on Ps. 50) And of this will St. Augustine speaks (Enchiridion, ch. 97):
In coelo et in terra non quaedam voluit et fecit, quaedam vero voluit et non fecit, sed omnia quaecun{que} voluit fecit.
[In heaven and on earth, He did not will some things and accomplish them and will other things but not accomplish them; rather, He accomplished all things whatsoever He willed.]
And St. Jerome, speaking of the Samaritans, says (apud Petr. Diac.): Si voluisset, ex indevotis devotos fecisset [If He had willed, He had made the impious pious]. And that prayer of Basil is famous (On the Incarnation, ch. 8):
Malos, quaesumus, bonos facito; bonos in bonitate conserva. Omnia enim potes: quem enim volueris, salvas: et non est qui resistat tibi.
[Make the wicked good, we beseech You; preserve the good in goodness. For You can do all things: whomsoever You will, You save; and there is none who may resist You.]
Since therefore the Scriptures and the Fathers, and all orthodox divines, who confess that to be a true will which by affording ordinary means aims at the sanctification (1 Tim. 4:3) and salvation of all men (1 Tim. 2:4), do notwithstanding, intimate unto us an absolute will eternally predestinating and in time infallibly working the salvation only of some men; it is but a weak kind of reasoning from the affirmation of the one to conclude a negation of the other.
The doctrine of absolute election and reprobation infers that God had not an absolute will by those means of grace which He bestowed upon the non-elect angels or men to bring them unto glory; and that He had an absolute will to permit themselves to abuse them to the procuring of their own eternal misery: And yet he that should say that God by giving the non-elect angels such excellent endowments, or by giving Cain and Judas such fatherly admonitions, did in those means aim at their destruction, speaks both ignorantly and profanely. For the aim of God and the end of any good gift which He vouchsafes unto men, is to be measured by the nature of the gift itself and not by the perverse use which God suffers the receivers to make of it.
Calvin usually speaks in the Scripture-phrase, even in those points which seem harsh to the ears of the Remonstrants. But this author having before truly explained how such phrases are to be understood, namely of the end whereunto reprobates always finally abuse them, and not of the end whereunto God has ordained them, he had done much better to have afforded Calvin’s words this charitable construction.
And as for Beza, he denies not a proper and true ordination of the divine grace unto the effecting of salvation in all to whom it is afforded, nor a true will of complacency in God, that by them it should be used to that good end: but he denies an absolute will in God of saving them by that grace; and he shows the end which the wicked always come to by abusing it, which is, ut gravius puniantur [that they are more severely punished].
That Calvin had no other meaning, appears by these words of his which shut-up the section out of which the former are taken:
Quid sibi vult Dominus eos docendo a quibus ne intelligatur curat? Considera unde vitium, et desines interrogare. In verbo enim qualiscunque sit obscuritas, satis tamen semper est lucis ad convincendam impiorum conscientiam.
[What does the Lord intend by teaching those whom He takes no care should understand? Consider from where the fault proceeds, and you will cease to inquire. For in the Word, whatever its obscurity may be, there is nevertheless always enough light to convict the consciences of the wicked.]
The drift of Calvin is not to affirm that God works either by any positive action, or by proper ordination of his Word unto any such end that deafness, blindness, senselesseness whereunto the reprobate grow only by their own default. But because God, who could soften their hearts and would if they were in the number of his elect, has ordained not to do it, this ordination is intimated by the event which perpetually follows upon it, namely deafness, blindness, etc. So that all which Calvin intends is this (see §14-15, where is mind is explained), that where God has not comprised men within his merciful decree of predestination, there He has decreed to hold-off his hand from effectually opening their ears and eyes; and they suo vitio obsurdescunt [become deaf through their own fault], etc. And Beza had no other intent, but to show that the Word preached unto the reprobate (Opuscula, p. 30 and Of Predestination, p. 434):
non eo usque conjunctum cum Spiritus ministerio, ut illos vera fide, qua propria nota electi a reprobis dignoscuntur, Christo ut palmites frugiferos inserat.
[is not so joined with the ministry of the Spirit as to insert them into Christ by true faith, by which, as the distinctive mark, the elect are distinguished from the reprobate as fruitful branches.]
Whence follows that woeful event, ut justo exitio devoti magis ac magìs reddantur [Greek] [that they may be rendered more and more devoted to just destruction].
For [Johannes] Maccovius, if his speeches [see pp. 372-73 in the previous section] tend to show the intentional end of the gospel preached, and not the eventual success, we utterly disclaim his opinion.
For God properly intends no end of his volitions or actions but Himself, unto whose glory all things have naturam mediorum [the nature of means], not intenti finis [the intention of an end]. The intention therefore of means by God unto any lower or inferior end is nothing else but the fitness of such means considered in themselves (and not abused) for the producing of that end: And this intention is not altered by the decree of reprobation; for that decree as it is immanent and eternal in voluntate divina, nihil ponit in reprobato [in the divine will, puts nothing in the reprobate]: And when the temporal execution comes, it puts no malice into his will; it puts no necessitation unto wicked actions upon his will; it only puts in God an absolute will of not-giving effectual grace, and of not-working in him salutiferous actions, whereupon follows perditio tua exte [your destruction is out of yourself, Hos. 13:9].”
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Jean Diodati
Pious Annotations upon the Holy Bible… (London: T.B., 1643), on James, ch. 1, verse. 13, “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:”
“v. 13, ‘Let no man’ Now he goes on to the other kind of temptation, which is the inducement and allurement to sin, which does not proceed from God, as the other of afflictions does.
‘For God’, as He has no inclination, nor takes no delight in evil, so can He not induce others unto it, as the Devil does.”
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William Twisse
A Treatise of Mr. [John] Cotton’s clearing certain doubts concerning Predestination, together with an Examination Thereof (London: J.D., 1646), Question 2, p. 58
“3… For whereas hitherto you [John Cotton] have proposed a will of God only conditionate, the place of Scripture alleged [Eze. 18:23] mentions no such conditionate will, which is indifferent to pass either upon the life or death of a man accordingly as he shall be found to repent or not to repent, but rather intimates a will of God inclining to affect rather the life of man than his death, as it is manifested in these words, ‘I have no pleasure in the wicked man’s death, but rather that he repent and live.'”
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Edward Leigh & William Estius
Leigh, Annotations upon all the New Testament Philological & Theological… (London: W.W., 1650), on Rom. 11, verse 22, “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.”
“Verse 22…. ‘The goodness’, the word signifies the propensity of God to do good.¹ ‘Severity’ [Greek], such a severity as notes a cutting off: which word Paul uses the more to set forth God’s goodness to us.
¹ [Greek] benignitatem. Significatur ea voce facilitas ac promptitudo praestandi beneficia; Estius. [‘Goodness’. By this word is signified a readiness and willingness to bestow benefits.]”
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Anthony Burgess
The True Doctrine of Justification Asserted & Vindicated… (London: Underhill, 1654)
sect. 1, Sermon 1, Demonstrations of God’s Righteousness; The Kinds of it, and in what sense its attributed unto God, p. 3
“2. [About the word “righteousness“:] It cannot be denied but that in many places its used for that propensity in God whereby from his hatred to sin He punishes wicked men; and thus it must be here [in Ps. 11:7], as the context evidences. Thus it is evidently used 2 Chron. 12:6; Rom. 2:5. Therefore in the next place, righteousness attributed to God signifies in the general that rectitude and purity in God’s nature, whereby He is free from all sin and hates all iniquity. And then more particularly that attribute in God whereby He does punish ungodly men:”
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sect. 2, sermon 6, That all men through Adam’s transgression are plunged into sin…, p. 56
“Besides, the text [2 Cor. 5:13] only says, ‘God is reconciling the world to Himself;’ now there is a great difference between God reconciling and reconciled: The former supposes in God a propensity to bring about the way of reconciliation; not that He is already reconciled, but this flows from a general love and pity He bears to mankind, whereby He procures a way that actual reconciliation may be obtained between man and God; yea Eph. 2:16 compared with Col. 1:20…”
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Thomas Larkham
The Attributes of God Unfolded & Applied... (London: Eglesfield, 1656) Larkham (1602–1669) was an English puritan clergyman and settler in New England.
pp. 103-4
“[Margin:] (What mercy is in God: Miseri cordia est voluntas Dei qua ad succurrendum miseris et propensus [Mercy is the will of God by which He is inclined to succor the miserable.]; [Johannes] Sharpius. The mercy of God some call the property or attribute of his nature, inclining Him to relieve the misery of his creature; some the essence of God showing mercy. [William] Sclater on the 117th Psalm: Ira dicitur esse in Deo non ut turbidus motus animi sed simplex voluntas ad ultionem.)
But mercy in God is his very essence whereby He is infinitely disposed to help succour and comfort such as be in any miserable condition. Those expressions in Scripture: ‘In their afflictions He was afflicted’; and ‘Mine heart is turned within Me, my repentings are kindled together,’ are borrowed phrases, as from the turning of the bowels in men at the sight of an object of pity. And yet in men this is not mercy itself but a companion of pity. Yet because by it our mercy is made known, we call it by the name of ‘mercy’. We call rolling of bowels mercy, and mercy rolling of bowels, which yet is but a companion of it, and that in men only and not in God.
Mercy may be without it, and in God always is; because God has no bowels to be turned, God is one most simple essence, and has no qualities. And therefore when we say God is merciful, we speak of Him metaphorically, as when we say God is angry. Anger is a turbulency of spirit, but there is no such thing in God. The effects of that which is called anger in God are often put for anger: as when we see the punishment and scourges on the backs of wicked men we conclude that God is angry. In like manner when we see the [hurtful] rod taken of and cast into the fire (which is an effect of mercy) we say God is merciful. But mercy in God signifies two things:
First, an inclination in his heavenly Majesty to show mercy.
Secondly, the effects of his supposed affection, which is his helping of the miserable creature, or a making out of God to such as have need of help and pity. The affection of mercy in men is known by that grief that accompanies it (Tanquam a nobis notiori vertus ipsa nomen traxit), but such a companion of mercy cannot be in God. O mercy is a glorious attribute of God, He is a very sea of mercy, He is never dry. Amongst men he that is fullest of pity is but a drop of it. Their pity falls infinitely short of what is in God.
And this mercy of God is either general to all his creatures or special unto mankind or more special and peculiar: that whereby He is said to be merciful to his elect unto eternal life and [gives] freedom from the wrath to come.”
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pp. 131-33
“God in this attribute of mercy is infinite and incomprehensible. He is in this as in other attributes; indeed He is God. Heaps of places I might bring in; the Bible abounds with passages of the merciful inclination of God:
Ex. 34:6-7, ‘The Lord God merciful and gracious, etc.’ And again, ‘Keeping mercy for thousands.’
Dt. 5:10, ‘And showing mercy unto thousands.’
Ps. 36:5, ‘Thy mercy O Lord is in the heavens,’ or unto the heavens.
So that we need not ask as Esau did of Jacob his father about a blessing, ‘Hast thou but one blessing my father?’ (Gen. 27:38) So hast Thou but one mercy, O God? For come there never so many, there is mercy for all. The bottomless ocean of God’s mercy can never possibly be drawn dry by the creature.
Many admirable sayings have we touching God’s mercy:
First, God inclines to it; it comes naturally from Him: not as waters out of the pump, but as showers from heaven. Tis but ‘open our mouths’ and God will fill them [Ps. 95].
Yea secondly (to use the words of a painful and learned writer; [John] Downame’s Christian Warfare, bk. 2, ch. 34, sect. 4, p. 204), ‘It is not only not troublesome and painful’ (to wit because it is natural to God to show mercy) ‘but also pleasant and delightful for God to show mercy, etc.’ And a little after:
‘And contrariwise it should be troublesome and irksome, if I may so speak‘ (says mine author) ‘for God not to show and exercise his nature and mercy, etc.’
And once more:
‘For as the eye is delighted with seeing, and to be restrained therefrom is grievous unto it, as the ear is delighted with hearing and is much molested if it be stopped; and as every part and faculty of the body and soul are delighted in exercising their several actions and functions and are much vexed and cumbered if by any means they should be hindered, so is the Lord delighted and well pleased in showing and exercising his own nature and attributes.’
God weeps when He strikes, but smiles when He strokes. It does his heart good (as we use to say of men). Certainly God will not be barred of his pleasure; He rejoices much to have an occasion offered of exercising his mercy. Ps. 147:11, David says that, ‘the Lord is delighted in them that fear Him and attend upon his mercy.’ When men wait for mercy, God is delighted to exercise it towards them. Judicious Mr. [Joseph] Caryl, ‘To show mercy pleases Him more than it relieves us.’
Thirdly, God is said ‘to multiply’ to show mercy. Single acts of mercy cannot give Him content: He shows mercies by thousands, unto thousands of his people.
Fourthly, ye have an expression, Isa. 30:18, ‘And therefore will He be exalted that He may have mercy upon you.’ But what do I speak of that which is infinite and incomprehensible? Sooner can we number the stars of heaven, drops of the ocean, sands on the shore, yea atoms in the sun, than give you a true account of the mercies of this most merciful God. What is a drop to the ocean?
(Quantum scintilla ad mare se habet, tantum hominis malitia ad Dei clementiam imo vero non tantum; [As much as a spark is to the sea, so much is man’s wickedness to God’s clemency; indeed, not even so much.] Chrysostom)
And what are our sins to the mercies of God. Infiniteness cannot be limited. God’s thoughts of mercy are exalted above the thoughts of our unworthiness far higher than the heavens are exalted above the earth. Mercy is as it were God’s fetching of breath. His infinite and incomprehensible goodness does in a sort wholly live in works of mercy; For all the world are object of God’s mercy since Adam’s fall: ‘For all have sinned, and have come short of the glory of God.’
That famous man, Jerome Zanchi has notable stuff about this matter. I will take notice but of one passage, upon Ex. 34:6-7, where it is said that God is slow to anger. He writes (On the Attributes, bk. 2, ch. 1, quest. 2):
‘And therefore we must note, although anger be attributed unto God, it is in God nothing else but the chief goodness and justice whereby He abhors evil, and according to his just judgment, does at length punish it if it be not amended by his longsuffering and patience. This here hence appears evidently speaking of revenge, which is an effect of anger; He does not say that He does presently inflict punishment, or that He is so ready to inflict it as to show mercy: but He says that He ‘is slow to anger,’ etc.’
And upon the 28th of Isa. 21, where the words are:
‘For the Lord shall rise up as in mount Perahim; He shall be wrath as in the valley of Gibeon, that He may do his work, his strange work, and bring to pass his acts, his strange act.’
‘The prophet’ (says Zanchi):
‘makes two sorts of God’s works: his proper and strange works. The proper work of God is to show mercy and to spare or forgive; his strange work is to be angry and to punish.’
So far he. I have been somewhat long about this quotation. The weight lies upon this, that mercy in God is his nature, and therefore infinite; it is the very life of God, his drawing of breath in his proper works. Mercy, goodness, longsuffering are according to the nature of the Deity, which is far remote from all unjust severity, cruelty, tyranny and pride. All providences have mercy in them. Tis of the infinite mercy of God that the world is borne up, which would else sink into its first: nothing.
It is mercy [that] respites the damnation of wicked men and saves the elect; yea, behold I tell you a mystery, mercies bring calamities: 1 Cor. 11:32, ‘But when we are judged we are chastened of the Lord that we should not be condemned with the world.’ O let me draw breath a little! Consider what unexpected, even incredible mercies God sometimes breathes out. Even when He seems to breathe out smoke and flames, yet He is angry that He may bring his work to pass, that is to say, his proper work; that is, that he may have mercy and preserve. The Devil, he breathes out deaths, miseries and mischiefs, but God loads us with mercies, and (as I said) the attribute of goodness sets God on work to put Himself out in endless mercies and tender bowels beyond what man or angel can possibly imagine.”
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William Greenhill
Sermons of Christ, his Last Discovery of Himself... (London: R.I., 1656), Christ’s Willingness to Save Sinners, 2nd Sermon, pp. 168-69
“Fifteenthly and lastly, It is clearly evident that the Lord Christ has a strong inclination to save sinners, by his giving out of Scripture in that way and manner as He has done; the Lord Christ has given out Scripture so as to answer the objections of men and women, to answer all the evils of their hearts, all the pleas of corruption, and of a guilty conscience, and of the Devil himself: The Lord has given out Scripture so as to answer all that might hinder their coming in unto Him…
Is not here encouragement enough unto poor sinners: — So here in the next words, ‘Whosoever will let him come and drink of the water of life freely:’ It’s laid down so as to answer all your objections, and to take away all your pleas you have to stave you off from Christ. So then you see clear evidences that Christ is willing to save sinners.”
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Andrew Gray
The Works… (d. 1656; Aberdeen: King, 1839), pp. 455-56
“The second consideration which we would have the Christian to take along with him when he begins to study the mercy and love of God is this: know that it is natural and native for Him to love; justice is his strange act, Isa. 28:21, importing his great unwillingness to be much taken up in the exercise of that attribute of justice.
If we would ask the question, What is God? we could have no answer so suitable and pertinent to it as that which He has given Himself, He is merciful and loving. It is his great design, and likewise his desire, to be taken up in his attribute of mercy…
And we conceive, that which does eminently declare how much God delights in mercy, and how natural it is for Him to love, is this: that notwithstanding there was a strong and invincible impediment laid in the way of the exercise of the attribute of mercy (which if angels and men had attempted to have loosed, should eternally have crushed and depressed them into the lowest hell), yet love was not hindered in its exercise by this strong impediment. O blessed be that love, for it was strong; and that good will, for it was wonderful: that when there was such an impediment laid in the way, it did put wisdom in exercise to find out the way how it might exercise itself towards man without leaving an imputation on justice! It likewise put omnipotent power to exercise, that it might exercise the decrees of wisdom that were such a holy and divine restraint on the love of God; and before the curse was proclaimed towards man for the breach of his holy law, love did propose the way how that everlasting curse, which man by his own hand had wrapped about his own neck, might be taken away…”
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Moses Amyraut
The Evidence of Things Not Seen, or Diverse Scriptural & Philosophical Discourses concerning the State of Good & Holy Men after Death... (d. 1664; London: Cockerill, 1700), 4th Discourse, Concerning the Happiness of Believers after the Resurrection, pp. 172-74
“Now although the nature of God be marvellously one and simple, so it is that according to our manner of conception, we distinguish his virtues and properties from his essence. Concerning his properties, we conceive them under very different respects, and pretend not when we say that he is merciful, to beget an apprehension in the minds of those that hear us, that He is just, or when we say that He is wise, to give occasion to think of his power and might, as his attributes have very different objects, so we comprehend them in our understandings under very different ideas:
But then when we speak of his essence, we make a kind of abstraction of it from his properties, and represent it as a single and simple thing, in which all his attributes exist as in a common subject.
As to what concerns his attributes, we see them in some sort in this life, in that we understand at least in some degree what is the nature of those operations by which they display themselves upon their objects. For we are not perfectly ignorant what may be that inclination in God of pardoning sins to the penitent, and punishing the obstinate and impenitent and things of like nature.
But as to his essence, there is no man that does not acknowledge that we understand it not at all in this life; that is to say, we are not able to form any conception in our minds which has any respect to the nature of his essence, only some think that when we shall be received into the heavens, our supreme happiness will consist in the vision of this essence, which certainly seems extremely difficult to be imagined…”
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John Bunyan
The Resurrection of the Dead & Eternal Judgement... (London: Smith, 1665), p. 119
“Further, The inclination of thy heart towards fruitless and unprofitable creatures does fore-preach to thee the inclination of the heart of God towards thee in the Judgment: If thou hast either cow or any other beast that is now unprofitable to thee, though thou mayst suffer them for some time to be with thee, as God suffers sinners in the world, yet all this while thy heart is not with them, but thou wilt take thy time to clear thy hands of them. Why, just so shall thy judgment be as God says, ‘Though Moses and Samuel stood before Me,’ that is, to pray Me to spare this people, ‘yet my heart could not be towards them; therefore cast them out of my sight and let them go forth.’ Jer. 15:1; Eze. 14:13-14.”
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Richard Alleine
Vindiciæ pietatis: or a Vindication of Godliness… (London: 1665), Sermon on Jn. 1:47, 3. Learn the skill to plead with God in prayer, pp. 222-23
“Plead hard with God, but plead with Him upon his own arguments; there are amongst many others, these four grounds on which to bottom your plea…
1. On God Himself. And there are two special things from which you may plead here:
1. His gracious nature. Fetch your arguments by which you plead with God for mercy thence, whence He originally fetched his arguments to persuade Himself to show mercy; from his own bowels, from his gracious nature, from his natural goodness and gracious inclination to mercy, Jn. 3:16, ‘God so loved the world that He gave his only Son, etc.'”
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Obadiah Grew
Meditations upon our Savior’s Parable of the Prodigal Son… (London: Roycroft, 1678), ch. 27, pp. 253-54
“Remember and consider what the Lord says in this case, ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts;’ (Isa. 55:7) He can pardon abundantly. The very holiness of God inclines Him to mercy, as man’s wickedness inclines him to cruelty: The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.
The Devil, who is the greatest of sinners, is disposed to the greatest revenge and cruelty: he would revenge himself on God if he could; and therefore he belies God to man, as well as he does man to God… There is no such thing in the Devil as the least pity towards any sinner.
But God’s holiness disposes Him to pity poor sinners, when their souls are in trouble for sin. Thus says the high and lofty One that inhabits eternity, whose Name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite one.’ (Isa. 57:15)”
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Matthew Newcomen
The Best Acquaintance & Highest Honor of Christians, or a Discourse of Acquaintance with God (London: Parker, 1679), ch. 4, pp. 48-49
“The Greeks and Romans of old were wont always to have their feasts at supper; therefore when it is said here, ‘I will come in to him, and sup with him,’ [Rev. 3:20] it is as if He had said, ‘I will come in to him and feast with him.’ And feasting together was of old a symbol of perfect reconciliation, and intimate friendship and acquaintance. Now, behold here the wonderful goodness and condescension of God, and his gracious disposition and inclination towards peace and acquaintance with his poor creatures…
Behold therefore, I say, and admire the gracious disposition of God towards sinful man, and the great desire He has towards peace and renewed acquaintance with Him.”
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Stephen Charnock
Several Discourses upon the Existence & Attributes of God… (d. 1680; London: Newman, 1682), Goodness of God
pp. 584-85
“The goodness of God is his inclination to deal well and bountifully with his creatures. (Cocceius, Sum, p. 50) ‘Tis that whereby He wills there should be something besides Himself for his own glory. God is good in Himself and to Himself, i.e. highly amiable to Himself; and therefore some define it a perfection of God, whereby He loves Himself and his own excellency; but as it stands in relation to his creatures, ’tis that perfection of God whereby He delights in his works and is beneficial to them.
God is the highest goodness, because He does not act for his own profit, but for his creatures’ welfare and the manifestation of his own goodness. He sends out his beams without receiving any addition to Himself or substantial advantage from his creatures. ‘Tis from this perfection that He loves whatsoever is good, and that is whatsoever He has made, for ‘every creature of God is good.‘ (1 Tim. 4:4)
Every creature has some communications from Him, which cannot be without some affection to them; Every creature has a footstep of divine goodness upon it; God therefore loves that goodness in the creature, else He would not love Himself. (Cajetan, in pt. 2 of 2, quest. 34, art. 3) God hates no creature, no not the devils and damned as creatures; He is not an enemy to them as they are the works of his hands: He is properly an enemy that does simply and absolutely wish evil to another; but God does not abso∣lutely wish evil to the damned; that justice that He inflicts upon them, the deserved punishment of their sin, is part of his goodness (as shall afterward be shown).”
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p. 588
“3. This goodness is communicative. [There is] None so communicatively good as God. As the notion of God includes goodness, so the notion of goodness includes diffusiveness; without goodness He would cease to be a Deity, and without diffusiveness He would cease to be Good. The being good is necessary to the being God: For goodness is nothing else in the notion of it, but a strong inclination to do good; either to find or make an object wherein to exercise itself according to the propension of its own nature; and it is an inclination of communicating itself not for its own interest, but the good of the object it pitches upon.
Thus God is good by nature and his nature is not without activity; He acts conveniently to his own nature. Ps. 119:68, ‘Thou art good and dost good.’ And nothing accrues to Him by the communications of Himself to others, since his blessedness was as great before the frame of any creature as ever it was since the erecting of the world; so that the goodness of Christ Himself increases not the luster of his happiness: Ps. 16:2, ‘My goodness extends not to Thee.’ He is not of a niggardly and envious nature; He is too rich to have any cause to envy, and too good to have any will to envy: He is as liberal as he is rich, according to the capacity of the object about which his goodness is exercised.
The divine goodness being the supreme goodness, is goodness in the highest degree of activity; Not an idle, enclosed, pent up goodness, as a spring shut up or a fountain sealed, bubbling up within itself, but bubbling out of itself. A fountain of gardens to water every part of his creation; He is an ointment poured forth (Cant. 1:5). Nothing spreads itself more than oil and takes up a larger space, wheresoever it drops. It may be no less said of the goodness of God, as it is of the fulness of Christ, Eph. 1:23, ‘He fills all in all‘:
He fills rational creatures with understanding, sensitive nature with vigor and motion, the whole world with beauty and sweetness. Every taste, every touch of a creature is a taste and touch of divine goodness. Divine goodness offers itself in one spark in this creature, in another spark in the other creature, and altogether make up a goodness inconceivable by any creature. The whole mass and extracted spirit of it is infinitely short of the goodness of the divine nature, imperfect shadows of that goodness which is in Himself.”
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p. 591
“Whatever sparks of goodness any creature has are the free effusions of God’s bounty, the offspring of his own inclination to do well, the simple favor of the donor; not purchased, not merited by the creature. God is as unconstrained in his liberty in all his communications as infinite in his goodness, the fountain of them.”
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p. 645
“3. The third thing is the goodness of God in his government…. his goodness hovers over the whole frame… to conduct them to those ends which might illustrate his wisdom and goodness to his creatures. His goodness does no less incline Him to provide for them than to frame them.
‘Tis the natural inclination of man to love what is purely the birth of his own strength or skill. He is fond of preserving his own inventions, as well as laborious in inventing them. ‘Tis the glory of a man to preserve them as well as to produce them. God loves everything which He has made, which love could not be without a continued diffusiveness to them, suitable to the end for which He made them.”
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p. 678
“That goodness which surmounted so many difficulties and conquered so many motions that might be made against any repeated exercise of it after it had been abused by the first rebellion of man: That goodness that after so much contempt of it appeared in such a majestic tenderness and threw aside those impediments which men had cast in the way of divine inclinations: This goodness is the foundation of all reliance upon God.”
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p. 688
“It would bring to remembrance the horror of our crimes and set us a blushing before Him when we should consider the multitude of his benefits and our unworthy behavior that has not constrained Him, even against the inclination of his goodness to punish us.”
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Thomas Goodwin
The Object & Acts of Justifying Faith, pt. 1, bk. 1, ch. 8, on Ex. 34:6-7 in The Works (d. 1680; Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), vol. 8
“I come now to the next attribute expressed in this proclamation, merciful: ‘The Lord, the Lord God, strong, gracious, merciful, abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin,’ Ex. 34:6-7. Things attributed to God here are of three sorts:
1. The inward disposition or inclination, or aptitude and readiness to mercy, that is in the four first attributes, merciful, gracious, long-suffering, much in goodness, and truth is added.
2. There are his purposes and resolutions of mercy, keeping mercy for thousands; and they are immanent acts in God, kept and laid up in God’s own breast.
3. There are extrinsical acts of mercy issuing from both: ‘pardoning iniquity, transgression, and sin.’
The meaning plainly is, first, God is merciful as He is Jehovah; that is his nature. Secondly, He fully resolves to show mercy; there is his heart. Thirdly, He has done it, and does it every day, in pardoning sin; there is his wont and practice. So that God is every way merciful: in his nature, in his purposes, and in his deeds and performance.”
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“2. The next thing in God is love, and that arises from goodness. The goodness that is in God inclines Him to love, and to be the most profuse lover. You read in 1 John 4:7-8, ‘God is love.’ The question is whether this speech does not import that He is love in Himself, as well as that He shows love.
There are these reasons why it imports what He is in Himself, when He says, ‘God is love.’ Says He, verse 7, ‘Every one that loves is born of God, and knows God,’ that is the affirmative; and verse 8, ‘He that loves not knows not God, for God is love’; that is, he knows not God in what is most proper to Him, as to what does most abound in Him, for God is love. We ordinarily say of a man that is of such a disposition, I know him, he is so and so; so the believer knows God to be love…
He speaks it of his love, which none sees but as manifest by effects; but God is love essentially. Says Aquinas, Whoever has a will, has a proneness to love. Says Musculus, As every one is in goodness, so in love. If God then has a will inclined to anything, it is to love; He has hatred in Him to sin, He has the opposite: He has a love also to something, only it is guided by his will towards creatures.”
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Thomas Manton
“A Practical Exposition Upon the Fifty-Third Chapter of Isaiah: the First Verse” in The Complete Works of Thomas Manton (London: Nisbet & Co., 1873), vol. 3, pp. 210–11 HT: Tony Byrne
“First, What is this love of God in Christ? Here I take it actively for the love wherewith He loves us. Love may be considered:
First, as an attribute or a perfection in God; so it is said, 1 John 4:8, ‘God is love.’ Which notes his readiness, self-propension or inclination to do good.
Secondly, as it relates and passes out to the creature; so there is a common love and a special love. His common love is set forth: Ps. 145:9, ‘The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works.’…”
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One Hundred & Ninety Sermons on the Hundred & Nineteenth Psalm… (London: T.P., 1681)
sermon 72, on Ps. 119:64, pp. 436-37
“III Proposition: In asking any spiritual gift we are encouraged by the bounty and mercy of God [as in Ps. 119:64]. David signifies both:
1. His bounty or benignity, or that free inclination which is in God to do good to his creatures.
2. His mercy respects the creature as affected with any misery. Mercy properly is a proneness to succour and relieve a man in misery notwithstanding sin. Now the larger thoughts of mercy, the more hope, partly because we have no plea of merit and therefore mercy is the fountain of all the good which comes to us from God.”
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sermon 84, on Ps. 119:76, “Let, I pray thee, thy merciful kindness be for my comfort”, p. 512
“In God it [‘mercy’] notes his readiness to do good to the miserable, notwithstanding sin. The motion comes from within, from his own breast and bowels. For our God is pitiful and of tender mercy, James 5:11, and the act of it is extended and reached out unto the creature in seasonable relief. For the throne of grace was erected for this purpose, Heb. 4:11. Two things there are in mercy:
First, a propension and inclination to commiserate the afflicted.
Secondly, a ready relief and succour of them according to our power, affectus and effectus.
First, there is a compassion or a being affected with the misery of others.
This properly cannot be in God, in whom as there is no passion, so strictly speaking there is no compassion; yet something analagous there is, a taking notice of our misery. Something like a pity arising in his heart upon the sight of it; which the Scripture frequently ascribes to God, and we can best understand as we consider the divine perfections shining forth in the human nature of Christ.
Ex. 2:24, ‘He heard their groaning;’ and Isa. 63:4, ‘In all their afflictions He was afflicted.’ Judges 10:16, ‘His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel.’ Forms of speech taken from the manner of men, who use to be thus affected when they see a miserable object.
God in his simple and perfect nature cannot be said either to joy or grieve: but He carries Himself as one thus affected. Or these expressions were laid in aforehand to suit with the divine perfections as manifested in Christ, who is touched with a feeling of our infirmities.
Secondly, mercy notes the actual exhibition of help and relief to the miserable…”
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A Fourth Volume containing One Hundred & Fifty Sermons on Several Texts of Scripture… (London: J.D., 1693)
A Sermon on Mt. 15:21-28, p. 472
“(2) There is more goodwill in his heart than is visible in his dealings. The merciful nature of God should be a support to us, though we see nothing of the effects of it in his providence. Job 10:13, ‘These things hast Thou hid in thine heart; I know that it is with Thee.’ He speaks of his favourable inclination to show pity to distressed creatures. We are not able always to reconcile his present dispensations with his gracious nature, yet faith must not quit its holdfast: We must see what is hid in God’s heart and comfort ourselves with that favor and mercy which we know to be essential to Him: Though the mercy and pity be not visible and obvious to sense, the disposition and inclination abides in God unchangeable and sure. God is a merciful God still, and Christ a compassionate Savior, though the effects be suspended to try and sharpen our faith.”
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A Sermon on Isa. 50:10, p. 813
“5. That we must not dote upon sensible consolation. The merciful nature of God should be a support to us though we see nothing of the effects of it in the course of his dealings with us; and we should believe his love when we do not actually feel it. Job 10:13, ‘And these things hast Thou hid in thine heart; I know that this is with Thee.’ He speaks of his favorable inclination to show pity to his creatures. We are not able always to reconcile his present dispensations with his gracious nature, nor our former experience of his goodnessת yet faith must not quit its holdfast but we must see what is hid in God’s heart and comfort ourselves with concealed favor and mercy, when we cannot comfort ourselves with felt favor and mercy. Though mercies be not visible and obvious to sense, yet the disposition and inclination is ever in God unchangeable and sure. A withdrawn God is a merciful God still.”
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John Collinges
The Intercourses of Divine Love betwixt Christ & his Church (London: Snowden, 1683), p. 156 HT: Tony Byrne
“1. As love stands opposed to hatred and wrath, and enmity. Considering man as God’s creature, he was not hated of God; God hates not the work of his own hand; but considering him as a lapsed creature, as degenerated into the plant of a strange vine, after that God had created him a generous, noble plant…
How suitable to us now is it to have a Savior? That is love, and who has loves, considering the aversion in the holy Divine Being from mankind as rebellious seed, a seed of evil-doers? Who could have suited us to have become a Savior unto us, but one who had a kind propension and inclination to us, inclining Him to the great work of man’s redemption and reconciliation to God, especially also considering that there could be no remission of sins without blood…”
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Edward Pococke
A Commentary on the Prophecy of Hosea (Oxford: 1685), on Hos. 11:8, “How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboim? mine heart is turned within Me, my repentings are kindled together.”
“…all [senses] given it [the Hebrew word for “turned”] in this place do concur in one scope or making one meaning (to wit), to express in God a tender affection, a propensity to show mercy to them, notwithstanding their great provocation of Him; the effects of which affection prevailing with Him are declared in the next verse [“I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger, I will not return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God, and not man;”].”
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Thomas Pierce
The Law & Equity of the Gospel, or the Goodness of our Lord as a Legislator, delivered first from the pulpit in two plain sermons… (London: Roycroft, 1686), A Short & Easy Resolution of the Fore-mentioned Enquiry, p. 225
“…we are in order to reflect on the nature of it [saving belief]. Which is indeed very closely, but significantly couched in the preposition… ’tis [Greek] believe and trust IN, or UPON the Lord Jesus. Believe at once his propensity and power to save thee. Believe his power, for he is Dominus, The Lord. And believe his propensity, for He is Jesus, the Savior.”
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Thomas Cole
A Discourse of Christian Religion... (London: R.R., 1692), Christ the Hope of Glory, ch. 6, p. 112
“No man was ever questioned by God for having too much grace; we may all complain of too little: More grace is the constant desire of every holy soul as there is a propensity in God to give it; ‘To him that has, more shall be given’: God loves to accumulate his favors, to load us with his benefits; he gives liberally that He may draw out our hope to follow Him for more and more still. ‘Let us then abound in hope, holding fast our confidence firm unto the end.'”
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Peter van Mastricht
Theoretical-Practical Theology, ed. J.R. Beeke, tr. T.M. Rester & M.T. Spangler (Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), vol. 2 HT: Tony Byrne
p. 365
“There is in God a universal or common love by which he is inclined to do good to every creature, and so then also to man (Ps. 36:6; 1 Tim. 4:10), by external and common benefits (Ps. 17:14), and there is also a special, saving love by which he dispenses the benefits that accompany salvation, which have an unbreakable connection with salvation (Heb. 6:9).”
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p. 378
“XL. Third, zeal for exploring, if we observe some propensity of God toward us, some love, grace, or mercy, whether is it only that universal propensity which is inclined to beasts as well as men (Ps. 36:6), or that common propensity which is inclined to the reprobate as well as the elect.”
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1700’s
Wilhelmus A’Brakel
The Christian’s Reasonable Service, trans. Bartel Elshout (Soli Deo Gloria, 1992) 1:122-23 HT: David Ponter
“The goodness of God, on the contrary, is the loveliness, benign character, sweetness, friendliness, kindness, and generosity of God. Goodness is the very essence of God’s being, even if there were no creature to whom this could be manifested. “The good LORD pardon every one” (2 Chr.30:18); “Good and upright is the LORD: therefore will He teach sinners in the way” (Psa. 25:B); “There is none good but one, that is, God” (Mat. 19:17).
From this goodness issues forth lovingkindness and an inclination to bless His creatures. This is to the astonishment of all who take note of this, which explains why David exclaims twenty-six times in Ps. 136, “For His Mercy endureth for ever.” In the following texts we read likewise. “Also unto Thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy” (Psa. 62:12); “All the paths of the LORD are mercy” (Psa. 25:10). From goodness and benevolence issues forth the doing of that which is good. “Thou art good, and doest good” (Psa. 119:68); “Rejoice the soul of Thy servant: and attend unto the voice of my supplications. For Thou Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon Thee” (Psa. 86:4, 6, 5).
This goodness is of a general nature in reference to all God’s creatures, since they are His creatures. “The LORD is good to all: and His tender mercies are over all is works” (Psa. 145:9); “The earth is full of the goodness of the LORD” (Psa. 33:5); “For He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mat. 5:45). The goodness which is of a special or particular nature as it relates to God’s children is thus expressed: ‘Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as arc of a clean heart” (Psa. 73:1); “The LORD is good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him” (Lam. 3:25). This goodness of God is the reason why a believer, even after many backslidings, is motivated by renewal to return unto the Lord. “The children of Israel shall return… and shall fear the LORD and His goodness” (Hosea 3:5); “But I have trusted in Thy mercy” (Psa. 13:5). This is why they call the Lord “the God of my mercy” (Psa. 59:10, 17). In this goodness they rejoice and this goodness they magnify. “I will sing of the mercies of the LORD for ever” (Psa. 89:1); “Praise ye the LORD. O give thanks unto the LORD; for He is good: for His mercy endureth for ever” (Psa. 106:1).”
.
Jonathan Edwards
Remarks on Important Theological Controversies, ch. 3, “Concerning the Divine Decrees in General, & Election in Particular,” from paragraphs 9 & 13, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Edward Hickman (†1758), vol. 2, pp. 527-28 This is also in Select Works (Banner of Truth), 2:528
“13. …There is all in God that is good, and perfect, and excellent in our desires and wishes for the conversion and salvation of wicked men. As, for instance, there is a love to holiness, absolutely considered, or an agreeableness of holiness to his nature and will; or, in other words, to his natural inclination. The holiness and happiness of the creature, absolutely considered, are things that he loves. These things are infinitely more agreeable to his nature than to ours.
There is all in God that belongs to our desire of the holiness and happiness of unconverted men and reprobates, excepting what implies imperfection. All that is consistent with infinite knowledge, wisdom, power, self-sufficience, infinite happiness, and immutability. Therefore, there is no reason that his absolute prescience, or his wise determination and ordering what is future, should hinder his expressing this disposition of his nature, in like manner as we are wont to express such a disposition in ourselves, viz. by calls and invitations, and the like.”
.
Isaac Watts
“Sermon VII: A hopeful Youth falling short of Heaven” in Sermons on Various Subjects (London: A. Macpherson, 1811), vol. 1, p. 160 HT: Tony Byrne
“3rdly, Some natural good wishes for his welfare are implied in this love [to the rich young ruler]. There is in every wise and good man a hearty desire of the happiness of his fellow-creatures; he loves them all in this sense, even the foolish and the wicked. Human nature that has any goodness in it, is ready to wish well to any person, though he be an utter stranger and unknown, especially if he has some agreeable qualities.
There may be an innocent inclination to see all men happy, though we know this shall not be brought to pass; for the Word of God declares that the most part of men walk in the broad way, and shall go down to hell. You know how passionately St. Paul longed for the salvation of all his countrymen the Jews [Rom. 9]. This is called a love of benevolence; and it is evident, by the following particulars, that the Lord expressed this good-will toward the young man in my text.”
[Watts had argued on pp. 158-59 that Christ’s love for the rich young ruler was not merely according to his human nature, but also according to his divine nature.]
.
1900’s
John Gerstner
The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan Edwards, 3 vols. (Powhatan, VA: Berea Publications; Orlando, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 1993), vol. 2, p. 38 HT: Tony Byrne
“If God’s love is known by what it hates, it is also known by what it loves or inclines toward. First, in a sense, it extends to all creatures.
All creatures have some good from God.136 Even the wicked share in this benevolence. “God is kind to the unthankful and evil.”137 Man is now naturally contrary to God and positively evil, but the Luke 6:35 sermon shows that God still loves him in some ways. Indeed, Edwards goes on to say in another sermon: “even in damnation.”138 Yet, fundamentally, “holy persons love holy things for their holiness.”139
136. Unpublished MS sermon on Ps. 145:15–21, “All creatures in heaven and earth have their good things from God,” p. 1, St. Ind., Nov. 1, 1753.
137. Unpublished MS sermon on Lk. 6:35.
138. Unpublished MS sermon on Eph. 4:15–16, “In a company of Christians among whom Christianity has its genuine effect, love is the beginning and love is the middle and love is the end of all their affairs,” p. 2, May 1743.
139. Unpublished MS sermons on Ps. 119:[1]40.”
Historical
On the Post-Reformation
Richard Muller
Dictionary of Latin & Greek Theological Terms Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2017)
pp. 31-32
“amor Dei: the love of god; i.e., both the love of creatures for God and the divine attribute of love…
Considered as a divine attribute, the amor Dei can be defined as the propensity of the divine essence or nature for the good, both in the sense of God’s inward intrinsic, benevolentia, or willing of the good, and in the sense of God’s external, extrinsic, beneficentia, or kindness, toward his creatures…
the amor Dei communis is directed toward all human beings, both elect and reprobate, and is manifest in the blessings, or benefits (beneficia), of God… the amor Dei communis is understood to be benevolentia in the strict sense of goodwill toward human beings…”
.
pp. 41-42
“appetitus: appetite, desire; specifically, the appetitive faculty or capacity of a being, which seeks out or inclines toward a good. In all spiritual beings, including God, the exercise of will implies appetite. By extension, the propensities of inanimate objects, and even of matter, can be described as appetite…
Scholastic theology and philosophy focus in particular upon the appetites of finite spiritual beings, which by nature seek out their own good. Since the fall has caused a deprivation and distortion of desire, a distinction must be made between appetitus rectus, right desire, and appetitus perversus or inordinatus, perverse or inordinate desire. It is characteristic of the desire of sinful beings that it misidentifies the good, particularly ultimate good, and perversely, or inordinately, desires finite things as ends in themselves (see frui). Thus appetitus perversus and appetitus inordinatus (q.v.) are synonyms for sin (peccatum, q.v.).
Appetite can be distinguished further into natural appetite (appetitus naturalis), rational or voluntary appetite (appetitus rationalis sive voluntarius), and animal or sensual or sensitive appetite (appetitus animalis sive sensualis; appetitus sensitivus).
Natural appetite is simply the nature of any existent thing to be what it is and to perform its proper acts or operations; e.g., human beings have a natural appetite for breathing!
The rational or voluntary appetite, also called appetitus intellectualis, intellectual appetite, is the will (voluntas, q.v.). Whereas it is the intellect (intellectus, q.v.) that perceives and knows objects, it is the will that chooses. Since choice belongs to the will, the will must be exercised in the choice of even purely intellectual objects—thus appetitus intellectualis. In addition, since the will and the intellect are not really distinct, but only formally or rationally distinct (see distinctio), the appetitive function of will is also rational (rationalis). Thus the will desires the goodness, truth, and justice known by the intellect…
The appetitus animalis sive sensualis or appetitus sensitivus is thus emotion or passion (affectus, passio), and it may be described in terms of the six concupiscible (concupiscibilis, q.v.) passions: love and hate, joy and sadness, desire and aversion; and of the five irascible (irascibilis, q.v.) passions: courage and fear, hope, despair, and anger. This appetite, because of its relation to the body, is usually described as being situated “below” the will in the hierarchy of human faculties.”
.
Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Baker Academic, 2003), vol. 3
“Mastricht offers as a brief definition the statement that the divine will is God’s ‘propensity toward the good,’ (Theoretico-practica theol., II.xvii.4) and the somewhat longer definition that ‘will in God is nothing other than his most wise propensity toward himself as the highest goal and toward creatures as means, for the sake of himself,’ inasmuch as creatures attain the fulfilment of the good not in themselves but in God.’ (Theoretico-practica theol., II.xv.7; cf. Cocceius, Summa theol. III.x.23-24 and Van Asselt, Federal Theology, p. 166.)”
.
“[Benedict Pictet:] Now we call goodness that affection in God, by which he is inclined to communicate himself to his creatures… The first act of God’s goodness in time is creation, and because what is produced always depends on what produces it, the second act of goodness is preservation.” (Theol. chr., II.vii.2-3; cf. Ridgely, Body of Divinity (1885), p. 109.)
In this most inclusive sense, the divine goodness can be identified as benevolentia, the ‘inclination of the will to do good as far as it is possible and lawful to do so‘ or, indeed, as ‘the love of God towards his creatures’ by which he acts to ‘promote their happiness and perfection.’ (Venema, Inst. theol., VII (p. 163).) Accordingly, Scripture teaches that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8), that he is ‘good and upright’ (Ps. 25:8), that he takes ‘no pleasure’ in the death of his creatures (Ezek. 18:32), would have none perish (2 Pet. 3:9), and ‘will have all men to be saved‘ (1 Tim. 2:4). (Cf. Venema, Inst. theol., VII (p. 163), with Turretin, Inst. theol. elencticae, III.xx.2, 5.)”
.
“The affections are, therefore [after quoting Venema and Ames], either inward and inalterable dispositions of the divine will or figurative attributions based on ad extra manifestations. Furthermore, what makes the attribution of an affection to God figurative or metaphorical is its apparent variation, temporality, or alterability.
Significantly, this figurative or metaphorical understanding of some of the divine affections as inward, permanent dispositions and others as ad extra manifestations of permanent dispositions in no way lessened the Reformed interest in the topic–nor did it in any way undermine the discussion of the divine affections in the works of popular piety written during the era of orthodoxy. It is even possible to argue the opposite, that the Reformed orthodox reading of the biblical language of divine affections as not indicating alterations of the divine essence but, nonetheless, as descriptive of genuine patterns of relationship between God and his creation, enhanced the interest of theologians, pastors, and authors of treatises of popular piety in the divine affections…
…Nor, indeed, has the basic doctrinal assumption shifted: like the Reformers, the orthodox assume that God has affectiones that characterize his relationship to the world and that some analogy can be drawn between these ‘divine affections’ and the affections that belong to human willing–with the major qualification that, unlike human affections, the divine affections do not indicate essential change in God and that they are permanent rather than transient dispositions. Because of the difficulties inherent in the term ‘affection,’ some of the Reformed prefer to speak of the divine ‘virtues.’ (Thus, Leigh, Treatise, II.x (pp. 78-79); Mastricht, Theoretico-practica theologia, II.xv.18-19.)
The question of the ‘affections’ (affectiones or adfectiones) and ‘passions’ (passiones) of the divine will arises rather naturally as a result of the definition and discussion of the voluntas Dei, granting the context of traditional, Christian Aristotelianism and scholastic faculty psychology within which Protestant discussions of mind and will took place, both in the time of the Reformation and afterward. (See Muller, Unaccommodated Calvin, pp. 159-173; and idem, God, Creation, and Providence, pp. 143-149, 167-169, 191-207.) The terminology is itself interesting: the language of affections and passions is typically a language indicating the changeableness of a living being, specifically of the soul, in its sentiments or dispositions. Strictly, an affection or passion is an acquired quality. (Francois Bremondy, “Affection,” in Encyclopedie philosophique universelle, II/1, p. 49.) An affection is usually favorable or positive, whereas a passion is usually negative.
Thus, an affection is a disposition of nature or an inclination of will toward an object and, as such, it can indicate either a transient disposition (in contrast to a habitus) that is caused by an external object or a permanent disposition or virtue. (Cf. Heidanus, Corpus theol., II (p. 172); Venema, Inst. theol., viii (p. 180).) It is the latter sense of the term, as a permanent disposition or virtue, that the orthodox accept.
A passion, most strictly, is a form of suffering and would not have the connotation of a permanent disposition and certainly not of a disposition positively directed toward an object. Passions, moreover, indicate a declension from an original or natural condition that is at variance with the fundamental inclination of the individual–and, therefore, a loss of power or self-control. (Venema, Inst. theol., viii (p. 181).) A virtue is, quite simply, a moral perfection–in the case of God, the perfection of his understanding and/or will.¹
¹ (Ames, Marrow, I.iv.63; note that this understanding of affections and passions reflects the standard categories of predication, in which action and passion denote respectively, the act of a subject and the subject being acted upon: thus, the point of the theological argument is that God act[s] but is not acted upon.)”
.
“The Reformed orthodox describe God’s love as an act of the divine will or a movement toward the good–both toward the good in itself and toward the good as it is embodied in the creature. Indeed, the predications of will, love, and goodness conjoin in the basic definition, granting that the divine will is God’s propensity for the good that is ultimately the divine essence itself as the source of all good–and amor [love], strictly defined, is a propensity for the good (Mastricht, Theoretico-practica theol., II.xvii.3, 4, 6; cf. Brakel, Redelijke Godsdienst, I.iii.33. Note the similar definitions in Arminius, Disputationes privatae, XX.iii-iv.), or a desire or ‘appetite for union.’ (Heidanus, Corpus theol., II (p. 172).)”
.
“There is also a certain logic of interrelation of attributes in the orthodox presentation of the voluntary love of God for the world–God’s propensity to love the finite order rests on the grounding of the finite order in the goodness of God:
‘From the goodness springs the love of God, by which God is inclined towards the creature, and delights to do it good, and as it were, to unite himself with it.’ (Pictet, Theol. chr., II.vii.4; cf. Mastricht, Theoretico-practica theol., II.xvii.8; Synopsis purioris theologiae, VI.xl.)
The love of God, therefore, belongs to the category of affection, arising inwardly and extending outward, and is not to be understood as a passion, arising because of some outward good that it apprehends and desires. (Beza et al. Propositions and Principles, IX.viii.)”
.
“Thus, gratia Dei [the grace of God] is that perfection or attribute according to which God, out of a totally gracious and unmerited love, is conceived as willing to communicate himself to his creatures. (Rijssen, Summa Theol., III.xliii) Considered as affective, as ratione actus interni in Deo [a rule of the internal act in God], grace is a propensity of the divine will–while considered as effective it is the gifts of the Spirit graciously given to us by God, either the ordinary gifts of faith, hope, and love or the extraordinary gifts bestowed upon the church for its edification. (Rijssen, Summa theol., III.xliii.)”
.
“This pattern of definition results in the understanding of mercy as an affection, although there remains among the Reformed orthodox the assumption that the inclination to aid the creature is so intrinsic to the divine nature that mercy also can be understood as an essential attribute of God: the disposition belongs to God essentially, although its transient revelation belongs to the category of affection. (Cf. Brakel, Redelijke Godsdienst, I.iii.35.)”
.
On Divine Willingness
Order of
General 2
Articles 7
Quotes 36+
Historical 1
On Willingness in General
Order of
Quote 1
Historical 1
.
Quote
1300’s
John Duns Scotus
Ordinatio, tr. Peter Simpson (2013 / 2023), bk. 1, dist. 26-48, 47. Whether divine permission is some act of the divine will?, pp. 198-99
“3. I reply: In us can be distinguished a double act of will, namely to will and to will-not, and each is a positive act; and if they be about the same object, they are contrary acts – which also are expressed by different words, which are ‘to love’ and ‘to hate’.
4. And both [of these] in us can be distinguished, so that to will is distinguished into efficacious and remiss:
so that ‘efficacious willing’ is called that whereby to the will is not only the being of what is willed pleasing but, if it can at once put what is willed into being, it at once does; so too ‘efficacious willing-not’ is called that whereby not only does he who wills-not impede something but, if he can, he altogether destroys it.
‘Remiss will’ is that by which a willed thing so pleases that yet the will does not put it into being, although it can put it into being; ‘remiss willing-not’ is that whereby the thing willed-not thus displeases that it [the will] not prevent it from being, although it could.
5. In us, therefore, weak [or remiss] willing-not – properly speaking – seems to be the permission of something bad that I know: for I am not said to permit that about which I know nothing, or that which is so done by another that it pleases me – but that which I know is wrongly done by another but do not prevent, this I permit.
6. A sign of efficacious willing, if it be done immediately by the will, is fulfilment; if through another, it is precept; and of weak [remiss] willing in us, perhaps counsel is a sign, or persuasion or warning. And a sign of weak [remiss] willing-not is permission or dissuasion; and a sign of efficacious willing-not is prohibition.
7. But this distinction could be posited in God, so that as one act of his is willing and willing-not (and this without contrariety or dissimilarity in the act in itself), so over certain objects of his willed would be put ‘efficacious willing’, and similarly his willing-
not over certain objects: willed-not ‘efficacious’, and over certain, not [willed that way, but rather it is willed remissly].
And then could God’s willing-not be called weak with respect to those objects which he so wills-not that he wills-not to prohibit them; and this willing-not of God can be called his permission – and so the act in God, insofar as it passes over the object, thus disposes itself to the divine will.
8. But if this [n. 7] does not please (to the extent the willing-not of anything posited in being would seem to be with some sadness and with some imperfection of the volition and will), then it can be said that permission outwardly, or the sign, is that an effect be, which [sign] however is against the divine precept – and this is the permission that is a sign of the divine will; but to this does not correspond anything in the divine will save the not-willing to prohibit something being done, or the not willing-not, which is a negation of a divine positive act and consequently is not a positive [act].
9. And that he is called ‘willing to allow’, this can be meant, not that he has a direct willing about what he permits, but a reflex act; for he offers to his will that this man will sin or is sinning, and first his will does not have a ‘to will’ about this man (for he cannot will him to have sin); secondly he can understand his will not to be willing this, and then he can will his will ‘not to will this’, – and so he is called willing to allow and to allow willingly; willing to permit and to permit willingly.
Just as on the other side, with Judas presented to him: first God has a not willing him glory, and not first a willing-not (according to the final position in Ord. I, d. 41, n. 45); and he can then secondly reflect on this negation of act and will it – and so willing (or willingly) he does not choose Judas going to sin finally and a willing-not of glory, but a non-willing of glory.”
.
Historical
Post-Reformation
Quote
Richard Muller
Dictionary of Latin & Greek Theological Terms Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2017)
“velleitas (or velle): willingness; thus (1) the condition of having a capability of willing or the ability of a spiritual being to act without exterior compulsion; or (2) a general willingness or nonefficacious openness of will to the occurrence of something, as distinct from an actual or efficacious willing. See arbitrium; voluntas.”
Articles
1500’s
Calvin, John – ‘Highlighting Richard Muller’s Citations of Calvin on God’s Slowness to Anger & Willingness to Save’ ed. Tony Byrne from Calvin, Commentary on Nahum 1:3; Joel 2:13 & Jonah 4:2 at Theological Meditations
.
1600’s
Greenhill, Ezekiel – Sermons of Christ… (London: R.I., 1656)
‘Christ’s Willingness to Save Sinners, Sermon 1’ 145
‘Christ’s Willingness to Save Sinners, Sermon 2’ 165-85
Burroughs, Jeremiah – Gospel Reconciliation… (London: Cole, 1657)
60. 4th Doctrine, that God and Christ are exceeding willing and desirous to be reconciled to sinners
61. 1st Argument, manifesting the exceeding willingness of God to be reconciled to sinners
62. 2nd Argument
63. 3rd Argument
64. 4th Argument
65. 5th Argument
66. 6th Argument
67. 7th Argument
68. 8th Argument
69. 9th Argument
70. 10th argument
71. 11th argument
72. 12th Argument
73. 13th argument
74. 14th Argument
75. 15th Argument
76. 16th Argument
77. Christ’s willingness to be reconciled to sinners further opened
78. Objections answered concerning the willingness of God and Christ to be reconciled to sinners
Powell, Vavasor – Divine Love, discovered in Three Dialogues in Divine Love: or the Willingness of Jesus Christ to save Sinners discovered in Three Divine Dialogues... (London: 1677), pp. 1-103
Gouge, Thomas – ‘Thomas Gouge (1605–1681) on God’s Willingness to Save’ from “A Word to Sinners & a Word to Saints” in The Works of the Late Reverend & Pious Mr. Thomas Gouge (Albany: Linday, 1815), pp. 53–55 at Theological Meditations
.
1700’s
Edwards, Jonathan – ‘Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) on Common Grace & God’s Willingness to Save’ at Theological Meditations
.
2000’s
Murray, Iain – ‘Iain H. Murray on God’s Universal Love and Willingness to Save all Men’ ed. Tony Byrne from Murray, “The Cross: The Pulpit of God’s Love,” Banner of Truth 494-95 (Nov-Dec, 2004), pt. 1, pp. 8-9; pt. 2, pp. 16-17 at Theological Meditations
Quotes
Order of
Aquinas
Calvin
Udall
Dickson
Adams
Testard & Amyraut
Davenant & Vasquez
Stock
Caryl
Burroughs
Twisse
Rutherford
Culverwell
Estius
Dickson
Collinges
Durham
Palmer
Gataker
Burgess
Gray
Lye
Wamphray
Gale
Charnock
Brooks
Bunyan
Flavel
Howe
Haddington
Fuller
Colquhoun
M’Cheyne
Nettleton
Candlish
Burns
Kennedy of Dingwall
Beeke & Smalley
.
1200’s
Thomas Aquinas
Commentary on the Sentences, pt. 4, dist. 43, question 1, article 4, Response to Quaestiuncula 1, reply to objection 2
“The perfect desire of the saints cannot be in vain; but nothing prevents their conditional desire from being in vain, and that is the kind of desire by which we do not wish to be stripped but clothed [2 Cor. 5:4] about, namely, if that ‘were possible’. And this desire is called a willingness, ‘velleity’, by some.”
.
Summa, pt. 1, quest. 19, article 6, Whether the will of God is always fulfilled?, reply to objection 1
“The words of the apostle, ‘God will have all men to be saved, etc.’ [1 Tim. 2:4] can be understood in three ways:
Third, according to [John] Damascene (Of the Orthodox Faith, 2.29), they are understood of the antecedent will of God; not of the consequent will. This distinction must not be taken as applying to the divine will itself, in which there is nothing antecedent nor consequent, but to the things willed.
To understand this we must consider that everything, in so far as it is good, is willed by God. A thing taken in its primary sense, and absolutely considered, may be good or evil, and yet when some additional circumstances are taken into account, by a consequent consideration may be changed into the contrary.
Thus that a man should live is good; and that a man should be killed is evil, absolutely considered. But if in a particular case we add that a man is a murderer or dangerous to society, to kill him is a good; that he live is an evil. Hence it may be said of a just judge, that antecedently he wills all men to live; but consequently wills the murderer to be hanged.
In the same way God antecedently wills all men to be saved, but consequently wills some to be damned, as His justice exacts. Nor do we will simply, what we will antecedently, but rather we will it in a qualified manner; for the will is directed to things as they are in themselves, and in themselves they exist under particular qualifications. Hence we will a thing simply inasmuch as we will it when all particular circumstances are considered; and this is what is meant by willing consequently.
Thus it may be said that a just judge wills simply the hanging of a murderer, but in a qualified manner he would will him to live, to wit, inasmuch as he is a man. Such a qualified will may be called a willingness rather than an absolute will. Thus it is clear that whatever God simply wills takes place; although what He wills antecedently may not take place.”
.
1500’s
John Calvin
Commentary on Deuteronomy 28, verse 63
“‘And it shall come to pass, that as the Lord rejoiced over you.’ The wonderful and inestimable love of God towards his people is here set forth, via, that He had rejoiced in heaping blessings upon them; wherefore their depravity was all the more base and intolerable, in that God, though voluntarily disposed to be bountiful, was obliged by it to lay aside His affection for them.
But although it is only by a metaphor that God is said to rejoice in destroying the wicked, yet it is not without good reason that this expression is applied to Him; that we may know that He can no more fail to be the defender of His Law, and the Avenger of its contempt, than deny Himself. He complains, indeed, by Isaiah, (Isa. 10:24) that He is unwillingly forced to punish the Jews; but these two things are quite consistent, that He rejoices in His just judgment and at the same time is mindful of His clemency and indulgence, so that He would rather pardon, if the wickedness of men would allow Him.”
.
“Here we see what care about our salvation is manifested by our Heavenly Father, who wishes us to take hold of his power and goodness, that we may know how great it is, and may partake of it more and more abundantly; for He would wish to deal with us on the same familiar terms as with his children, if we did not prevent Him by our wickedness. Since, therefore, we are incapable of enjoying his fatherly tenderness, He must display his strength and majesty, that, being awed by it, and affected by the anticipation of the judgment, we may humbly entreat Him, and sincerely implore peace and pardon. Now, this is done when we are truly converted to Him; for, so long as we please ourselves, and flatter our vices, we cannot but displease Him; and, on the other hand, if we enter into peace with Him, we must make war against Satan and sin.
How earnestly God desires to be reconciled to us appears still more clearly from the repetition of the words. He might have said, in a single word, that He is merciful and ready to bestow pardon; and therefore, when He twice repeats the words, ‘that he may make peace with Me,’ He declares that willingly and most earnestly He hastens to blot out all our offenses.”
.
Commentary on Isaiah 42, verse 21, “The Lord is well pleased for his righteousness’ sake; he will magnify the law, and make it honourable.”
“‘The Lord is well pleased.’…
This passage is interpreted in various ways. Some render it, “The Lord has so willed it;” others, “He is merciful;” but, for my own part, I have translated it, “The Lord is willing,” that is, disposed and inclined to deliver his people, and that for the purpose of magnifying his Law and extolling his righteousness. Thus God assigns the reason why He is ready to aid those who are unworthy, that He wishes to spread his glory in their salvation, that in this manner his righteousness may be illustriously displayed, and that his Law may prevail and flourish. As to the heavy calamities that have come on the Jews, the reason is, that of their own accord they have resolved to be blind, and to bring afflictions on themselves, instead of obeying God; for otherwise the Lord would have wished to enrich and exalt them….
Others render it, “For his righteous one,” and refer it to Christ; but they mistake the meaning of the word צדקו, (tzidko) and unquestionably He speaks of righteousness, and means that the Lord would willingly have displayed the magnificence of his promises: and would have given proofs of his righteousness in preserving his people, if they had not shown themselves to be ungrateful and unworthy.
Some think that the Lord here offers an excuse for Himself, because, when the people whom He had adopted were exposed to so many evils, it appeared as if his truth were shaken, and that the prophet intended to meet this calumny, for they were seized and became a prey, not because the Lord delights in their miseries, but because He prefers his righteousness to everything else.
For my own part, I explain it simply to mean, “The Lord, for the sake of doing honor to his Law, was inclined to do good to his people, in order that his glory and righteousness might shine forth in it; but his people showed themselves to be unworthy of so great a favor; and, therefore, by their own obduracy they made their wounds incurable.”
Besides, we ought to learn from this passage the reason why the Lord bestows so many favors on his Church. It is, that he may promote his Law, that is, that He may bring men to honor his majesty, and that his truth may shine more and more. When He says that the Lord is willing and inclined; He shows plainly that He is not induced to it by anyone else than by Himself; but He expresses it more fully, when He adds, on account of his righteousness; for He excludes everything that men could bring. Nor is the Lord prompted by any other consideration to do good, than because He is righteous; for no merit or worth will be found among men.”
.
“‘For He abounds in pardoning.’ Now, because it is difficult to remove terror from trembling minds, Isaiah draws all argument from the nature of God, that He will be ready to pardon and to be reconciled. Thus the Holy Spirit dwells on this part of doctrine, because we always doubt whether or not God is willing to pardon us; for, although we entertain some thoughts of his mercy, yet we do not venture fully to believe that, it belongs to us. It is not without reason, therefore, that this clause is added, that we may not be hindered by uncertainty or doubt as to his infinite compassion toward us.”
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“And such a hope ought especially to encourage us to repent, for we see that God is ready to receive us and seeks reconciliation with us, and is always prepared to forgive all our sins, provided we from the heart return to Him; and He seems as one unwilling to inflict punishment.”
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verse 32, “But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies.”
“But as it cannot be but that God will smite us with his rods, not only because we deserve to be smitten, but also because it is expedient, it is necessary to flee to this consolation which is offered to us, even that God having afflicted us with grief will again shew us compassion, even ‘according to the multitude of his mercies.’ He confirms the truth of what he alleges by a reference to the very nature of God Himself.
Hence, that the faithful might not debate with themselves whether God would be propitious to them, after having inflicted on them a temporary punishment, the prophet comes to their aid, and sets before them the mercy of God, or rather mercies, in the plural number; as though he had said, that it could not be that God should deny Himself, and that therefore He would be always merciful to his people; for otherwise his mercy would be obliterated, yea, that mercy which is inseparable from his eternal essence and divinity.”
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verse 33, “For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.”
“This is another confirmation of the same truth, that God takes no delight in the evils or miseries of men. It is indeed a strong mode of speaking which the prophet adopts, but very suitable. God, we know, puts on, as it were, our form or manner, for He cannot be comprehended in his inconceivable glory by human minds. Hence it is that He transfers to Himself what properly can only apply to men.
God surely never acts unwillingly nor feignedly: how then is that suitable which Jeremiah declares—that God does not afflict from his heart [as the Hebrew is literally]? But God, as already said, does here assume the character of man; for though He afflicts us with sorrow as He pleases, yet true it is that He delights not in the miseries of men; for if a father desires to benefit his own children, and deals kindly with them, what ought we to think of our heavenly Father?
“Ye,” says Christ, “who are evil, know how to do good to your children” (Mt. 7:11); what then are we to expect from the very fountain of goodness? As, then, parents are not willingly angry with their children, nor handle them roughly, there is no doubt but that God never punishes men except when He is constrained.
There is, as I have said, an impropriety in the expression, but it is enough to know, that God derives no pleasure from the miseries of men, as profane men say, who utter such blasphemies as these, that we are like balls with which God plays, and that we are exposed to many evils, because God wishes to have as it were, a pleasant and delectable spectacle in looking on the innumerable afflictions, and at length on the death of men.
That such thoughts, then, might not tempt us to unbelief, the prophet here puts a check on us, and declares that God does not afflict from his heart, that is, willingly, as though He delighted in the evils of men, as a judge, who, when he ascends his throne and condemns the guilty to death, does not do this from his heart, because he wishes all to be innocent, and thus to have a reason for acquitting them; but yet he willingly condemns the guilty, because this is his duty. So also God, when He adopts severity towards men, He indeed does so willingly, because He is the judge of the world; but He does not do so from the heart, because He wishes all to be innocent—for far away from Him is all fierceness and cruelty; and as He regards men with paternal love, so also He would have them to be saved, were they not as it were by force to drive Him to rigor.
And this feeling he also expresses in Isaiah, “Ah! I will take consolation from mine adversaries.” (Isa. 1:24) He calls them adversaries who so often provoked Him by their obstinacy; yet He was led unwillingly to punish their sins, and hence He employed a particle expressive of grief, and exclaimed ‘Ah!’ as a father who wishes his son to be innocent, and yet is compelled to be severe with him.”
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John Udall
A Commentary upon the Lamentations of Jeremy... (London: Orwin, 1593), ch. 3, on v. 41, p. 134
“[Let us lift up our hearts] by hearty prayer send up our petitions…
[unto God] unto the creator and governor of the whole world, that only is able and willing to forgive us our sins.”
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1600’s
David Dickson
Sermons on Jeremiah’s Lamentations (1628; Naphtali Press & RHB, 2020), on Lam. 3:33, p. 205
“Verse 33. ‘For he does not afflict willingly.’ Here he tells that if God afflicts, He does it not willingly, but strokes are drawn out of His hand by our provocations and the necessity of our estate.
Objection. But how can anything be done to us and God not willing to do it?
Answer. He is willing and not willing. [Willing,] because justice requires it, and He must correct us or lose us. Unwilling, because strokes are extorted out of His hand. We see then that simply and absolutely or properly God delights not in our affliction, but when He afflicts, it is extorted from His justice.
2. This shows the procuring cause of our grief is not in the Lord but in ourselves. God is the causer of our grief but not the procurer of it. God is the worker and {bringer about} of grief but no the causer of it.
…
Use Two. If God afflicted not willingly, then be sure He will comfort willingly. As He is unwilling to strike, so He is ready to comfort. As a father would rejoice to see his son thrive, so would God to see us study to please Him. He can let the rod lie aside us all day, clap [pat] our heads and lay His benefits to our hand. Know then, as it is against God’s will that you come into grief, so it is with His will that you be comforted, or if He let you lie still in that grief, it is because He sees it is necessary for you to steep yourself in trouble [so] that your perverse nature [may] be humbled.”
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Thomas Adams
An Exposition upon the Second Epistle General of St. Peter (1633; Soli Deo Gloria, 1990), on 2 Pet. 3:9, “Not willing that any should perish,” pp. 693-95
“Why then does He punish with perdition? No otherwise than as some just judge, that would have all men live regularly, and free from disorders; but having transgressed the laws, justice compels him, and that by a good and rectified will, to punish them.
Some would have this will of God to be velleitatem [willingness] rather than voluntatem [will]; not so much an absolute will and resolution, as a willingness and desire: not unlike a merchant’s casting his freight overboard in a dangerous tempest. He would willingly save them, and yet he is willingly content to lose them, says one.”
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Paul Testard & Moses Amyraut
as described by the French Reformed, Synod of Alancon (1637) in John Quick, Synodicon, vol. 2, ch. 15, article 23, pp. 355-56
“[Testard & Amuraut] ascribed unto God, as it were, a notion of velleity [willingness], and strong affections, and vehement desires of things which He has not, nor ever will effectuate; they having declared that by those figurative ways of speaking, and anthropopathical, they designed, to speak properly, none other thing than this, that if men were obedient to the commandments and invitations of God, their faith and obedience would be most acceptable unto Him…”
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On John Davenant & Gabriel Vasquez
Michael Lynch, John Davenant’s Hypothetical Universalism: a Defense of Catholic & Reformed Orthodoxy (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021), 7.2.2 Voluntas Providentialis, pp. 151-52
“Davenant also often distinguishes between conditional and absolute decrees with respect to the voluntas simplicis complacentiae. Absolute decrees properly fall under God’s voluntas beneplaciti, whereas God’s voluntas simplicis complacentiae is often expressed conditionally in Scripture. Thus, when Scripture says God wills the salvation of all, it is on the condition of believing in Christ— an act “so agreeable unto Gods will that wheresoever it is found it shall be rewarded.” Consider, for example, God’s voluntas simplicis complacentiae by which God is said to desire or will the salvation of all. This will can be understood as an effectual will (virtually, in itself) with a condition. That is, it is a mixed conditional, as opposed to a mere conditional.¹
¹ On the distinction between a mixed conditional and a mere conditional decree, see Ruiz de Montoya, Commentaria ac Disputationes de Scientia, de Ideis, de Veritate, ac de Vita Dei… (Paris: Sebastian Cramoisy, 1629), VI.2 [pp. 38– 40] LXXI.7 [p. 744]. It is called a mixed conditional because, as Ruiz says, this antecedent will is “necessarily and essentially conjoined with [God’s will of] simple complacency, and partly with an efficacious will, as far as it pertains to God’s part” (Commentaria . . . De Voluntate Dei, XX.1 [p. 215]). Cf. Davenant, Animadversions, 225– 27).
As the sixteenth-century Jesuit Gabriel Vásquez explains,
“God, by way of an agreement [pacto], willed our salvation by a simple love [affectu] and that salvation is pleasing to him, so that unless sins hinder it, he effectually wills it… therefore because of this mixed [implicitae] will under a condition, we say that God has a conditional will, or as they say, willingness [velleitatem].” (Commentariorum, ac Disputationum in Primam Partem S. Thomae, Tomus Primus (Ingolstadt: Andreas Angermarius, 1609), Disp. LXXXIII.4 [p. 511])
So God may be said to approbatively love the salvation of all, insofar as the objects of faith and repentance are well-pleasing to him, while also permitting the failing of the event, viz., the salvation of any particular person, on account of their failure to perform the condition.
Because of God’s foreknowledge of all future actions of all human beings, as well as his absolute power to cause them to do any good which would lead to blessedness or leave them in their sin leading to destruction, all of God’s decrees are either absolute or mixed conditionals. Moreover, all decrees are either revealed or hidden. The decree regarding a person’s election is hidden; on the other hand, the decree that God will save any person that believes is revealed. Decrees that come in the form of a condition— such as “If Esau believes, he will be saved”— are not pure conditionals, as noted above, but are said to be mixed because they are grounded upon God’s absolute, effectual, and revealed will that he has bound himself to, namely, that he will save any who repent and believe. According to an eternal and inviolable divine ordination, there is an indissoluble connection between faith and salvation. Davenant explains:
“It is an absolute decree of the Divine will published in the Gospel, That whosoever repenteth, believeth, persevereth, shall be saved: From hence is derived that mixt conditionall decree, If Cain, if Judas, if any other repent and believe, they shall be saved.”
In short, when Davenant speaks of a conditional decree, he understands such decrees as founded upon God’s absolute will by which he has decreed that the apodosis follow (infallibly) from the fulfillment of the protasis.”
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Richard Stock
A Stock of Divine Knowledge, being a lively Description of the Divine Nature, or the Divine Essence, Attributes & Trinity particularly explained and profitably applied… (London: T.H., 1641) Stock (c.1568-1626) was an English puritan.
ch. 13, pp. 133-34
“Objection: Again it is objected, the apostle Paul says in 1 Tim. 2:4 that God would have all men saved: How should it be then that any should perish, unless his will be changeable?
Answer: Ambrose upon this place of the apostle expounds it thus: God will have all men to be saved, but so as they come to Him, He will have them saved; if they will salvation to themselves; and if this sense be admitted, there is no shadow of change in God, though many be not saved, because those many that are not saved, do not seek salvation…
God will have all men saved, He wills the salvation even of the reprobate, as a thing in itself good and suitable to the disposition of a gracious God: but yet He does not determine or appoint it, and therefore though many perish, there is no change in God’s will: this place showing what God might approve of being done, not what He determined to do; He wills it by an antecedent will, as in itself considered; but not with a consequent will, and here is no change in God’s will;”
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ch. 19, Of the Anger of God, pp. 217-18
“…when He has decreed it, He does not presently execute it, but He does denounce it: why? because He is most merciful, slow to wrath, and therefore He does denounce: Isa. 34:7, He is a God that will not punish, but upon necessity; He would willingly be always showing good, and when He is angry, He is compelled and provoked to it; and because He would not willingly punish, therefore He denounces punishment; He speaks often, before He will do it once, that if it might be, He might be prevented by repentance.
Lastly, after threatening, He proceeds to execution, not with delight (God delights not in the death of a sinner, He afflicts not willingly), but compassion. As Titus the Emperor, before he sacked the city of Jerusalem, wept over it, pitying them he should destroy it; so does God, when threatnings prevail not, and by them, men are not reclaimed, then He comes to execution… as Savian says of Sodom, that God showed mercy, in that He was long before He did execute; and justice, and wrath, in that He did execute at last.”
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Joseph Caryl
The Arraignment of Unbelief (London, 1645), p. 40 HT: Tony Byrne
“Thirdly, God has expressed Himself in Scripture, as much, yea more, for his willingness, than for his power to help; therefore we need not make our uncertainty of his will the reason of our unbelief, when we say, we are assured of his power: God has said, He is Almighty, etc., but there are not only words importing that God is willing to help his people, but promises and oaths that He will (Ps. 50:15) ‘Call upon me, and I will deliver thee’; Eze. 33:11, ‘As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked (that place is meant primarily of a civil death, a death in trouble) but that the wicked turn from his way and live.’
Yea, God has manifested a willingness to help a people, which his power has not seconded; but He never manifested his power, when his will did not concur: that most passionate exclamation, ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, How often would I have gathered thee! etc.’ [Mt. 23:37] implies a general willingness in Christ to gather Jerusalem, yet Christ did not act his divine power effectually for their gathering.”
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Jeremiah Burroughs
Gospel Reconciliation, or Christ’s Trumpet of Peace to the World (d. 1646; 1657; Soli Deo Gloria, 1997)
Table of Contents
“The Fourth Doctrine Propounded in Chapter 45: that God and Christ are exceedingly willing and desirous to be reconciled with sinners.”
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ch. 74, The Fourteenth Argument, pp. 316-17
“This argues God’s willingness to be reconciled, that the Lord is thus pleading with you. And let me speak to everyone in this place who has felt God pleading thus with them. Know that the Lord, by this work of His, strives with you to bring you to be reconciled to Him. This is nothing other than the striving of the Spirit of God Himself with you, though perhaps you think this is troublesome to you.”
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William Twisse
A Treatise of Mr. [John] Cotton’s clearing certain doubts concerning Predestination, together with an Examination Thereof (London: J.D., 1646), Question 2
pp. 54-55
“Come we to your [John Cotton‘s] proper opinion: You ‘do not acknowledge any unwillingness in God to reward the men of this world with life, upon any condition whatsoever.‘
I know no reason why you should conceive any of our divines to differ from you in this, although you had spoken out your meaning never so plainly and fully: not only denying unwillingness, but acknowledging a willingness, as afterwards you do; not a willingness only, which may have place though joined with a will to the contrary, as in all mixed actions, which yet are not incident to God, though they are to a creature, as who sometimes does some thing volens nolens [willingly not willingly]:
for certainly God will save any man upon condition he believes and repents: and on the other side, neither is there any unwillingness in God, but a willingness rather, yea and that a resolute will to damn any man in case he dies in infidelity and impenitency. For we have the clear word of God to justify us herein, professing most evidently that ‘Whosoever believeth shall be saved; whosoever believeth not shall be damned.’
So that I wonder not a little whereto these expressions [of Cotton’s] tend, save that commonly such is the issue of imperfect conceptions, all preparations to the justifying of them fall miserably short of that whereunto they aim.”
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p. 58
“2… And on the other side, it is equally as true that God has a willingness to glorify his vindicative justice as well as remunerative: to punish with death any one of his elect upon condition of final disobedience and impenitency, as well as to reward with life, upon condition of obedience and repentance.”
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Samuel Rutherford
Christ Dying & Drawing Sinners to Himself… (London: J.D., 1647), pt. 3, pp. 445-47
“6. For the ground and warrant of Christ’s willingness to save and draw sinners, do but consider: 1. The words of the text, ‘I will draw all men to Me;’ it is as if He would say, ‘I will baulk no nation, nor any man upon a national respect;’
the first covenant to the Jews suffered a mighty exception: What is God, the God of the Jews only? Have all the nations of the earth done with their part of heaven and salvation, but only the narrow trinket and bit of the earth in poor little Judea? This made the Gospel despised and liable to sad and heavy calumnies. Christ must have narrow bowels, and must be ebb, short, and thin in free grace if the matter be so.
Nay but, Christ has mercy for all men: ‘I will draw all men,’ that is, multitudes of Jews and gentiles: for that Christ draws all and every one without exception, and that by his death, is against Scripture and experience; but He has an ‘all’ that he draws: Tit. 2:11, ‘The grace of God has appeared to all men [Greek]; what grace? the teaching grace of God that teaches us to wait for the blessed hope and the appearance of the glory and of our Savior Jesus Christ: sure, this must bee the preached Gospel; now the Gospel by Scripture experience, [and by] consent of Arminians, never appeared, in the least sound, to all and every son of Adam; then Christ must have another ‘all,’ a fair and numerous multitude whom He saves and draws, and this says He, had a good will to save all, and that his elect ones believe…
2. Christ is willing to take away all heart-exceptions of unbelief from men, as… Eze. 33, The people slandered the Lord, He delighted so to have the people pine away in their iniquities, that He would punish them for no fault, but the children’s teeth should be set on edge for the sins of the father and the grapes that they eat not themselves. The Lord answers that calumny, Eze. 18, ‘And here, as I live, I delight not so (so as you slanderously, and blasphemously say) in the death of a sinner, by my life, I desire you may repent and live, nor have I pleasure to punish innocent men, for no sin at all.'”
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Ezekiel Culverwell
A Treatise of Faith (1648), pp. 184-86
“…I only now advise every one who is kept from believing by this, that he knows not whether he be contained under the pardon or no, not to look to God’s secret will, but to attend to God’s revealed will in his Word, wherein it is expressly said that God would have no man to perish, but would have all men come to repentance [2 Pet. 3:9]; and so oft. That He desires not the death of a sinner [Eze. 18:23,32], that hereby he may be moved to seek and hope for that mercy, which God is so willing to bestow upon him, if the fault be not in his own self, as it was in the unbelieving Jews in Jerusalem, of whom our Savior complained, saying, ‘How often would I have gathered thy Children, as the Hen gathereth her Chickens under her wings, and ye would not?’ [Mt. 23:37]
A further manifestation of this willingness in God to save sinners, may be seen in his gracious invitation of the unworthiest to come to the wedding of his Son [Mt. 22:2-3]: yea, more by his beseeching sinners to be reconciled to Him [2 Cor. 5:20]: and by the many and weighty arguments He uses to persuade men to believe, by the great rewards, earthly and spiritual, temporal and eternal, which all believers shall enjoy; and by the fearful woes which shall fall on all unbelievers, both in this life, and that to come, as plentifully is to be seen throughout the Scriptures.”
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William Estius
as quoted below in Edward Leigh, Annotations upon all the New Testament Philological & Theological… (London: W.W., 1650), on Rom. 11, verse 22, “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.” Estius was a Roman Catholic.
“Verse 22…. ‘The goodness’, the word signifies the propensity of God to do good.¹ ‘Severity’ [Greek], such a severity as notes a cutting off: which word Paul uses the more to set forth God’s goodness to us.
¹ [Greek] benignitatem. Significatur ea voce facilitas ac promptitudo praestandi beneficia; Estius. [‘Goodness’. By this word is signified a readiness and willingness to bestow benefits.]”
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David Dickson
A Brief Explication of the Other Fifty Psalms, from Ps. 50 to Ps. 100 (London: T.R. & E.M., 1653), on Ps. 81:13, pp. 254-55
“…and if it be asked, what may be imported by this speech properly? We answer, ‘O that my people had hearkened unto Me, etc.’ [Ps. 81:13] shows these six things:
…
4. Fourthly, that God delights not in the death or destruction of his people, but that they should repent and live.
…
6. Sixthly, that God requires a suitable meeting of his people to his dispensations, that is, that they may be so willing to hearken to his voice, and so loath to offend Him, as He does manifest by Word and works his willingness to save them and his loathness to destroy them.
From the Lord’s lamenting, learn further:
…
3. He who hears God uttering his wishes for the conversion of His people and lamenting that His Word is not believed, and that his offer of grace is not received, does give God an evil meeting and neither believes God’s goodness, nor cares for his own salvation, except he join with God lamenting his own misbelief in time past, and do with heartily the same with God for his own conversion for time to come;”
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John Collinges
The Works of John Collings, vol. 1 (London: Tomlins, 1655), A Cordial for a Fainting Soul
pp. 57–58 HT: Tony Byrne
“8. He invites, Isa. 55:1-3, ‘Ho, every one that thirsteth come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money come, yea buy and eat without money, and without price;’ and again, verse 3, ‘Incline your ear and come unto Me, and your soul shall live;’ Hark how He calls, Mt. 11:29, ‘Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and heavy laden, and I will ease you.’ The Father says come, the Son says come, the Spirit says come; you that are in the hedges come; He sends out his servants to highway-people, Mt. 22:9. To as many as are found there: Why stay you disputing his will when He so often says ‘Come, come‘? Rev. 22:17, ‘The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come,’ and let him that heareth say ‘Come,’ and let him that is athirst come, and whosoever will let him drink of the water of life freely.’ Is not all this enough to let thee know God is willing, and Christ is willing to receive thee? Lo, Christ will come to thee.
9. See that essence of glory bowing the heavens and coming down, laying aside his robes of majesty, and putting on thy filthy garments; see Him tiring Himself in going about from place to place upon no other errand than this, to cry at the markets, ‘Oh, if any sinners love life, happiness; if any will go to heaven: let them come to Me; I will show them the way to my father’s bosom and endear them to my fathers heart.’ Read his sermons, observe his pains; thou wilt find a willing Savior, not excepting publicans and harlots from the kingdom of God.
10. Wouldst thou have more tokens of his will yet? See Him dying, hanging upon the cross, dropping out his last blood, breathing out his last breath, stretching out his dying arms to encircle sinners should run in to Him, breathing out the breath of free grace in his very last act upon a thief that had not an hour to live; Who shall despair? who shall say Christ is not willing to save him, and not blaspheme eternal love? Speak truth! corrupt heart say thou art not willing to be saved.
11. Is not this yet enough? Observe Him setting ministers in his Church, lest thou shouldst not read, and none should tell thee the truth of his eternal love, to speak out his good will in thine ears: All our errand is nothing but this: Sinners, Christ is willing to save you; And as ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ’s stead to be ye reconciled to God, 2 Cor. 5:20. Why canst thou not believe his will? Consider in thy Savior’s will there is not only a latitude for, but an eagerness of thy eternal salvation: Why therefore dost thou say, ‘My sins are so great that God will not pardon me?’ Believe; O blaspheme not the God of infinite good-will.”
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Sermon 9, p. 154
“Behold! He stands at the door and knocks: He is willing, He is willing, He stands at the door: thy opening is after his knocking; He knocks this day, He calls to thee (Ah Lord! Break open the door that will not open!) thou are prevented with love, He stands at the door, and knocks before thou canst have the least thought of opening; Hark (sinner!) hear Him knocking; ‘Turn, turn, why will ye die O house of Israel?’”
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James Durham
The Unsearchable Riches of Christ (1764; Soli Deo Gloria, 2002), sermon 3, ‘Gospel Presentations are the Strongest Invitations’, p. 55 on Mt. 22:4, ‘All things are ready; come to the marriage.’
“Observation 5. Christ the Bridegroom and His Father are very willing to have the match made up and the marriage completed… therefore they expostulate when this marriage is refused, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you, but you would not!” (Mt. 23:37). “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if thou, even thou, hadst known in this thy day the things that belong to thy peace!” (Lk. 19:42). All these sad complaints, that Israel would not hearken to his voice, and his people would have none of Him (Ps. 81:11), that He came to His own, and His own received Him not (Jn. 1:11), and that they will not come to Him that they might have life (Jn. 5:40), make out His willingness abundantly and undeniably.”
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Anthony Palmer
The Gospel New-Creature (London: Brewster, 1658), pp. 115–16 HT: Tony Byrne
“3. If God has so laid the design to save a sinner freely, then how great, how just is the condemnation of guilty sinners that will not hasten in unto it: How could the Lord have laid it more freely then He has? Oh that any sinner, forever condemned to Hell without it, should withstand it! Why sinner? Shall the Blessed God, that might have much glory in condemning thee to all eternity, be willing to save thee freely; and wilt thou not come and bow unto Him and accept of it? All the contempt of God in all his holy commands is not like this, to turn the back upon free-mercy, free-salvation: This will be the worm that never dies to any of your souls that shall not come into and rightly accept of gospel-salvation, that you might have been saved freely, have had grace, remission of sins, Jesus Christ, the Spirit, eternal life freely, and yet turned your backs upon it?”
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Thomas Gataker
in English Annotations, or Annotations Upon all the Books of the Old and New Testament Wherein the Text is Explained, Doubts Resolved, Scriptures Paralleled, and Various Readings Observed. By the Joint-Labor of certain Learned Divines, thereunto appointed, and therein employed 3rd ed. (1645; 1658), on Isa. 55:1
“‘Come.’ As before: and again in the next branch; and yet again, in the third verse [of Isa. 55], so oft repeated, as to show God’s forwardness to invite and willingness to impart: so closely to tax men’s natural backwardness to those things, that most nearly and deeply concern his own good. See the like, Eze. 32:18, 30-32…”
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Anthony Burgess
Spiritual Refining: or A Treatise of Grace and Assurance, pt. 1 (1652; Ames, Iowa: 1990)
sermon 66, “Showing that the Damnation of Wicked Men is unpleasing to God, and that which He delights not in”, pp. 403-6 on Eze. 33:11 HT: Tony Byrne
“Let us see wherein it appears that this is not well pleasing to God; and that therefore the whole fault and blame of a man’s perdition is wholly on his own head:
First, God’s unwillingness to damn is seen in the original and primitive institution and creation of man:
He made him after his own image, endued him with all sufficient power and ability to persevere: There was no spot or blemish, or defect in him; only he was mutable and might apostatize from this happy estate if he would: Seeing then God withheld nothing from him that might make him happy, and in him He covenanted with all mankind, intending the like good to them; hence it does appear how well pleasing it was unto God that man should continue in a state of holiness before Him:
…
Secondly, God’s unwillingness is seen even since man’s revolt;
For whereas he might have dealt with us as the lapsed angels who are left without any remedy, He has appointed an ark to save some righteous persons. There was never such offers and tenders to angels as here in the text [Eze. 33:11], ‘Turn ye, turn ye; why will ye be damned?‘ Now the means God has appointed for a man’s recovery are diverse:
…
Fifthly, God’s unwillingness that the wicked should perish, appears in those internal means, and inward works of God’s Spirit, that are vouchsafed to many:
.
Sermon 69
“But God after all the despite and disdain done unto Him, is willing to be reconciled: this goodness and mercy of God should abundantly change your heart. And certainly you do not seriously and fully ponder these things in your heart, if you did, you would not a moment longer stay from running to Him: You would not only turn, but run to Him; ‘Draw us, and we will run after you,’ prays the Church, Cant. 1.”
.
Andrew Gray
The Works… (d. 1656; Aberdeen: King, 1839)
“Christ weeps to us in the law, but we do not lament; and He pipes to us in the gospel, but we do not dance: He is willing to draw us with the cords of men and with the bands of love, and yet we will not have Him to reign over us…
Christ has now given us the first and second summons, the day is approaching when the sad and woeful summons shall be sent against us, of departing from Him into these everlasting flames, out of which there is no redemption.”
.
“The second thing I shall say to persuade your heart to take Christ, freely promised and offered onto you, shall be this— will ye consider that there is willingness in the heart of Christ to take you. I shall give you these six things that speak out Christ’s willingness to receive you:
1st, Does He not command you to come and receive Him?…
2dly, He does regret and deeply resent it that they will not come. I think Christ never wept so bitterly as on that day when He wept over Jerusalem, that they would not embrace Him. Luke 19:42— If thou hadst known, even thou, at least, in this thy day, the things that belong unto thy peace; and John 5:40, Ye will not come unto Me that ye may have life. O what think ye can be the rise of this, that Christ should sorrow, because ye will not give up your hearts unto Him? Does He increase his gain when ye give Him your hearts? No, certainly; but He cannot endure the madness in you that ye should forsake your only gain.
3dly, Would you do Christ a joyful turn and make his heart glad?—embrace Him: this is clear, Luke 15:5, that when He finds the sheep that is going astray, He returns rejoicing.
4thly, I shall say more unto you—would ye make all the persons of the blessed Trinity to rejoice? Would ye make all the angels of heaven to sing? Would ye make all the saints that are round about the throne to exult for joy? Then give your hearts up to Christ and close with Him in the covenant of promise, according to that word, Cant. 6, last verse, ‘Return, return, O Shunamite. Return, return, that we may look upon thee.’ Four times that command is repeated, ‘return:’ and the great argument with which He backs it is, that all the persons of the Trinity may rejoice, ‘that we may look upon thee.’
5thly, Consider how He has condescended to give Himself at a very low rate…
Yea, 6thly, does not this speak an admirable willingness to have you? He is to give you that look…
Lastly, That speaks Christ’s willingness to receive and take you, that He does not take the first refusal. O Christians that are now in Christ! if Christ had taken a hundred refusals from you, ye should never have been in heaven; but He waits for an answer, and does not take us at our first word; according to that word, Song 5:2, ‘I am wet (says He) with the drops of the morning, and my locks with the dew of the night.’ He was long knocking at her heart, and staid a long time there patiently, suffering all the injuries He could meet with. And I would only pose you:—Think ye that if one of the richest of you were suiting a very poor woman, and she refused you so many times, would your proud heart submit to take her? And yet how oftentimes has the precious heart of Christ submitted to so many affronts and refusals that we have given Him? I think, if it were possible, Christians would wink when first they behold Christ upon the day of their espousals.”
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Thomas Lye
The Morning Exercise Methodized (London: E.M., 1660), Sermon 18, p. 397
“2… Look yonder on the amiable Jesus Christ (for a marriage between whom and thy precious soul I am now wooing). Do but observe his condescending willingness to be united to thee…”
.
Isaac Ambrose
Looking unto Jesus: a View of the Everlasting Gospel… (d. 1664; Edinburgh: Ormiston, 1723), pp. 246–47 HT: Tony Byrne
“Who shall say Christ is not willing to save him and not blaspheme eternal Love? Speak truth: Corrupt hearts speak truth; say not Christ is unwilling, but you are unwilling; I would, but ye would not. [Mt. 23:37]”
.
John Brown of Wamphray
Christ the Way the Truth & the Life (1677), ch. 6, How Christ is Made Use of for Justification, as a Way
“Thus then is Christ made use of as the way to the Father in the point of justification when the poor weakened sinner, convinced of his sin and misery, of his own inability to help himself, of the insufficiency of all means beside Christ, of Christ’s all-sufficiency, readiness and willingness to help, of the equity and reasonableness of the conditions on which He is offered, and life through Him, is now content and fully satisfied with this way, actually renouncing all other ways whatsoever, and does with heart and hand embrace Jesus Christ and take Him as He is offered in the gospel to make use of Him for all things, to lean to Him and rest upon Him in all hazards; and particularly to refuge itself in his wings and to rest there with complacency, satisfaction and delight; and hide itself from the wrath of God and all accusations.”
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Theophilus Gale
Christ’s Tears for Jerusalem’s Unbelief & Ruin, Now Humbly Recommended to England’s Consideration in this Her Day of Trial & Danger (1679), pp. 66-67
“Hence likewise we may collect how really and cheerfully willing Christ is to save sinners. Certainly, He that makes such bitter lamentation over the foreseen ruins of Jerusalem, must needs have a very cordial, and unfeigned will and desire of her salvation… What a pathetic expostulation is here, which carries in it notices of vehement affections?
Oh! how willing is Christ to give unto sinners the things that belong unto their peace? Yea, is He not more willing to bestow great things than small? Does not his willingness to give, infinitely exceed the sinners’ willingness to receive? Is not Christ more glad to receive poor and weary souls, than they are to come unto Him?… Is not every thing about Christ mighty drawing, alluring, and inviting?”
.
Stephen Charnock
Several Discourses upon the Existence & Attributes of God… (London: Newman, 1682)
Wisdom of God, p. 387
“The willingness of God to receive returning sinners is manifested in the highest degree; and the willingness of a sinner to return to Him in duty has the strongest engagements. He has done as much to encourage our obedience as to illustrate his glory. We cannot conceive what could be done greater for the salvation of our souls and consequently what could have been done more to enforce our observance. We have a Redeemer, as man, to copy it to us, and as God to perfect us in it. It would make the heart of any to tremble to wound Him that has provided such a salve for our sores and to make grace a warrant for rebellion:”
.
God’s Patience, p. 821
“2. His patience is a ground to trust in his promise. If his slowness to anger be so great when his precept is slighted, his readiness to give what He has promised will be as great when his promise is believed. If the provocations of them meet with such an unwillingness to punish them, faith in Him will meet with the choicest embraces from Him. He was more ready to make the promise of redemption after man’s apostasy than to execute the threatening of the Law. He does still witness a greater willingness to give forth the fruits of the promise than to pour out the vials of his curses. His slowness to anger is an evidence still that He has the same disposition, which is no slight cordial to faith in his Word.”
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The Works of Stephen Charnock, 5 vols. (d. 1680; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1997), vol. 5, “Man’s Enmity to God,” p. 521
“(2) God has been importunate in entreaties of us. God offers not only truce, but a peace, and has been most active in urging a reconciliation. Can He manifest his willingness in clearer methods, than that of sending his Son to reconcile the world to Himself? Can He evidence more sincerity than by his repeated and reiterated pressing of our souls to the acceptance of Him?”
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Thomas Brooks
Works
vol. 1, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, Appendix, pp. 146-48
“Device [of Satan] (4). By suggesting to a sinner Christ’s unwillingness to save. It is true, says Satan, Christ is able to save you, but is He willing? Surely, though He is able, yet He is not willing to save such a wretch as you are, that has trampled his blood under your feet, and that has been in open rebellion against Him all thy days, etc. The remedy against this device of Satan is, briefly to consider these few things:
Remedy (1). First, The great journey that He has taken, from heaven to earth, on purpose to save sinners, does strongly demonstrate his willingness to save them. Mt. 9:13, ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ 1 Tim. 1:15, ‘This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.’
Secondly, His divesting Himself of his glory in order to sinners’ salvation, speaks out his willingness to save them. He leaves his Father’s bosom, He puts off his glorious robes, and lays aside his glorious crown, and bids adieu to his glistering courtiers the angels; and all this He does, that He may accomplish sinners’ salvation.
Thirdly, That sea of sin, that sea of wrath, that sea of trouble, that sea of blood that Jesus Christ waded through, that sinners might be pardoned, justified, reconciled and saved does strongly evidence his willingness to save sinners, 1 Cor. 5:19,20.
Fourthly, His sending his ambassadors, early and late, to woo and entreat sinners to be reconciled to Him, does with open mouth show his readiness and willingness to save sinners.
Fifthly, His complaints against such as refuse Him, and that turn their backs upon Him, and that will not be saved by Him, does strongly declare his willingness to save them: Jn. 1:11, ‘He came to his own, and his own received Him not.’ So in Jn. 5:40, ‘But ye will not come to me, that ye may have life.’
Sixthly, The joy and delight that He takes at the conversion of sinners, does demonstrate his willingness that they should be saved: Lk. 15:7, ‘I say unto you, That likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repents, more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.’ God the Father rejoices at the return of his prodigal son: Christ rejoices to see the travail of his soul: the Spirit rejoices that He has another temple to dwell in…”
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vol. 3, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ, p. 206
“Seventhly, Get this principle rooted in you, That it is the delight of Christ to give poor sinners an interest [legal right] in Himself.
He is not only able to do it, but it is his delight to do it. Christ’s soul is in nothing more. Witness his leaving his Father’s bosom; witness his laying down his crown; witness those many sufferings and deaths that He went through in this world; witness those gospel acclamations, Mk. 16:16, Rev. 22:17; witness those persuasive exhortations and gracious impetrations [obtaining by asking or petition] and entreaties, Isa. 53:11, Mt. 11:28, 2 Cor. 5:20; witness divine injunctions and comminations [threatenings, 1 Jn. 5:23, Mt. 11:21; witness those pathetical lamentations, Mt. 23:37, Lk. 19:42, Ps. 81:13; and witness the inward motions and secret excitations of his blessed Spirit, Gen. 6:3, all which speak out his great willingness and delight to save poor sinners;”
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John Bunyan
Reprobation Asserted (1688)
“Chapter 11 – Seeing it is not possible that the reprobate should receive this grace and live, and also seeing this is infallibly foreseen of God; and again, seeing God has fore-determined to suffer it so to be: Why does He yet will and command that the Gospel, and so grace in the general tenders [offers] thereof, should be proffered unto them?
That God is willing to save even those that perish forever, is apparent, both from the consideration of the goodness of his nature, of man’s being his creature, and indeed in a miserable state. But I say, as I have also said already, there is a great difference between his being willing to save them, through their complying with these his reasonable terms, and his being resolved to save them, whether they, as men, will close therewith, or no: So only He saves the elect themselves, even according to the riches of his Grace, even according to his riches in glory, by Christ Jesus working effectually in them what the Gospel, as a condition, calls for from them.”
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John Flavel
The Works of John Flavel, 6 vols. (London: Baynes & Son, 1820)
vol. 4, England’s Duty Under the Present Gospel: Eleven Sermons on Revelation 3:20 (1689), Sermon 6, “Jesus Christ an Earnest Suitor for Union and Communion with the Souls of Sinners”, p. 117
“His sorrows and mourning upon the account of the obstinacy and unbelief of sinners, speaks the vehemency of his desire after union with them… The Redeemer’s tears wept over obstinate Jerusalem, spake the zeal and fervency of his affection to their salvation; how loth Christ is to give up sinners. What a mournful voice is that in John 5:40, “And you will not come unto me, that you might have life.” How fain [desirous] would I give you life? but you would rather die than come unto Me for it. What can Christ do more to express his willingness? All the sorrows that ever touched the heart of Christ from men, were upon this account, that they would not yield to his calls and invitations.”
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vol. 5, “A Sober Consideration of the Sin of Drunkenness”, p. 337 HT: Tony Byrne
“Question 13. But how may it appear that He is willing to receive me?
Answer: Make trial of Him thyself. If thou didst but know his heart to poor sinners, you would not question it. Believe what He says in the gospel; there thou shalt find that He is a willing Savior; for therein thou hast:
First, his most serious invitations, Mt. 11:28, “Come unto Me, ye that are weary and heavy laden.” Isa. 55:1, “Ho! every one that thirsteth come ye to the waters.”
These serious invitations are, secondly, backed and confirmed with an oath, Eze. 33:11, “As I live, I desire not the death of a sinner.”
Thirdly, amplified with pathetical wishes, sighs and groans, Lk. 19:42, “Oh! that thou hadst known, even thou, at least, in this thy day.”
Fourthly, yea, delivered unto them in undissembled tears, Mt. 23:37-38, “He wept over it, and said, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!”
Fifthly, nay, He has shed not only tears, but blood, to convince thee of his willingness. View Him in his dying posture upon the cross, stretching out his dying arms to gather thee, hanging down his blessed head to kiss thee; every one of his wounds was a mouth opened to convince thee of the abundant willingness of Christ to receive thee.”
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1700’s
John Howe
The Redeemer’s Tears Wept Over Lost Souls, in Works, vol. 2, pp. 358-61
“But when expressions that import anger, or grief, are used [Gen. 6:6; Jud. 10:16; Ps. 78:40; 95:10; etc.], even concerning God Himself, we must sever in our conception everything of imperfection and ascribe everything of real perfection. We are not to think such expressions signify nothing, that they have no meaning, or that nothing at all is to be attributed to Him under them.
Nor are we, again, to think they signify the same thing with what we find in ourselves and are wont to express by those names. In the divine nature, there may be real, and yet most serene complacency and displacency, viz. that are unaccompanied with the least commotion, and import nothing of imperfection, but perfection rather, as it is a perfection to apprehend things suitably to what in themselves they are…
But we must take heed, lest, under the pretense that we cannot ascribe everything to God that such expressions seem to import, we therefore ascribe nothing. We ascribe nothing, if we do not ascribe to Him a real unwillingness that men should sin on, and perish; and consequently, a real willingness that they should turn to Him, and live; which so many plain texts assert. And therefore it is unavoidably imposed upon us to believe that God is truly unwilling of some things, which He does not think fit to interpose his omnipotency to hinder; and is truly willing of some things which He does not put forth his omnipotency to effect…”
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John Brown of Haddington
Appendix, “An Address to the Rising Generation” in Two Short Catechisms Mutually Connected (Edinburgh: 1769), as in Addresses to Children Concerning Salvation (Torwood Press, 2013), pp. 9-15
“And O how He ‘travails in the greatness of his strength, mighty to save! able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by Him.’ O His infinite willingness to save us! how deeply marked in words, in oaths, in cries, in tears, in sighs, in groans, in blood, in death of an expiring God! He ‘comes in the name of the Lord to save us–to seek and to save that which was lost; and him that comes unto Him, He will in no wise cast out;’ all day long He stretches out his hands to invite and receive a disobedient and gainsaying people. Now the Master comes! knocks at the door of thy heart, and calls for you:”
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1800’s
Andrew Fuller
“The Reality and Efficacy of Divine Grace” (1815) in The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller (Harrisonburg, Virginia: Sprinkle Publications, 1988), 2:554
“It is admitted that God’s love to man is in one sense universal. He bears good-will towards them, as the work of his hands; but it does not follow thence that He must do all that he could do for their salvation…
As to God’s willingness that all should turn and live, as God’s will has been observed sometimes expresses what He approves, and sometimes what He purposes. God wills, approves and desires a sinner’s turning unto Him. It is that which, through the whole Bible, is required of him; and whosoever thus returns shall live. I may add, God is willing to receive and forgive every sinner that returns to Him through Jesus Christ. He desires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he would repent and live.
But He has not purposed the salvation of every sinner, or to incline his heart to embrace the salvation exhibited in the gospel. In this sense, the salvation of some is neither desired nor designed: if it were, it would be effected; for “his counsel shall stand, and He will do all his pleasure.”–“Whatsoever his soul desires, even that he does,” Isa. 46:10; Job 23:13.”
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John Colquhoun
A Treatise on the Law & Gospel, p. 119
“Those invitations, when considered as calls, to perform the duties of believing and repenting, belong to the law; but when viewed as expressions of the readiness, or willingness of God, to bestow salvation on sinners, and, as affording them an additional warrant to trust in the compassionate Savior for it, they form a part of the gospel.”
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Robert M. M’Cheyne
“Ye Will Not Come To Me,” a sermon on Jn. 5:40, in Additional Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M’Cheyne, pp. 298-99
“Sinners are lost, not because Christ is unwilling to save all. The whole Bible shows that Christ is quite willing and anxious that all sinners should come to Him. The city of refuge in the Old Testament was a type of Christ; and you remember that its gates were open by night and by day. The arms of Christ were nailed wide open when He hung upon the cross; and this was a figure of his wide willingness to save all, as He said: “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.” But though his arms were firmly nailed, they are more firmly nailed wide open now by His love and compassion for perishing sinners than ever they were nailed to the tree.
There is no unwillingness in the heart of Jesus Christ. When people are willing and anxious about something, they do everything that lies in their power to bring it to pass. So did Jesus Christ: “What could have been done more for my vineyard, that I have not done in it?” But if they are very anxious, they will attempt it again and again. So did Jesus Christ:
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered your children as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”
But if they are still more anxious, they will be grieved if they are disappointed. So was Jesus Christ: “When he came near, he beheld the city, and wept over it.” But if they are very anxious, they will suffer pain rather than lose their object. So did Jesus Christ: The good Shepherd gave his life for the sheep. Ah! dear brethren, if you perish, it is not because Jesus wishes you to perish.
A word to anxious souls. How strange it is that anxious souls do most of all doubt the willingness of Christ to be their Savior! These should least of all doubt Him. If He is a willing Savior to any, O surely He is a willing Savior to a weary soul!“
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Asahel Nettleton
Remains of the Late Rev. Asahel Nettleton, ed. B. Tyler (Hartford: Robins & Smith, 1845), Sermon 25, ‘Christ Standing at the Door’, pp. 300-302
“3. Behold the extent of his willingness to receive sinners. The sinner sometimes says, ‘I am willing to receive Christ, but He is not willing to receive me.’ But what says the text? ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock.’ Does not this imply his readiness and willingness to come in? Nor is this all—He calls, ‘Open unto Me—open unto Me.’ Nor is this all—He says, ‘if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in.’ He positively declares that He is willing.”
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Robert Candlish
The Atonement, its Efficacy & Extent (1867), pt. 2, The Question Viewed in its Practical Relation to the Gospel Call & the Acceptance of it by Faith, p. 196
“II. But not only is the cross of Christ a manifestation equally to all of the name or nature of God,– it is the proof and measure of that infinite compassion which dwells in the bosom of God towards each and all of the lost race of Adam, and his infinite willingness, or rather longing and yearning desire, to receive each and all of them again into his favor.”
.
William C. Burns
The Complete Works of William Chalmers Burns, ed. Parisis & Link (†1868; 2011), ch. 18, pt. 5, The Secret Place, p. 186
“And now, before we close, let us once more entreat you who are unconverted to turn to Jesus. Could ministers but give you some faint idea of Christ’s willingness to save you! If any soul here can declare that it is willing to receive Christ, let it know that Christ is yet more willing to save and to bless. He does not wish you to remain an hour longer a stranger to his love. Why did He suffer? Why did He die? Oh! not merely that He might be glorified in your destruction.”
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John Kennedy of Dingwall
Man’s Relations to God traced in the Light of ‘The Present Truth’ (Edinburgh: MacLaren, 1869), ch. 3, Man as Evangelized in Relation to God, p. 73
“Christ is the great theme of the gospel, the personal Savior, whom it reveals and presents to us. He is preached as ‘Jesus Christ the Lord;’ His right to save, certified by His attested commission and His accepted merit; His power to save, extending ‘to the uttermost;’ and His willingness to save, assured both by His death and by His word. Such is He as presented by God to every creature under heaven, ‘to whom the gospel is preached.’”
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2000’s
Joel Beeke & Paul Smalley
Reformed Systematic Theology: Spirit & Salvation, vol. 3 of Reformed Systematic Theology (Crossway, 2021), 2. The Objection against the Gospel Call, pp. 299–305 HT: Tony Byrne
“The free offer of the gospel expresses God’s sincere desire for sinners to repent and be saved. Another relevant meaning of the word ‘offer’ is “to declare one’s readiness or willingness.” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. “offer.”)
The Word reveals the goodness of God to all people. God “is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil” because of his “merciful” character (Luke 6:35–36; cf. Matt. 5:44–48). When the gospel comes to people, He expresses his good desires for them in saying,
“O that there were such an heart in them, that they would fear Me, and keep all my commandments always, that it might be well with them, and with their children for ever!” (Deut. 5:29).”
Historical
On the Post-Reformation
Quote
Richard Muller
Dictionary of Latin & Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology 1st ed. (Baker, 1985), p. 180
“longanimitas: longsuffering; the patient bearing of an offense, particularly over a long period of time; thus, the willingness of God to endure the offense of sin rather than immediately annihilate the world in its wickedness. The longanimitas Dei is the affection of the divine will according to which God wills to await repentance and to allow millennia to elapse, for the sake of mankind, between the fall and the final judgment. Longanimitas is virtually synonymous with patientia, indicating the height of patience.”
.
On Calvin
Article
ed. Byrne, Tony – ‘Highlighting [Richard] Muller’s Citations of Calvin on God’s Slowness to Anger & Willingness to Save’ at Theological Meditations
.
Contra a Divine Disposition, Inclination, Desire, etc., in some Sense(s)
Order of
Article 1
Quotes 3
. Response to Owen
Article
1600’s
Rijssen, Leonard – A Complete Summary of Elenctic Theology & of as Much Didactic Theology as is Necessary trans. J. Wesley White MTh thesis (Bern, 1676; GPTS, 2009), Ch. 3, God Note Rijssen’s quote and references in the above sections, and his qualified language below.
Controversy 1 – ‘Is the real (realis) will of God sometimes antecedent, by which He desires something in Himself, not in relation to circumstances, before foreknowledge, and at other times consequent, by which, after having foreseen the act of the creature, He decides the contrary? We deny against the Socinians and Arminians.’ 39-40
Controversy 2 – ‘Are there capricious desires or inefficacious desires (optationes) in God, which are called wishes (velleitates)? We deny against the same.’ 40
Controversy 3 – ‘Is God’s will always absolute, firm, and efficacious and never conditioned, weak, or inefficacious? We affirm against the same.’ 41
Controversy 4 – ‘Are, then, any passions of soul truly found in God? We deny against the same.’ 41-46
Quotes
Order of
Voet
Genevan Articles
Owen
. Response to Owen
.
1600’s
Gisbert Voet
Disputation 29, ‘On Regeneration’, pt. 1 (1639) tr. AI by Roman Prestarri in Select Theological Disputations (1655), vol. 2, p. 432 ff. Latin at Confessionally Reformed Theology
“We reject likewise the fictions of the Pelagianizers:
Concerning the conditioned will, concerning the decree of velleity or desire.
Concerning Middle or conditioned Knowledge, by which that desired determination is said to be foreseen.
Concerning the intention of conditioned concourse concomitantly into the effect—and consequently concerning the simultaneous concourse and egress of grace and free will, which is really independence and primacy, pre-running and predetermination of the second cause.
Concerning universal sufficient grace, and according to it a salvific calling, whose presupposition is the grace of universal redemption, reconciliation, and confederation.
Which fictions have been sufficiently sifted by the authors just cited, partly also by the Dominican theologians and other genuine followers of Thomas, whom you will see alleged in those authors passim [throughout], and especially in Sylvius the Douai theologian, in his treatise On the Motion of the First Mover.
Of our men, Ferri in his Orthodox Scholastic and its Defense against the Jesuit Perrin has rendered most useful service here. The Various Dissertations on the [End] Term of Life edited by Beverovicio can also be compared.”
.
Genevan 1649 Articles
Donald D. Grohman, The Genevan Reactions to the Saumur Doctrines of Hypothetical Universalism: 1635-1685 Th.D. diss (Knox College in cooperation with Toronto School of Theology. 1971), pp. 231-35 For context see ‘Donald Grohman on Dort and the 1649 Genevan Articles’ at Calvin & Calvinism and Grohman.
“Predestination
l. Fallen men are the object of predestination, not however as unbelieving and rebellious to the call.
2. Holy Scripture sometimes presents election to salvation and the means of salvation separately, and for this reason they can be considered separately. Christ was sent and He died according to the counsel of God the Father, which proceeds from his eternal love for the elect.
3. God decreed to give to the Son only those whom He elected in Christ by his good pleasure alone, and to give them faith so that they would be led to eternal life.
4. The unique love and mercy of God is the only cause of the sending of the Son and of the satisfaction provided by Him, as well as the gift of faith and the application of merit through Him. These benefits ought not to be separated or divided or torn away in their turn from their source.
Rejection of the error of those:
1. Who teach that in God there is some good will for saving under the condition of faith and repentance those who perish.
2. Who, giving economy (oikonomias) as a pretext, falsely attribute to God an inclination, or will, or want, or disposition, or less strong love, or virtue, or intention, or desire, or will, or counsel, or decree, or covenant, or necessary or universal conditional mercy, by which he wishes to save each and every man if he believes in Christ.
3. Who attribute to God a plan previous to election by which he resolved to be merciful to the entire human race indeterminately.
4. Who ascribe to God a double mercy: the one, clear or first and universal, by which He wants each and everyone to be saved: the other, clearer, second, and particular for the elect.”
On John Owen
Intro & Response to Owen
.
Travis Fentiman
8-2026
.
John Owen below opposes the notion that God must necessarily show mercy to human sinners, by his very nature, due to a natural affection or propensity of his for his creatures. This view is often associated with Arminianism. The Reformed, as Owen references, generally understood God sending his Son in redemption to derive from a free, sovereign choice of his will, as God did not have to send Christ in mercy.
Yet there is a third option that Owen does not consider, or rather, seems to lump with the natural necessity position: While God is good in his very nature, and being self-sufficient, need not will anything outside of Himself (ad extra), yet if He do so will, it is more in accord with his nature to will justice and good, than mere justice; and his willing, apart from the consideration of greater and higher, good reasons, by this natural propensity, tends to reflect this, though its effects with respect to variegated, finite creatures over time, may vary with the free, sovereign specifications of what He chooses. And this is what is reflected in Scripture and what Scripture teaches, for at least these (non-exhaustive) reasons:
1. When God first created both angels and men, He did not create them in an environment reflecting bare justice, but one in superabounding goodness.
2. God says in Isa. 27:4, “Fury is not in Me,” which in the context manifests God’s preference to deal in mercy rather than in judgment, even to those who very much deserve judgment, as many Reformed commentators mention. Lam. 3:33 likewise says “He does not afflict willingly”. Classical orthodoxy (including Reformed Orthodoxy) has maintained ‘That Wrath, Hatred & Other such Negative Qualities Attributed to God are Not Proper to God or in Him, or Part of his Nature or Essence’.
3. Hence Ex. 34:6-7, when God proclaims Himself to Moses, ascribes mercy, grace and abundant goodness to God’s nature, resulting in the blessing of thousands of generations, while justice is only strictly served unto the third or fourth generation:
“The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”
See this also reflected in the 2nd Commandment: Ex. 20:5-6.
4. Likewise Mic. 7:18 says, “He retains not his anger forever, because He delights in mercy.” The Bible never speaks of God being rich in justice, but rather “rich in mercy” (Eph. 2:4). Ps. 103:8 says, “The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.” This was characteristic even of God’s way with Cain (Gen. 4:9-17), whom there is every reason to believe was a reprobate.
James 2:13 says “mercy rejoices against judgment,” reflecting the superior nature of the one against the other. While both are in God, He rejoices in his mercy more than in his justice. Hence judgment is called God’s “strange work” (Isa. 28:21).
This all is further seen in God’s administrations through Scripture history: “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” (Jn. 1:17) The culmination of God’s glory through the progress of history comes to be manifested not in God’s justice, but in his grace (see also Rom. 9:22-23).
5. 2 Pet. 2:4 says “God spared not the angels that sinned…” God’s administration with the fallen angels has been by his sovereignly chosen appointment, reflecting a lawful severity, in a way restraining the full expression of his nature.
6. The language of Rom. 9:22 has a permissive aspect: “What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction,” and this for the greater and higher, good reasons (v. 23) “that He might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had afore prepared unto glory…”
The third paradigm laid out here either solves, or can solve, all the objections Owen poses below. To answer briefly two other similar objections that may be opposed to this understanding:
Objection 1: Acknowledging a certain disposition or propensity in God seems to give God parts; but God is completely simple.
It is affirmed God is completely and infinitely simple, with no parts; the variation we perceive (and must perceive to some extent) in God’s Being due to his revelation reflects virtual distinctions in God.ª They have a grounding in God, though they are not real distinctions (realiter) of different things in God.
ª See ‘On a Virtual Distinction’.
It is because the finite cannot contain the infinite that such things appear manifold to us, yet all perfections are in God, and are and must be consistent with themselves therein. All this goes for God, in the same way, having an intellect and will, and manifold attributes. God’s simplicity is not at odds with the infinite depth and richness of his Being. To deny the latter, deriving from God being All, Unlimited Being (“I am,” Ex. 3:14), is truly to deny something essential to God.
Objection 2: To say God’s will has a tendency to reflect a propensity (some way) in God is to introduce contingency into God’s Being.
It is affirmed God is necessary existence itself as He is the I am, and the I am that I am (Ex. 3:14). The seeming contingency is not in God Himself but is necessarily characteristic of: (1) the finite, creaturely reality we exist in, and (2) God’s revelation to the creature (in his Will of Sign), as his infinite Being is revealed over and through variegated finite creation, (3) according to our necessarily finite mode of thought, who are persons made in his image, with dispositions and inclinations.
The issue with respect to contingency, of God having (in some infinite way) a disposition, propensity or inclination (that is, a nature with purpose), is not significantly different than an intellect and will being attributed to God where his will chooses to make real one possibility out of the infinite possibilities his intellect comprehends.
In all this, that which is perfect about such things is by way of analogy affirmed to be in God. A nature and purpose are pure perfections not reducible to other perfections. All that which is imperfect in such conceptions (whether in an intellect, will, or disposition, propensity or inclination), namely compositeness, contingency, temporalness, transientness, changeability, relativeness, dependency, finiteness, variation, etc.: must be denied of God.
For more on God having all pure perfections, how perfections are determined, and how mixed perfections must be stripped of imperfection in being attributed to God, see Allan Wolter’s “Conclusions Respecting Reality,” conclusions 61-63, 68-69 (and throughout), and his Proof of God, conclusion 3, How Creatures Differ from God, corollary 5 and conclusion 16.
It is here affirmed that God fundamentally is love (1 Jn. 4:16), has a tendency to love, and sovereignly loves. God, in his revealed will, willing and exemplifying mere justice (as distinguished from goodness and love) is less reflective of his nature and is a lesser good in comparison to his more abundant willing of justice, goodness and love in his blood-bought, redeeming mercy. God’s redeeming mercy shows more of his demonstrative glory, this being a greater reflection of his essential, unchangeable glory in Himself. Hence John exclaims, “Behold, what manner of love is this?!” (1 Jn. 3:1) in consideration of the effects which came about from what Jesus announced in proclaiming those breath-taking words, “For God so loved the world…” (Jn. 3:16)
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John Owen, Salus electorum, sanguis Jesu, or the Death of Death in the Death of Christ… (London: W.W., 1648)
bk. 2, ch. 4, pp. 92-93
“That God has any natural or necessary inclination by his goodness, or any other property to do good to us, or any of his creatures, we do deny: every thing that concerns us is an act of his free will and good pleasure, and not a natural necessary act of his Deity, as shall be declared.
…
Thirdly, a common affection and inclination to do good to all does not seem to set out the freedom, fulness and dimensions of that most intense love of God which is asserted in the Scripture to be the cause of sending his Son, as Jn. 3:16, ‘God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son;’ Eph. 1:6, ‘Having made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which He hath purposed in Himself.’ Col. 1:19, ‘It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell.’ Rom. 5:8, ‘God commended his love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ dyed for us.’ These two [points] I shall by the Lord’s assistance fully clear, if the Lord give life and strength and his people encouragement to go through with the second part of this controversy.
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An actual and necessary velleity for the doing of anything which cannot possibly be accomplished without some work fulfilled outwardly of Him, is opposite to his eternal blessedness and all-sufficiency.
Thirdly, [Owen’s opponents hold:] God therefore do fulfill that general love and good will of his toward all, and that it might put forth itself in such a way as should seem good to Him, to satisfy his justice which stood in the way, and was the only hindrance, He sent his Son into the world to die. The failing of this assertion we shall lay forth, when we come to declare that love whereof the sending of Christ was the proper issue and effect.”
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bk. 4, ch. 2, pp. 201-3
“For the first, by love in this place [Jn. 3:16] all our adversaries agree that a natural affection and propensity in God to the good of the creature, lost under sin in general, which moved Him to take some way whereby it might possibly be remedied, is intended.
We on the contrary [hold] that by ‘love’ here is not meant an inclination or propensity of his nature, but an act of his will (where we conceive his love to be sealed) and eternal purpose to do good to man, being the most transcendent and eminent act of God’s love to the creature.
That both these may be weighed, to see which is most agreeable to the mind of the Holy Ghost, I shall give you, first, some of the reasons whereby we oppose the former interpretation; and, secondly, those whereby we confirm our own.
First, if no natural affection whereby He should necessarily be carried to anything without Himself can or ought to be ascribed unto God, then no such thing is here intended in the word ‘love’: for that cannot be here intended which is not in God at all: but now that there neither is nor can be any such natural affection in God is most apparent and may be evidenced by many demonstrations; I shall briefly recount a few of them:
First, nothing that includes any imperfection is to be assigned to Almighty God: He is God all-sufficient, He is our rock and his work is perfect; but a natural affection in God to the good and salvation of all, being never completed nor perfected, carries along with it a great deal of imperfection and weakness, and not only so, but it must also needs be exceedingly prejudicial to the absolute blessedness and happiness of Almighty God. Look how much anything wants [lacks] of the fulfilling of that whereunto it is carried out with any desire natural or voluntary, so much it wants of blessedness and happiness; so that without impairing of the infinite blessedness of the ever blessed God, no natural affection unto anything never to be accomplished can be ascribed unto Him, such as this general love to all is supposed to be.
Secondly, if the Lord has a natural affection to all, as to love them so far as to send his Son to die for them: whence is it that this affection of his does not receive accomplishment? whence is it that it is hindered and does not produce its effects? why does not the Lord engage his power for the fulfilling of his desire? It does not seem good to his infinite wisdom (say they) so to do. Then is there an affection in God to that which in his wisdom He cannot prosecute; this among the sons of men, the worms of the earth, would be called a brutish affection.
Thirdly, no affection or natural propensity to good is to be ascribed to God which the Scripture nowhere assigns to Him and is contrary to what the Scripture does assign unto Him: now the Scripture does nowhere assign unto God any natural affection whereby his [he or his will?] should be naturally inclined to the good of the creature: the place to prove it clearly is yet to be produced: and that it is contrary to what the Scripture assigns Him is apparent; for it describes Him to be free in showing mercy; every act of it, being by Him performed freely, even as He pleases, for He has mercy on whom He will have mercy: now if every act of mercy showed unto any, do proceed from the free distinguishing will of God (as is apparent), certainly there can be in Him no such natural affection; and the truth is:
If the Lord should not show mercy and be carried out towards the creature merely upon his own distinguishing will, but should naturally be moved to show mercy to the miserable, He should, first, be no more merciful to men than to devils:
nor, secondly, to those that are saved than to those that are damned, for that which is natural must be equal in all its operations; and that which is natural to God must be eternal.
Many more effectual reasons are produced by our divines for the denial of this natural affection in God in the resolution of the Arminian distinction (I call it so, as now by them abused) of God’s antecedent and consequent will, to whom the learned reader may repair for satisfaction: so that the love mentioned in this place is not that natural affection to all in general, which is not: But,
Secondly, It is the special love of God to his elect, as we affirm…”
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“ I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people…”
Isa. 65:2
“The LORD is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in mercy. The LORD is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works.”
Ps. 145:8-9
“For You, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive, and abundant in mercy to all those who call upon You.”
Ps. 86:5
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