Devotional 15: Of God's Eternal Decree: Before the children had drawn a single breath, before either had done anything t

The Confession Read

Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions; yet hath He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 3, Section 2

Introduction

Before the children had drawn a single breath, before either had done anything that could be called good or evil, God spoke a word over them that determined their destinies: the elder would serve the younger. Jacob was loved and Esau was not. The apostle Paul, recounting this history, anticipates the objection before it can be voiced. If the choice was made before the children had done anything at all, surely God's election must be unjust. Paul offers no apology. He simply quotes the words that Moses heard on Sinai: I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. And with those words, the whole structure of conditional election, the idea that God chooses those whom He foresees will choose Him, collapses into the silence that the creature owes the Creator. This is the hard edge of the doctrine that Section 2 presses into our hands. Section 1 affirms that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass. The question then becomes: upon what basis does He ordain? Does He look down the corridor of time, observe who will believe and who will not, and then decree to save those whom He has foreseen as believers? Does He survey all possible worlds, consider every choice that free creatures might make under every conceivable set of circumstances, and then build His decree upon the foundation of that foresight? The Westminster Divines, with the whole Reformed tradition behind them and the testimony of Scripture before them, answer with a single word. No. God has not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future. The Confession's opening clause is easily passed over. The Divines do not deny that God possesses what theologians call middle knowledge — the knowledge of what every free creature would do under any possible set of circumstances. God's knowledge is exhaustive. It extends to all possible futures, to every road not taken. In the infinite depths of the divine mind, there is no hypothetical that remains unexamined. But this exhaustive knowledge is not the ground of the decree. It does not provide the reason why God decrees as He does. God does not decree because He foresees. He foreknows because He has decreed. This is not a fine point of academic theology. It reaches into the very foundation of your assurance. If God's choice of you depends in any measure upon His foresight of something in you — your faith, your perseverance, your receptivity to grace — then the ground of your salvation is not finally in God but in yourself. The difference between you and the unbeliever would be reducible to something you contributed. The cross would still do its work, but the ultimate reason you benefit while another does not would be found not in the sovereign will of God but in the foreseen motion of your own will. Against this, the Confession raises the standard of sola gratia. Grace alone means God alone. And God alone means that the decree rests upon nothing outside of God Himself.

Scripture Foundation

The teaching of Section 2 is not a speculation deduced from the idea of sovereignty by a chain of logical inferences. It is drawn from the plain language of Scripture. Let us hear the biblical testimony before tracing the theological reasoning that follows. The apostle Paul, in the golden chain of salvation, places foreknowledge before predestination, but he does so in a way that excludes the Arminian interpretation. Romans 8:29-30 declares: "For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified." The Arminian reads these verses and concludes that God's foreknowledge of faith is logically prior to His decree. God foreknew who would believe, and on that basis He predestinated them. But the text will not bear that reading. The word translated "foreknow" is the Greek proginōskō, and in the biblical idiom, knowledge is not mere intellectual awareness. When Amos declares that God has known Israel alone among all the families of the earth, he does not mean that God was unaware of the other nations. He means that God set His covenant love upon Israel to the exclusion of others. When Paul writes that the Lord knoweth them that are His, he speaks of recognition that arises from possession. And when Christ says to the false professors on the last day, "I never knew you," He does not confess a lapse in omniscience but declares the absence of a saving relationship. The objects of proginōskō in Romans 8:29 are not abstract facts about future faith. They are persons — "whom he did foreknow." God set His distinguishing love upon them before time began. The verb proorizō, to predestinate, follows foreknowledge not as its consequence but as its explication. Those whom God foreknew — those upon whom He set His covenantal love from eternity — He also predestinated to a specific end: conformity to the image of His Son. The movement is from love to purpose, not from foresight to decree. And the chain is unbreakable. Every foreknown person is predestinated, called, justified, and glorified. There is no break in the sequence, no point at which a foreknown person fails to reach glory. The plain sense of the passage is that God's eternal love is the ground of predestination, and predestination is the ground of calling, justification, and glorification. The decree does not rest on foresight. Foresight, in the sense of distinguishing love, is the decree's first expression. The narrative that Paul appeals to in the very next chapter drives the point home with even greater force. Romans 9:11-13 reads: "For the children being not yet born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth; it was said unto her, The elder shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." Every word is chosen to exclude the possibility of a conditional decree. The choice was made before the children were born. It was made before they had done anything good or evil. The Greek eklogē — election — is explicitly "not of works," which in the context of Romans must be taken broadly. Faith, in Paul's theology, is not a work but a gift. The principle remains: election is "of him that calleth," not of anything in the one called. The purpose of God according to election stands independent of all creaturely conditions, foreseen or actual. If the choice between Jacob and Esau was not made on the basis of foreseen good or evil, the Arminian scheme collapses at its foundation. The apostle returns to this theme in his second letter to Timothy, anchoring the entire work of salvation in a purpose that precedes all created realities. 2 Timothy 1:9 declares that God "hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began." The language strips away every conceivable ground of boasting: not according to our works, not according to foreseen faith conceived as a human contribution, but according to His own purpose and grace given in Christ before the ages of time began to run. A decree resting upon foresight cannot be a decree made before the world began, for at that point there was nothing to foresee — only God, and God's purpose, and God's grace. From these alone the decree proceeds. The opening doxology of Ephesians presses the same truth into a single sentence of overwhelming weight. Ephesians 1:4-5 proclaims: "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will." The election — "he hath chosen us" — is located temporally before the foundation of the world. The purpose of that election is "that we should be holy." Holiness is the fruit of election, not its root. God did not choose us because He foresaw that we would be holy. He chose us in order that we might become holy. And the ground of the whole transaction is "the good pleasure of his will." The Greek eudokia means delight, satisfaction, the pleasure that a thing gives to its possessor. The ultimate reason why God chose this person and not that person is found nowhere outside the mystery of God's own good pleasure. When the creature asks, "Why me, Lord?" there is no answer to be found in the creature. There is only the answer that echoes back from the throne: Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight. The apostle Peter, in the opening salutation of his first epistle, addresses the scattered believers as those "elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father" (1 Peter 1:2). At first glance, this verse might seem to support the Arminian reading, for it says that the elect are elect according to foreknowledge. But the Greek preposition kata with the accusative expresses the norm or sphere according to which something takes place, not its cause. Election is "according to foreknowledge" not in the sense that foreknowledge causes election, but in the sense that God's distinguishing love is the ground out of which election proceeds. The same Peter who writes "elect according to foreknowledge" is the Peter who preached at Pentecost that Christ was delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God — and there foreknowledge is clearly coordinate with the determinate counsel, not logically prior to it. Peter, like Paul, knows nothing of a decree that rests upon foreseen human choices. These passages together establish what the Confession asserts in a single sentence. God possesses exhaustive knowledge of all possible conditions and outcomes. But that knowledge is not the foundation of His decree. The decree rests upon His own purpose and grace. God foreknows the future because He has decreed the future, and the certainty of His knowledge rests upon the certainty of His will.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines drafted Section 2 with a specific theological adversary in view. The Remonstrants, the followers of Jacob Arminius, had published their Five Articles in 1610, and their first article concerned precisely the relationship between foreknowledge and election. They taught that God, from eternity, determined to save those whom He foresaw would believe in Christ and persevere to the end, and to condemn those whom He foresaw would reject the gospel. Election was conditional upon foreseen faith. The decree, though eternal in the sense that it was formed before creation, was logically dependent upon God's foresight of what free creatures would do. The Synod of Dort, meeting in 1618-19, had answered the Remonstrants with the Canons that affirm election is unconditional, flowing from the mere good pleasure of God and not from any foreseen quality in the creature. The Westminster Divines incorporated the substance of Dort's teaching into the Confession with their characteristic precision. Section 1 affirmed that God ordains whatsoever comes to pass. Section 2 now clarifies that the basis of the decree is not divine foreknowledge but divine will. The Divines do not deny God's knowledge of hypotheticals. The opening clause grants that God knows "whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions." This is a notable concession to the sophistication of the Arminian argument, which had developed a doctrine of scientia media, middle knowledge, according to which God knows, before the decree, what every free creature would do under any possible set of circumstances. The Divines do not, in this section, engage in a philosophical refutation of middle knowledge. They grant that God's knowledge is exhaustive. But they insist, with the whole Reformed tradition behind them, that this knowledge is not the reason for the decree. God does not survey a set of hypothetical futures, choose the one He prefers, and then decree to bring it about. The decree is the reason for the future, not the other way round. Robert Shaw, whose exposition of the Confession guided generations of Scottish Presbyterians, explains the matter with characteristic clarity. God's decree, he writes, "is not founded upon a foresight of what men would do, but is the foundation of that foresight. God foreknows future events because He has decreed them; He does not decree them because He foreknows them." Shaw's distinction between will and understanding is helpful. Foreknowledge belongs to the divine understanding. The decree belongs to the divine will. The understanding knows what the will has determined with infallible certainty, but it does not determine the will. The knowledge of God does not constrain the freedom of God. A. A. Hodge, commenting on this section, observes that the denial that God decrees on the basis of foresight is logically necessary if God is truly sovereign. If God's decree were based on foresight, the creatures whose actions God foresees would be, in the last analysis, the determiners of God's decree. The will of the creature would be logically prior to the will of the Creator. But Scripture presents the matter the other way round. What the creature wills in time, God has willed from eternity to permit or to effect. The creature's choices are real, as Section 1 insisted, but they are real within the framework of a decree that they do not determine and cannot alter. The phrase "upon all supposed conditions" is also aimed at a subtler view that had gained some currency: that God decreed to save particular individuals because He foresaw that if they were placed in certain circumstances they would believe. The decree, in this view, was conditional upon foreseen faith under hypothetical conditions. The Confession rejects this too. The conditions themselves, the circumstances in which every person finds himself, the entire matrix of causes that shape a human life. All of these are part of what God has decreed. The decree encompasses the conditions as well as the outcomes. To say that God decrees on the basis of foreseen outcomes under certain conditions is to imagine a God who adjusts His own decree to realities that exist independently of it — which is to imagine a God other than the God of Scripture. What was at stake in this debate, and remains at stake whenever this doctrine is taught, is the nature of grace itself. If election is conditional upon foreseen faith, then faith is not, in the final analysis, a gift of God. It is a human contribution that God recognises and rewards. The difference between the saved and the lost would be reducible to something in the saved that is not in the lost: a greater wisdom, humility, or sincerity. But Paul will not allow this. "Who maketh thee to differ from another? And what hast thou that thou didst not receive?" The answer, in the Arminian scheme, is that you differ from another because you made better use of the grace offered to all alike. Against this, the Reformed faith insists that the difference between the saved and the lost lies ultimately not in the saved but in God. From first to last, salvation is of the Lord.

Theological Depth

John Owen devoted the early years of his public ministry to the refutation of Arminianism. His Display of Arminianism remains a thorough biblical and theological response to the Remonstrant position in English. Owen saw that the whole system of Arminian theology hung upon a single thread: the assertion that God's decree rests upon His foresight of human choices. Cut that thread, he argued, and the entire fabric of conditional salvation unravels. Owen's argument can be summarised with the force of a geometric proof. If God decrees to save particular persons because He foresees that they will believe, then faith cannot be a gift of God in any meaningful sense. The Arminians grant that God provides the means of grace — preaching, illumination, moral persuasion. But they insist that the final determination, the act of believing itself, is the creature's own contribution, unaided by any effectual grace that distinguishes the elect from the non-elect. At the decisive point, the will of the creature tips the scale. But if this is so, Owen argues, the apostle's boast is emptied. If God chooses me because He foresees that I will choose Him, my choice is the cause of God's choice, and the ultimate reason for my salvation is not grace but the motion of my own will. The glory of the saved man belongs, in the last analysis, not to the Saviour but to the sinner who made himself to differ. Salvation is of the Lord from first to last — or it is not grace at all. Calvin addresses the same question in Book III of the Institutes, where he considers the grounds of election. He acknowledges that the doctrine of unconditional election is hard, and that many who profess the name of Christ stumble at it. But Calvin will not soften the doctrine. "If we seek the reason why God has chosen His own," he writes, "we shall find it nowhere but in God Himself. For He has not chosen us because we were holy, but that we might be holy. He has not chosen us because He foresaw that we would believe, but that we might believe. The cause of election is the will of God alone." Calvin's denial of a conditional decree is not the product of a logician's obsession with consistency. It is the product of a pastor's concern for assurance. If the decree rests upon foreseen faith, then my assurance rests upon the quality of my faith: its sincerity, its perseverance, its freedom from hypocrisy. And since my faith is always imperfect, always mixed with unbelief, my assurance will waver with it. But if the decree rests upon God's good pleasure alone, then my assurance rests upon the unchangeableness of His purpose. The anchor holds not because my grip is strong, but because it is fastened to the throne of God. William Cunningham, the nineteenth-century Principal of New College, Edinburgh, wrote his Historical Theology as a survey of the formative doctrinal controversies of the church. He demonstrates that the conditional decree was not a minor adjustment to the Reformed doctrine of election but a fundamental re-conception of the entire structure of salvation. Once the decree is made conditional upon foreseen faith, every other doctrine is affected. The nature of grace is altered: instead of grace being effectual, it becomes resistible. The nature of the atonement is altered: instead of Christ dying particularly for the elect, He dies generally for all, making salvation possible but not certain. The nature of perseverance is altered: instead of God preserving the elect, the elect preserve themselves by their own continued faith. "The controversy between the Calvinists and the Arminians," Cunningham concludes, "is not a dispute about words or subtleties. It is a dispute about whether God or man is the author of salvation." Thomas Goodwin, the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, draws out the pastoral implications with a warmth that softens the hard edges of the doctrine. He observes that the conditional decree cannot provide the comfort that a troubled conscience needs. If God chose me because He foresaw that I would believe, the question immediately returns: do I believe truly? Is my faith genuine? Is it the kind of faith God foresaw and rewarded? And since self-examination will always discover reasons for doubt, the conditional decree leaves the soul suspended over an abyss. The unconditional decree, by contrast, drives the believer away from himself and toward God. "Look not to thy faith as the ground of thy election," Goodwin counsels, "but look to thy election as the ground of thy faith. Thy faith is changeable; thy election is not. Rest, therefore, not upon the stream that rises and falls, but upon the fountain from which it flows." Warfield brings the discussion back to the text of Scripture, noting that proginōskō undergoes a significant narrowing of meaning in the New Testament. In classical Greek it meant simply to know beforehand. But in the biblical idiom, shaped by the Hebrew concept of knowing as intimate personal relation, proginōskō takes on a weight the classical usage did not carry. When Paul says that God foreknew certain persons, he is not saying that God had advance information about their future choices. He is saying that God set His covenant love upon them before the foundation of the world. Warfield's lexical argument reinforces what the context of Romans 8 already suggests: the golden chain begins not with God's passive observation of human choices but with God's active, distinguishing love. Foreknowledge is therefore "not a mere intellectual act of prescience, but an act of will — the will to enter into relations of intimate personal knowledge with its objects. That is to say, it is elective." These exegetical, historical, and pastoral considerations together make clear why the Divines could not leave the relationship between foreknowledge and decree undeclared. The conditional decree was not a harmless alternative. It was an assault upon the very nature of grace. By insisting that God has not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, the Divines were guarding the gospel itself, ensuring that every sinner who hears the good news would know, beyond all possibility of doubt, that his salvation depends from first to last upon the free and sovereign grace of God, and upon nothing else.

Puritan Application

First, examine the foundation of your assurance. Every believer who has walked with the Lord for any length of time has discovered that his own heart is a poor foundation upon which to build the hope of eternal life. Faith falters. Love grows cold. Obedience is patchy. If your confidence before God rests upon the quality of your own response to the gospel, it will rise and fall with the barometer of your subjective experience, and on many days the reading will be grim. But unconditional election invites you to look away from yourself altogether. The foundation of your salvation was laid before the world began, in the heart of a God who does not change, whose purposes cannot be frustrated, and whose love does not depend upon the loveliness of its object. Your faith did not cause God to choose you. God's choice caused you to believe. Let that truth settle deep into your soul, not as a speculative notion to be admired from a distance, but as a rock beneath your feet when every other ground gives way. Second, mortify the pride that whispers you have contributed something to your salvation that sets you apart from the perishing. The conditional decree, in every form it has taken, appeals to natural pride because it allows the saved person to trace the ultimate difference between himself and the lost to something in himself: he was wiser, humbler, more receptive. But the apostle silences this reasoning. What hast thou that thou didst not receive? The faith by which you lay hold of Christ was given to you. The repentance by which you turned from sin was wrought in you. The love for God that faintly flickers in your breast was kindled by the Spirit whom God sent into your heart because He chose you from eternity. There is no room for boasting anywhere along the line, and the attempt to find room for it is a corruption of the gospel. As Owen reminds us, if the ultimate reason for your salvation is found in you, then the glory of your salvation belongs to you, and God will not give His glory to another. Third, let the unconditional character of the decree animate your evangelism and your prayers for the lost. There is a persistent objection that the Reformed doctrine of election discourages evangelistic zeal. If God has already chosen whom He will save, why preach to all? But the objection mistakes the nature of the decree. The decree ordains both the end — the salvation of the elect — and the means by which that end is accomplished. And the chief of those means is the foolishness of preaching. God has chosen to save His elect through the proclamation of the gospel, and every time it is preached, the net of the kingdom is cast into the sea of humanity. The preacher does not know who the elect are, and he is not commanded to know. He is commanded to preach, offering Christ to all who will hear. The doctrine of unconditional election does not narrow the offer of the gospel. It guarantees its success. Because God has chosen a people for Himself, the preaching of the gospel will not return void. Preach, therefore, with the confidence of one who knows that his labour is not in vain in the Lord. Not because every hearer will believe, but because every hearer whom God has ordained to eternal life will believe, and your preaching is the appointed means of their ingathering. Fourth, do not let the mystery of the unconditional decree harden into a cold fatalism. It is possible to hold this doctrine with such rigid precision that it becomes a wall between the soul and the Saviour. The decree is not an impersonal machine grinding out outcomes without warmth or tenderness. It is the eternal purpose of the Father who loved you, the Son who died for you, and the Spirit who indwells you. The same God who chose you unconditionally invites you unconditionally. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. If you find yourself thinking about the decree in ways that make Christ seem distant, you have wandered from the path of Reformed piety into the thicket of speculation. Christ is the mirror in which we see our election reflected. Look to Christ, and you will find that the decree that seemed forbidding in the abstract becomes, in the concrete reality of the gospel, the sweetest truth your soul has ever tasted. Fifth, worship. The doctrine of the unconditional decree, rightly understood, does not terminate in argument but in adoration. When Paul finishes his exposition of sovereign election in Romans 9 through 11, he does not ask whether his readers have understood every point. He falls on his knees and worships. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! The decree is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be adored. After all the exegesis has been done and all the theology systematised, there remains a depth that finite minds cannot fathom. Why did God choose Jacob and not Esau? Why did He set His love upon you and not upon another who is better than you in a dozen ways? Scripture does not answer these questions, and the attempt to answer them by appealing to foreseen faith simply pushes the question back one step. The Reformed faith states the mystery in biblical terms and then kneels before it. For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.

Prayer

O Lord most high, whose throne is established in the heavens and whose kingdom ruleth over all, we bow before Thee as creatures who owe our every breath to Thy good pleasure. Thou hast declared the end from the beginning, and Thy counsel shall stand. Yet Thou hast condescended to reveal that Thy pleasure is not distant sovereignty but the love of a Father who chose His children before the worlds were framed. We bless Thee, O God, that the ground of our salvation lies not in anything Thou hast foreseen in us but in the unsearchable riches of Thy grace. We confess that our hearts are prone to take credit for what Thou alone hast wrought. We imagine that our faith made us to differ, that our repentance merited Thy favour. Forgive us this persistent pride that would steal Thy glory and make the creature the author of his own redemption. Empty us of every claim to have contributed to our salvation, and fill us with the gratitude of those who know they have received everything and deserved nothing. We thank Thee, O blessed Father, that before the foundation of the world Thou didst set Thy distinguishing love upon us, choosing us in Christ that we should be holy. We thank Thee, O blessed Son, that in the fulness of time Thou didst lay down Thy life for the sheep whom the Father had given Thee. We thank Thee, O blessed Spirit, that in due season Thou didst call us, opening our blind eyes and giving us the faith by which we lay hold of the Saviour. Our salvation is of the Lord from first to last, and we give Thee all the glory. When doubts assail us and our assurance wavers, teach us to look away from ourselves and unto Thee. Our faith is feeble, but Thy purpose is firm. Our love grows cold, but Thy love never fails. Let not the instability of our own hearts rob us of the peace that is our birthright as those who are elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father. Grant us to rest not upon the shifting sand of our own experience but upon the immovable rock of Thy decree. And for those who are yet strangers to Thy grace, we pray that Thou wouldst have mercy upon them according to the good pleasure of Thy will. Bless the proclamation of Thy Word in every land, and open hearts as Thou didst open the heart of Lydia. Grant to us who have believed the boldness to speak of Christ, knowing that our labour is not in vain when it is offered in the service of a decree that cannot fail. Now unto Him who is able to keep us from falling and to present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and evermore. Amen.