Part Vii The Wicked, By Their Acts Of Wickedness, Do Rather God'S Work Than Their Own.
ARTICLE VII.
(THAT IS, CALUMNY VII.)
WHATSOEVER MEN DO WHEN AND WHILE THEY SIN, THEY
DO ACCORDING TO THE WILL OF GOD, SEEING THAT THE
WILL OF GOD OFTEN CONFLICTS WITH HIS PRECEPT.
CALUMNIATOR'S
OBSERVATIOINS AND STATEMENTS.
On this SEVENTH ARTICLE your opponents ask you this question:
If the will of God is often at variance with His precept, in what way can it be known when God wills, and when He does not will, that which He commands? For (say they) if Calvin asserts that what God commands ought always to be done, whether God wills it or does not will it, it wilt follow that God wills in order that His will might sometimes be resisted. For if God commands me not to commit adultery, and yet wills that I should commit adultery, and yet I ought not to commit adultery, it follows that I ought to do that which is contrary to His will. For when God commands the people of Israel generally, "Thou shalt not commit adultery;" does He mean that none of them should commit adultery, or that some should commit adultery, but that others should not? On this point, Calvin, your adversaries ask of you some direct answer. If you reply that God wills that some should commit adultery, but that He at the same time wills that others should not, you will make God inconsistent with Himself in the one same precept.
If you reply to these arguments of your adversaries by asserting that God has a twofold will?the one open and manifest, the other secret? they next inquire: Who was it, then, that made this secret will known to Calvin? For if Calvin and his followers know this secret will, it
cannot be secret; and if they know it not, how dare they affirm that which they know not?
Your opponents again inquire whether God commands according to His will when He enjoins His people to pray, "Thy will be done;" and where Christ also saith, "He that doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven, the same is My brother and sister and mother" (Mark iii.
35)? There is also that passage of Paul, "Behold, thou art called a Jew, and restest in the law, and makest thy boast of God, and knowest His will, and approvest that which is excellent, and art a teacher of the law" (Rom. ii. 17). Surely we have here the will of God, and that which is commanded in the law, which will, if it be good
(which it certainly is), it must necessarily follow that that which is contrary thereto is evil; for whatsoever is contrary to good must be evil. There is, moreover, that memorable ejaculation of Christ, "How often would I have gathered thy children together, . . . but thou wouldest not." Christ most certainly speaks here of the open or manifest will of God, namely, that will which He (Christ) Himself had explained in so many ways. Now, if Christ had in His mind another will of God contrary to this will, His whole life must have been a contradiction.
REPLY OF JOHN CALVIN TO ARTICLE
VII.,
AND TO THE CALUMNIATOR'S OBSERVATIONS, STATEMENTS,
&C., &C.
I am utterly unconcerned to make to this SEVENTH ARTCLE any reply at all. Produce me the place in my writings where I have asserted that "the will of God is frequently at variance with, or
conflicts with, His precept." Such an idea never entered my mind; no, not even as a dream. Nay, on the entire contrary, among many other kindred explanations, I have faithfully expounded and set forth how simple and uniform, and one, the will of God is; although, between the secret counsel of God and His general doctrine, there is, to ignorant and inexperienced persons, at first sight, a certain appearance of difference. But whosoever modestly and soberly and reverently submits and commits himself to God and His teaching will, in a moment, see and acknowledge (as far as the human mind's capacity can see and acknowledge it) how it is that God, who forbids adultery and fornication, punishes by the incestuous intercourse of Absalom with the wives of David, David's sin of adultery with the wife of Uriah. God ever wills one and the same thing, but frequently in different forms. Wherefore, that the foulness of your lies may not cast any filth on me or my doctrine, let my readers receive in one word this solemn declaration: that that which you cast in my teeth, as promulgated by me concerning the two wills of God, is an entire fiction of your own. For, as to myself, I have ever proclaimed that there is between the secret or hidden counsel of God and the openly revealed voice of His doctrine, the most perfect, divine and consummate harmony.
Augustine did, indeed, by way of concession and explanation to his adversaries, make mention of a twofold will, or of different wills of God?a secret will, and an open or revealed will?but he so represented that twofold will as to show that they are in such consummate harmony with each other, that the "last day" will make it most gloriously manifest that there never was, nor is, in this multiform way of God's workings and doings, the least variance, conflict or contradiction, but the most divine and infinite harmony and oneness.
Having laid down this solemn principle and taken this immovable stand, I will now, if thou wilt have it so, draw swords with thee in battle for the truth. Thou arguest thus: "If God forbids a man to do that which He really wills him to do all the time, or if He commands
men to do that which He really wills not, He must command for the very purpose that His will might be resisted." Now, in none of alt this filth of argumentation are either myself or my doctrines the least concerned. I acknowledge nothing whatever of the profane sentiments to which it refers to be mine. On the contrary, the sum of my doctrine is this: that that will of God, which is set forth in His
Law, clearly demonstrates that righteousness is His delight, and that iniquity is His hatred; and also, that it is most certain that He would not denounce punishment against evil doers, if their evil doings pleased Him. This, however, by no means prevents God from willing, by His secret and unexplicable counsel, that those things should be done, in a certain sense and manner, which He yet wills not to be done, and which He forbids to be done.
If you will here raise the objection, that I make God inconsistent with Himself, I, in return, would ask you whether it belongs to you to prescribe a law or a bound for God, forbidding Him to do anything that surpasses your judgment and comprehension? Moses declares aloud that "the secret things of God belong unto Himself alone; but that whatsoever things are useful for man to know are revealed in the Law" (Deut. xxix. 29). Will you, therefore, deny God the right of doing anything but that, the reason of which you can fully comprehend and explain? After the depth of the counsel of God, which engulfs all human capacities of comprehension, has been fully declared in the Book of Job, the sublime description closes with this significant intimation, "Lo! these are parts of His ways; but how little is heard of Him!" (Job xxvi. 14). But as for you, you will not permit
God to have any counsel to Himself, but that which you can as plainly see as a thing which you behold with your natural eyes. You are more than blind, however, if you cannot see that when God, by His voice, forbids you to commit adultery, His will is that you should not be an adulterer; and yet, that He, the same great God, exercises
His righteous judgments in those same adulteries which He condemns, which righteous judgments He most certainly exercises not but with His full knowledge and will.
Take the matter more briefly and condensedly thus: God wills that adultery should not be committed, in as far as it is a pollution and violation of the holy bond of matrimony, and a great transgression of His righteous law. But, in as far as God uses adulteries, as well as other wicked doings of men, to execute His own acts of vengeance on the sins of men, He certainly executes the office and performs the sacred duty of a Judge, not unwillingly, but willingly! Wherefore, in what instances soever either the Chaldeans or Assyrians acted cruelly in their terrible victories and horrible slaughters, for such awful barbarities we by no means praise them. Nay, farther, God Himself declares that He will be the avenger of the afflicted and inhumanly treated; and yet, the same righteous God elsewhere declares that these slaughters are sacrifices which He has in this way prepared for Himself! (Isa. xxix.; xxxiv. 6; Jer. xlvi. 10; Ezek. xxxix.) And will you deny that God wills that which He thus dignifies with the honoured designation of "a sacrifice"? Awake, then, from thy slumber, open thine eyes from thy blindness, and at length acknowledge that God, by secret and inexplicable ways, rules and overrules His righteous judgments.
You, however, by a subtlety of argument, which you deem marvellously wise, inquire whether God, from the time that He first forbade men to commit adultery, willed that all should be adulterers, or only a part of them. Take this as a sure and certain reply: God demands of all men chastity, because God loveth chastity in all men.
Experience itself, however, manifests (without our entering into any proof or mention of the important facts themselves) that there are in God different reasons, motives and manners, of His willing. For if He equally and effectually willed that all men should be chaste, He would, without all doubt, make and render all men chaste.
Wherefore, since chastity is a singular gift of God, the prompt and evident conclusion is, that He wills that which He commands in His
Word differently from that which He effectually works and fulfils by His regenerating Spirit. Hence your impure and profane tongue has no ground whatever for charging God with inconsistency. God is neither dubious nor ambiguous in anything which He commands or
forbids, but He plainly discovers His pure and holy nature in both.
Neither will you find anything contrary to this, His purity, holiness and righteousness, in that secret and hidden will of His, by which He rules and overrules all the actions of the sons of men.
Whoredom is highly displeasing to God as the author of all chastity.
Yet the same holy God's will was to punish the adultery of David by the incestuous lust of Absalom. God forbids man's blood to be shed.
For as He greatly loves His own image, so He defends it by His own protection. And yet He raised up out of the wicked nations slaughterers of the sons of Eli, because it was His will that they should be killed; for so the Sacred History plainly and literally teaches us. If your blindness is as a stone-wall in your way, yet all who really have eyes see a perfectly holy and harmonious consistency in God, when He, the same Divine Being who hates whoredom and slaughter in as far as they are sins, or (which is the same thing) who hates the sins of whoredom and of murder because they are transgressions of His righteous law, yet exercises His secret and righteous judgments in justly punishing the wickednesses of nations and of men by means of the cruelties and sins of other nations and other men. And as to your own conceit of your acute wisdom when you ask the question, "If there be any secret will of God, when and how will that will be revealed to me?" the answer to your impious question will contain no difficulty when you have granted to me the acknowledgment that we are to follow the Holy Spirit alone as our teacher. For if God, according to the testimony of Paul, "dwelleth in the light that no man can approach unto," and if the same apostle reverentially declares that "His ways are past finding out," why am I not freely permitted to wonder at, and adore, that secret will of His which is hidden from my comprehension? The wisdom of God is exalted in the Book of Job with the highest praises, that mortals may know and confess that it cannot be spanned by any human intellect.
Are you, then, purposed to laugh at everything which is said concerning a matter so sublimely secret? Will you upbraid David with folly for solemnly proclaiming and adoring those judgments of God which he confessed to be a "great deep"? I hear from all the
prophets, and from all the apostles, that the counsels of God are incomprehensible. What they all declare I embrace with a firm and unhesitating faith, and what I believe I freely and undoubtingly profess and teach. Why, then, is this my reverence for God's secret will charged upon me as a fault and a crime?
And that you may not turn round upon me, and say that I adduce from the Scriptures examples and proofs wholly irrelevant, Paul's case and mine are surely one and the same, who, when speaking of the secret election or reprobation of God and adoring the riches and profundity of His wisdom, the incomprehensibility of His judgments and the unsearchableness of His ways, yet ceases not openly to affirm that God hath mercy on whom He will, and consigns whom
He will to eternal destruction. In a word, exult, I pray you, no more in the irreconcilable inconsistency which you imagine you have discovered in my doctrines. For the Scriptures furnish an abundance of testimonies concerning the secret and hidden will of God. What I have from them learned, I fearlessly assert and speak of as a thing sure and certain. But as my human intellect cannot soar to a height so stupendous, I adore with reverence, fear and trembling, that mystery which is too high and too deep for the angels themselves to penetrate. And this is my reason for offering so frequently in my writings the admonitory warning, that nothing is better or safer in these solemn matters than wise ignorance! because the folly of those who suffer themselves to be, or who wish to be, wise above what is written or permitted of God, is worse than the frenzy of madmen.
By this time you must see how sure and certain I hold that will of God to be, concerning which the Scriptures so clearly and fully testify, which same will is, nevertheless, so secret and incomprehensible with reference to the reasons why God wills this or that, or how He wills this or that, that the angelic intellects cannot grasp the comprehension. The fact is, that the pride and presumption of yourself, and of all like you, so madden ye all, that whatever ye cannot comprehend, but are compelled to relinquish as beyond your capacity, ye labour with all your might to make out to be
nothing at all! As to your continuing to cast in my teeth inconsistencies, contrarieties and contradictions, I have settled all those a hundred times over. And as to your scurrility, by which you attempt to overwhelm me, all that being insipid and pointless penetrates me not. And as to your charge against me, that I am an imitator of God, you, on account of your presumptuous and devil-like imitation of His wisdom, will one day find, to your eternal cost, what it is to exalt your own wisdom and to make yourself therein equal unto the Most High. The only pain and agony I feel are caused by your frenzied blasphemies, by which you profane the sacred Majesty of God, of which profanation He will Himself be, in His appointed time, the sure and certain Avenger.
As the will of God, which He has revealed in His Law, is good, whatsoever is contrary to that Law and that will I acknowledge to be evil. But when you brawl that that secret and hidden will of God, by which He separates the "vessels of mercy" from the "vessels of wrath," according to "His good pleasure," and by which He makes use of both "vessels," as He will, is contrary to His Law; when you utter this, you breathe forth from the foul sink of your ignorance a detestable fiction of your own brain and a horrible lie.
I freely acknowledge that Christ is speaking of the revealed will of God, when He says, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, and ye would not." For He is upbraiding the Jews with the same ingratitude and hardness of heart as He had before done in the song of Moses (Exod. xv. 17, etc.). And we know full well that God did in reality bestow on the Jewish nation all the blessings which the words of that song expresses, seeing that, by giving them His law, by the ordinances of His worship, and by the many benefits which He conferred on that people, and by which He bound them to Himself, He protected them, as it were, by the overshadowing of His wings; and He would still have done so, had not their indomitable obstinacy and obduracy carried them away from Him. After, therefore, Christ had testified His will so often and in so many different ways, spoken in order to win a perverse nation
to their obedience, but all in vain; it is with the utmost justice that He complains of their ingratitude. For, as to your restricting all these things to the lifetime of Christ, this you do with your usual ignorance of these divine things. Just as if Christ were not the true God, who, from the beginning, had not ceased to spread the wings of grace over His own elect people! But here you, in a moment, conclude that, if there were another and secret will in Christ, while He thus addressed
Jerusalem, the whole life of Christ must have been an inconsistency.
Just as if, to allure by the voice and by kindnesses, and yet to leave the heart untouched by the inspiration of His secret Spirit, were in Christ diverse and contrary acts!
But, that the absurdity and futility of your calumny may the more plainly appear, answer me, I pray you, this question: Where does
Christ complain that He was mistaken or deceived by the event, that the vine, from which He had expected grapes, brought forth wild grapes? What answer have you to give, noble teacher and skilful rhetorician? Will you impute ignorance to Christ, to avoid making
Him speak falsely? What! did the Jews entirely prevent and defeat the purposes of God? Why, according to you, the blessed God was sitting in doubt all the time as to what the event would be, and that event quite deceived and surprised Him at last. No! nor will it at all alter the state of the case if you make the saying of Christ, which He speaks to the fact and to the state of Jerusalem, refer to the secret foreknowledge of God. God had elsewhere said, "Surely they will fear
My Name" (Zeph. iii. 7), but they hastened to corrupt themselves more and more. God had expected some profit from His great punishments inflicted, but He afterwards complains that He was disappointed. Can you, then, disentangle yourself from this divine set of truth in no other way than by reducing God to order, and making
Him depend for the accomplishment of His eternal purposes upon the free will of men? Surely it is plain and evident to the meanest capacity, that God, in order to set forth the greatness of the wickedness of His people, speaks as in the person and after the manner of men, when they complain that all their labour is lost, because they are quite disappointed in their expected success.
It is most certain that those whom God wills to gather unto Himself effectually He "draws" by His Spirit, and that that which it is in His hand and purpose to do, He will, according to His promises, perform. Wherefore, when many who are called follow Him not, it is openly manifest that that manner of gathering together, of which Christ complains as having been unfruitful and inefficacious, was not attended with that efficacious influence of His Spirit, of which He elsewhere makes frequent mention, as, for instance, by the prophet
Isaiah: "He shall gather together the dispersed of Judah" (Isa. xi. 12).
Again, "The glory of the Lord shall gather thee" (Isa. lviii. 8). Again, "I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west "
(Isa. xliii. 5). Again, "Your God will be your rereward" (or will gather you) (Isa. lii. 12). For the prophet had just before said, "The Lord hath made bare His holy arm," that His power might be displayed
"before the eyes of all the nations" (Isa. lii. 10). Hence it is that the prophet a little afterwards repeats, "For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee (Isa. liv. 7).
But what I have before advanced concerning the precepts of God, is sufficient and abundant, I hope, to stop the mouth of all your blasphemies. Although, therefore, God commands nothing feignedly, or ambiguously, or fictitiously, but plainly and solemnly declares what He wills and approves; yet His mind and will are that a different kind of obedience should be rendered to Him by His elect
(whom He effectually bends and turns to His obedience), from that which is offered to Him by the reprobate, whom, indeed, He also calls to Himself by the outward voice of His Word, but whom He condescends not effectually "to draw" by His Spirit.
The natural obstinacy and depravity of all men are alike; so that no man will take upon himself the yoke of obedience to God voluntarily and willingly. To some God promises the Spirit of obedience; others
He leaves in their depravity. For notwithstanding all your vain talk about it, the truth is that "a heart of flesh" and "a new heart" are not promised to all men promiscuously, but to the elect peculiarly, that they might walk in the commandments of God. What have you to reply to these things, noble teacher and judge of the truth? And what