CHAPTER LXI – Q.11: How far must we be content with God's afflicting will?
Answ. 1. We must not be unreasonable, nor live unreasonably, nor believe unreasonably, nor love, or choose, or let out any affection unreasonably. We are commanded to be ready to give a "reason of our hopes." It is our rational faculty that proveth us men, and is essential to us; and without it we can neither understand the things of God or man: for how should we understand without an understanding?
But yet reason must thus far be denied. 1. We must not think higher of our reason than it deserves, either in itself, or compared to others.
2. We must not satisfy its curiosity in prying into unrevealed things.
3. Nor must we satisfy or suffer its presumption in judging our brethren, or censuring men's hearts or ways uncharitably. 4. Nor must we endure it to rise up against the word or ways of God, or contradict or quarrel with divine Revelations, though we cannot see the particular evidence or reason of each truth, nor reconcile them together in our apprehensions. Though we may not take any thing to be the word of God without reason; yet when we have reason to take it to be his word, we must believe and submit to all that is in it, without any more reason for our belief. For the formal reason of our belief is because God is true, that did reveal this word; and we have the greatest reason in the world to believe all that he revealeth.
CHAPTER LXI
Must we be content with Afflictions, permitted Sin, &c.?
Quest. 11. 'If self-denial require us to content our souls in the will of God, then whether must we be content with his afflictions, or permission of sin, or the church's sufferings; and, 1. How will this
stand with our due sense of God's displeasure and chastisements. 2.
And with our praying against them. 3. And our use of means for their removal?'
Answ. 1. The will of God is one thing, and the hurt which he willeth us is another; and the good end for which he willeth it, is a third. The afflicting will of God is good, and must be loved as good: and the end and benefit of chastisement is good, and must be loved: but the hurt as hurt, must not be loved. It is not God's will that we must resist, or seek to change; nor yet is it the end or benefit of the chastisement; but only the hurt, which our folly hath made a suitable means. And we may not seek to remove this hurt, till the effect be procured, or on terms that may consist with the end of it. And this is not against the will of God, that when the good is attained, the affliction be removed.
2. And you must distinguish between his pleased, and displeased will; his complacency and acceptance, and his displacency and rejecting will. Every act of God's will must be approved and loved as good in God: but it is not every one that we may rest and rejoice in as good to us, and as our felicity. We must be grieved for God's displeasure, and yet love even that holy will that is displeased with us; and we must be sensible of God's judgments, and yet love the will that doth inflict them. But it is only the love of God and pleasure of his will to us, that can be the rest and felicity of our souls.
3. Some acts of God's will are about the means, and have a tendency to a further end; and some are about the end itself. His commanding will we must love and obey: his forbidding will must have the same affections: his threatening will we must love and fear; his rewarding will we must love and rejoice in: his full accepting will, that is, his