Chapter 28. Faith Is The Gift Of God (continued)
CHAPTER 29.
GOD IS ABLE TO CONVERT OPPOSING WILLS, AND TO TAKE AWAY FROM THE HEART ITS HARDNESS
Now if faith is simply of free will, and it is not given by God, then why do we pray for those who will not believe, that they may believe? It would be absolutely useless to do this unless we believe, with perfect propriety, that Almighty God is able to turn to belief, those wills that are perverse and opposed to faith. Man’s free will is addressed when it is said, “Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.”Heb 3.15 But if God were not able to remove from the human heart even its obstinacy and hardness, then He would not say through the prophet, “I will take from them their heart of stone, and will give them a heart of flesh.”Eze 11.19 That all this was foretold in reference to the New Testament is shown clearly enough by the apostle when he says, “You are our epistle ...written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tablets of stone, but in fleshly tablets of the heart.”2Cor 3.2-3 We must not, of course, suppose that such a phrase as this is used as if those who ought to live spiritually might live in a fleshly way. But inasmuch as a stone has no feeling—to which man’s hard heart is compared—what was there left Him to compare man’s intelligent heart to, but the flesh, which possesses feeling? For this is what is said by the prophet Ezekiel: “I will give them another heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and I will give them a heart of flesh; that they may walk in my statutes, and keep my ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God, says the Lord.”Eze 11.19-20 Now can we possibly (without extreme absurdity) maintain that there previously existed in any man the good merit of a good will, to entitle him to the removal of his stony heart, when all the while this very heart of stone signifies nothing else than a will of the hardest kind, and such that it is absolutely inflexible against God? For where a good will precedes, there is of course, no longer a heart of stone.