I’m still preaching through the
1689 confession. In last Sunday afternoon’s message I focused
on the statement which affirms God is working all things according to the counsel of
His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory (chapter 2, “Of
God and Of the Holy Trinity, paragraph one). Here are my notes from the
meditation on the concept of God working out his will in “all things”:
Last week I read the essay by the Reformed philosopher Gordon H. Clark
on “God and Evil” in his book Religion,
Reason and Revelation (see this
book note). In that essay Clark cites a liberal professor (Georgia
Harkness) who was celebrating what she saw, in the early twentieth century, as
the decline and demise of Calvinism:
But not many, even of the
most rigorous of Calvinists would now say that if a man gets drunk and shoots
his family it is the will of God that he should do so!
To which Clark replies:
I wish very frankly and
pointedly to assert that if a man gets drunk and shoots his family, it was the
will of God that he should do so. The Scriptures leave no room for doubt … that
it was God’s plan for Herod, Pilate, and the Jews to crucify Christ. In
Ephesians 1:11 Paul tells us that God works all things, not some things only,
after the counsel of his own will. This is essential to the doctrine of
creation. Before the world was made, God knew everything that was to happen;
with this knowledge he willed that these things come to pass. Only if God has
been willing , could this world or any world, in all its details, have been
brought into existence (, p. 221).
JTR
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