The Counsel of God, part 5

This will be the fifth and final post on The Counsel of God series. As we read this final excerpt of John Owen’s, remember the question we posed at the end of part 4, “How could we be in a better and more permanent estate being saved from the wrath of God than we would have been if we had never been sinful and fallen in the first place?”

Here’s Owen (emphasis mine) :

4. There were, therefore, eternal counsels of God, whereby he disposed all things into a new order, unto his own glory, in the sanctification and salvation of the church. And of them two things may be considered : (1.) Their original ; (2.) The design of their accomplishment.
(1.) Their first spring or original was in the divine will and wisdom alone, without respect unto any external moving cause. No reason can be given, no cause be assigned, of these counsels, but the will of God alone. Hence are they called or described, by—the ” good pleasure which he purposed in himself;” (Eph. i. 9) “the purpose of him who worketh all things according to the counsel of his own will:” verse 11. “Who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? or who hath first given unto him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things:” Rom. xi. 34-36. The incarnation of Christ, and his mediation thereon, were not the procuring cause of these eternal counsels of God, but the effects of them, as the Scripture constantly declares.
But, (2.) The design of their accomplishment was laid in the person of the Son alone. As he was the essential wisdom of God, all things were at first created by him. But upon a prospect of the ruin of all by sin, God would in and by him—as he was fore-ordained to be incarnate—restore all things. The whole counsel of God unto this end centred in him alone. Hence their foundation is rightly said to be laid in him, and is declared so to be by the apostle : Eph. i. 4. For the spring of the sanctification and salvation of the church lies in election, the decree whereof compriseth the counsels of God concerning them. Herein, God from the beginning “chooseth us unto salvation through sanctification of the Spirit ;” (2 Thess. ii. 18 ) the one being the end he designeth, the other the means and way thereof. But this he did in Christ;” he chooseth us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love ;” that is,”into salvation through sanctification of the Spirit.” In him we were not actually, nor by faith, before the foundation of the world ; yet were we then chosen in him, as the only foundation of the execution of all the counsels of God concerning our sanctification and salvation. Thus as all things were originally made and created by him, as he was the essential wisdom of God—so all things are renewed and recovered by him, as he is the provisional wisdom of God, in and by his incarnation. Therefore are these things put together and compared unto his glory. He “is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature: for by him were all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible; ….all things were created by him and for him : and he is before all things, and by him all things consist: and he is the head of the body, the church ; who is the beginning, the first-born from the dead ; that in all things he might have the pre-eminence :” Col. i. 15-18………Herein he is glorified, and that in a way unspeakably exceeding all that glory which would have accrued unto him from the first creation, had all things abode in their primitive constitution.

Tying It Up….
The last sentence in the quote ties it all together. We must not think that God was, in any way, surprised or taken off guard by the fall of man. It was used and ordained in the counsel of His good pleasure to be a part of the means to one end alone. God was pleased with the fall to bring about the glory He so desired. Everything else is a result of this one thing. He seeks His glory.

Unanswered Questions
To answer the question at the top of the post, I must begin with asking one more question, If you are going to read a book that is a story of epic value, or say, watch an epic film, do you not continue with the story until its glory is revealed in the end? The beauty of the story is not in the beginning or the end alone. It is in the culmination of the two with the means of getting from one to the other. And Christ is The Beginning and The End, The Alpha and The Omega, and in Him we live and move and have our being.

The question asked so often by Christians who want to understand the will of God, is, “If God knew man would sin, why didn’t He just keep us from being able to do that in the first place?” We might well say that there is no such thing as a stupid question, but we should explain that there is such a thing as the wrong question. Human reasoning brings us to the question just stated mostly because we know that God is Love. First we must understand that God loves Himself first and foremost, hence the first four Commandments.

In part 1 of this series of posts, I posed the question, “When God made man in His image and then says that ’It is not good for man to be alone,‘ to what extent did He mean that, only physically, or spiritually as well and if spiritually, with whom should man be with?” I believe that the story of history, His-story, is the answer to this question, in fact the response of God to Himself, in His own eternal counsel the solution to the problem that it was not good for man to alone. The story of redemption is the story of God bringing man into a perfect union with the triune God. Man needed God, needs God and always will need Him. This is all done for His glory. Amen.

The Counsel of God, part 4

Back to Owen….
In this post, we will look at Owen’s third point. This one just blows me away. In this concise paragraph, he manages to answer questions that are raised by the first two points which we went over in part 1 and part 2. He presents a stellar argument for the sovereignty of God and how we should view the liberty of man in relation to it. God has His order for the way He has chosen things to be and turn out. Too often we try to judge God’s sovereignty based on what we think we know about our ‘free will,’ but this is backwards. We should be judging the extent of our ‘free will’ based on what God has revealed about His sovereignty and our slavery to sin. Let’s read Owen’s point and then I’ll make one more comment. Here’s Owen (emphasis mine) :

3. Divine wisdom was no way surprised with this disaster. God had, from all eternity, laid in provisions of counsels for the recovery of all things into a better and more permanent estate than what was lost by sin. This is ….. the revivification, the restitution of all things, Acts iii. 19, 21; ….. the gathering all things in heaven and earth into a new head in Christ Jesus: Eph. i. 10. For although, it may be, there is more of curiosity than of edification in a scrupulous inquiry into the method or order of God’s eternal decrees or counsels, and the disposal of them into a subserviency one unto another; yet this is necessary from the infinite wisdom, prescience, and immutability of God-that he is surprised with nothing, that he is put unto no new counsels, by any events in the works of creation. All things were disposed by him into those ways and methods-and that from eternity-which conduce unto, and certainly issue in, that glory which is ultimately intended. For as we are careful to state the eternal decrees of God, and the actual operations of his providence, so as that the liberty of the will of man, as the next cause of all his moral actions, be not infringed thereby-so ought we to be careful not to ascribe such a sacrilegious liberty unto the wills of any creatures, as that God should be surprised, imposed on, or changed by any of their actings whatever. For “known unto him are all his works from the foundation of the world,” and with him there is neither “variableness nor shadow of turning.”

Stressing This….
I want to point out what Owen stresses in the second sentence, “This is ….. the revivification, the restitution of all things, Acts iii. 19, 21; ….. the gathering all things in heaven and earth into a new head in Christ Jesus: Eph. i. 10.” and in the first sentence, “a better and more permanent estate than what was lost by sin.“

Concluding Question….
Until the next post, we should ask ourselves the question, “How could we be in a better and more permanent estate being saved from the wrath of God than we would have been if we had never been sinful and fallen in the first place?”

The Counsel of God, part 3

Fuller on The Fall
As a parenthesis to our discussion on The Counsel of God, particularly concerning the fall of man, I found the below quote by Andrew Fuller.

Something to Consider
We are careful not to attribute sin (blame) to God because He is sinless. Many times people do not want to understand that God ordained the fall of man because they see that as meaning that God is the author of sin which would mean that God is sinful. But not so. The author of a book is not a murderer just because one of the characters in his story is a murderer. Let me challenge you in light of this. Let’s get out our bibles and read Romans 9:20-21, then read all of chapter 9, and then with what we just read fresh in our minds, let’s read all of Romans.

Here’s Fuller (bold & underlining mine) :

Was the fall of Adam fore-determined, or only foreseen by God?
The concern which the decrees of God have with the fall of man, has often been the subject of inquiry. I do not see the reason, however, why this particular fact should be singled out from others. There is nothing revealed, that I know of, concerning the fall of man being the object either of the divine foreknowledge or decree. The scriptures declare, in general, that God knoweth the end from the beginning, from which we may conclude with certainty, that he knew all the events of time, all the causes and effects of things, through all their multiplied and diversified channels. The scriptures also ask, Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass, when the Lord commandeth it not? which intimates that the providence and purpose of God are concerned in whatever cometh to pass. The volitions of free agents, the evil as well as the good, are constantly represented as falling under the counsels and conduct of heaven. Never did men act more freely, nor more wickedly, than the Jews, in the crucifixion of Christ; yet in that whole business they did no other than what God’s hand and counsel determined before to he done. The delivery of Christ into their hands to be crucified, as performed by Judas, was a wicked act; yet was he delivered according to the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. The proof that the fall of man, was an object of divine foreknowledge is merely inferential; and from the same kind of proof we may conclude, that it was, all things considered, an object of pre-determination.

(Fuller’s scripture quote is Lamentations 3:37)
To get a ‘Fuller’ theology, click here

The Counsel of God, part 2

Getting back into it…..
In The Counsel of God, part 1 we posed this question to be at the forefront of our thinking as we delve deeper: ”When God made man in His image and then says that ‘It is not good for man to be alone,’ to what extent did He mean that, only physically, or spiritually as well and if spiritually, with whom should man be with?” This question will help us think in a way we probably have not ever thought about the fall of man.

One More Thing……
Before we read the next excerpt of John Owen, I am going to go ahead and assert what I believe that the answer to the above question is: That the fall of man, in other words the entrance of sin into creation, though bad to us is what God was pleased with as a part of the means to bring man into a perfected communion with God that we did not have before the fall. Here’s Owen (emphasis mine):

2. God was pleased to permit the entrance of sin, both in heaven above and in earth beneath, whereby this whole order and harmony was disturbed. There are yet characters of divine power, -wisdom, and goodness, remaining on the works of creation, and inseparable from their beings. But the primitive glory that was to redound unto God by them—especially as unto all things here below—was from the obedience of man, unto whom they were put in subjection. Their good estate depended on their subordination unto him in a way of natural use, as his did on God in the way of moral obedience:Gen. i. 26, 28 ; Ps. viii. 6-8. Man, as was said, is a creature which God made, that by him he might receive the glory that he aimed at in and by the whole inanimate creation. This was the end of our nature in its original constitution. Thereunto are we again restored in Christ : James 1:18. But the entrance of sin cast all this order into confusion, and brought the curse on all things here below. Hereby were they deprived of that estate wherein they were declared exceeding good, and cast into that of vanity—under the burden whereof they groan, and will do so to the end: Gen. iii. 17, 18; Rom. viii. 20, 21. And these things we must again consider afterward.

In the next post on TCOG, the excerpt of Owen’s will expound everything we are trying to establish here. Please stay tuned!

The Counsel of God, part 1

John Owen is my favorite Puritan and probably my favorite theologian. He is a hard read at times, but he is worth the labor of reading and understanding. He is an example of enduring a lot of personal trials in life and also being able to know God as deeply as he did theologically and I believe, quite passionately.

Before We Get Started
As we get in over our heads with this, I want us to consider this question every step of the way: ”When God made man in His image and then says that ’It is not good for man to be alone,‘ to what extent did He mean that, only physically, or spiritually as well and if spiritually, with whom should man be with?”

Getting Started
In chapter 4 of The Glory of Christ, Volume 1 of his works, Owen gets into the restoration of creation in the divine counsels of God, in the person of Christ. It’s a little lengthy to put into one post, so I am going to dig into it by spreading it out into 3 or 4 (possibly 5) posts to allow myself the opportunity to handle a little at a time. So here we go. Here is the first section:

1. God made all things, in the beginning, good, exceeding good. The whole of his work was disposed into a perfect harmony, beauty,and order, suited unto that manifestation of his own glory which he designed therein. And as all things had their own individual existence, and operations suited unto their being, and capable of an end, a rest, or a blessedness, congruous unto their natures and operations—so, in the various respects which they had each to other, in their mutual supplies, assistances, and co-operation, they all tended unto that ultimate end—his eternal glory. For as, in their beings and existence, they were effects of infinite power—so were their mutual respects and ends disposed in infinite wisdom. Thereon were the eternal power and wisdom of God glorified in them ; the one in their production, the other in their disposal into their order and harmony. Man was a creature that God made, that by him he might receive the glory that he aimed at in and by the whole inanimate creation—both that below, which was for his use, and that above, which was for his contemplation. This was the end of our nature in its original constitution. Thereunto are we again restored in Christ : James i. 18 ; Ps. civ. 24, cxxxvi. 5 ; Rom. i. 20.

Ok, Owen is asserting what the end of our nature was in its original design. Not only man, but all of creation, in that, all things are made with a purpose in the mind of God to be fulfilled in the way that brings Him the glory He seeks. But now, since sin entered, the way things were, seeing that it is impossible for man to get back there on his own, is something of a moot point because what was is not what is and even though what was may be restored, it will not ever be exactly what was because it has been changed.

Concluding Thoughts (for now….)
Now with all of this in mind, we must pursue the inquiry, “Was it possible for man NOT to sin? Was the fall avoidable?” I am going to assert that the answer is “No” to both questions. Only because I think this is what Owen is going to take on to prove (which I think he is right, by the way!) as we will see in the next few posts.

Thank you in advance for being patient as we get all of this out. I think you’ll see the brilliance of John Owen in this example. Also, if you are like me, you may want to read the quotes from Owen a few times to really soak up what he is saying. He will certainly stretch us!