20 Minutes
To gain the wisdom of the word we are to have faith in the remotest eternity,
the Determinate Counsel of the Triune God. This in order that we may
understand what final determination God has made with regard to His elect
in Christ. All by whom Christ is received in faith will be regarded by our
heavenly Father as sons and daughters. If we long to be regarded as sons
and daughters of God and heirs, we must ascend unto Christ. And if this is
our final goal, how infatuated is it to seek out of him what we have already
obtained in him, and can only find in him? Besides, as he is the Eternal
Wisdom, the Immutable Truth, the Determinate Counsel of the Father, there
is no room for fear that anything which he tells us will vary in the minutest
degree from that will of the Father after which we inquire. It’s called wisdom.
God’s foreordained plan was mysteriously hidden, because humans almost
always go against God’s plainly revealed word. God knew if we knew His
ordained plan, we would interfere. We can reject God’s word. We do this all
the time: sin is doing the opposite of God’s will. I say again, how can God
use me to spiritually impress upon your mind and your heart that there is no
room for fear that anything which He reveals to us will vary in the minutest
degree from that will of the Father after which we inquire. No, rather God,
who calls us to reason, faithfully discloses to us what is from the beginning,
and always will be. The practical influence of this doctrine of the Determinate
Counsel ought also to be exhibited in our prayers. For though a belief of our
election animates us to involve God, yet when we frame our prayers, it were
preposterous to obtrude it upon God, or to stipulate in this way, “O Lord, if I
am elected, hear me.” He would have us to rest satisfied with His promises,
and not to inquire elsewhere whether or not He is disposed to hear us. We
shall so be disentangled from many devices of the enemy, if we know how
to make a right use of what is rightly written; but let us not inconsiderately
take it to purposes different from that to which it ought to be confined. God
will not change toward us with His promises. This establishes our confidence
that our election is connected with our calling. But that calling and faith are
of little value without perseverance. There are two aspects of calling. There
is a universal call, by which God, through the external preaching of the word,
invites all alike, even those for whom He designs the call to be a savor of
death, and the ground of a severer condemnation. Besides this there is a
special call which, for the most part, God bestows on believers only, when
by the internal illumination of the Spirit He causes the word taught to take
deep root in their hearts. There is however the situation where He
communicates it also to those whom He enlightens for a time, and whom
afterwards, in just punishment for their ingratitude, their unwillingness to
reason with His word, He abandons and smites with greater blindness. God
has committed His chosen called to Christ. We must not fail to understand
His condescension in the ways of God as pertains to the ways of man. God
condescends to our comprehension.
Jeremiah 18:1-10
Isaiah 64:8
Psalms 15
Let this truth be set down as the anchor to God’s every word. The
Determinate Counsel is just that...it is every aspect of God’s character. It
horizons everything under the foreknowledge and foreordaining of God.
Foreknowledge and foreordination are God's will, counsel, purpose, resolve,
plan that associates every happening together. God both sets-up the way
and knows exactly how all things were, are, and will be. God is sovereign.
He directs our paths. He has written His story of mankind in order to bring to
pass His will and plans. Why? To receive glory. We are His vessels, made
for life or damnation according to the choice we make concerning His will.
There are two standpoints by which the distinct wisdom of God is viewed.
From the historical standpoint we are morally responsible for our every
choice, our every deed. From the standpoint of Divine teleology, it was part
of an eternal plan that explains consequences in terms of the purpose they
serve rather than of the cause by which they arise.
Luke 24:26
Two aspects of the same truth; our choices have consequences that are
foreknown of God. Reasonable consistency of two developed experiences;
our will aligned with God’s foreordain plan. God planned and ordained that
Jesus should be lifted up and crucified for us who would be chosen for
salvation. Jesus Christ, according to scripture sustains the entire universe
and controls its comings and goings. Every heartbeat, every breath, every
life and every death is in His hands.
Please do not harden your heart against the scriptures simply because you
cannot logically digest what is written. What is biblically truth is not always
apparent truth to the mind of man. We must come to reason with the
evidence of God’s election. For it is His choice. We’re talking about One who
can whisper untold numbers of galaxies into existence before a moment. It
is inaccurate to build divine truth on just what you think you know. We must
take into account the whole of scripture. Does not the Spirit expressly teach
us that the way of God is revealed in comparing spiritual with spiritual, and
that is meant to say, scripture with scripture? This is the way of the Holy
Ghost, “which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom
teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with
spiritual”.
All of God’s will is determinate and is either responsive to the responses of
men or contrary. The determinate will of God turns men’s hearts and
determines their response; the contrariness of God is changeable, resistible,
and interactive to the responses of men. God’s resistible will was His desire
that Pharaoh would let the people go, that Pharaoh would not sin, and that
Pharaoh would not be hardened through pride. God was using Pharaoh as
an instrument of His wrath and hatred, and He hardened him through an
eternal, predestinated plan and purpose which was for His own glory – this
was His eternal, irresistible, unchanging will. God hated Pharaoh from
eternity past, and at present that eternal hatred hardened his heart;
simultaneously, God loved Pharaoh and did not want him to sin, so much so
that He was grieved over his continuance to sin.
The character of God is devoted to determination, which is accomplished by
His irresistible will, as God in the ways of God, as God is who He is in any
given situation. They are holy ways, separate ways, and they are not even
comprehensible to the ways of man except the Holy Spirit reveals them
through reasoning.And it is in this way that we may accumulate the scriptural
truth of every word of God. God’s mind is unchanging in every way that it is
virtuous to be unchanging but open to change in every way that it is virtuous
to be open to the genuineness of our relationship. When a person is in a
genuine relationship with another, willingness to adjust to them is always
considered a virtue. When should this apply to people and not to God? Since
God is the epitome of all that is praiseworthy, and since we ordinarily
consider responsiveness to be praiseworthy, should we not be inclined to
view God as the most responsive Sovereign Being conceivable? He never
changes His perfect character, of course, for this would not be praiseworthy.
But He is willing and able to adjust His plans and emotions as His relationship
with us calls for it. This adjustment was foreknown and foreordainly
determined from the beginning.
God changes to every one who is of faith. Though He is all holiness, all
loveliness, all truthfulness, all overwhelming, all infiniteness, all wisdom, all
All, He becomes more even beyond what He is to us as He is transcendent
sovereignty past measurable determinatives. As we will grow in wisdom in
the faith of His changes, we will give Him all the magnificence of
incomparable glories that are distant after our praise.
God has predetermined by appointment every tiny detail in the universe,
such as the path of the dust mote in the air and all of our besetting sins.
Proverbs 16:33
But the randomness of casting lots is not random to God. God is not the least
taxed by keeping every sub-nuclear particle in its place. The only way to
understand the truth of change as related to God is to attain the
understanding from reasoning with God to know of the ultimate governing of
God. This centers us in wisdom.
Acts 4:27, 28
Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the Jews were all gathered
together to do what God's foreknowledge knew and God's plan had
predestined to take place in the killing of Jesus. We have God's plan and
hand predestining the most horrible sins ever committed. Pilate's choices,
the soldiers' cruel mockery, the piercing of his side, the cries, "Crucify him!
Crucify him!"...these few hours in history were the climax of the worst
wickedness that has ever been performed on the planet or ever will be. And
God planned it so that we might be saved from those sins. In other words,
what the devil did in unleashing all of that was commit suicide. And I pray
that when we contemplate our faith in a sovereign God who governs the dust
motes, when we contemplate believing in a totally sovereign God, I pray that
we center our faith right on the cross and every truth brought forth by it. Some
think it pathetic. Some think it most powerful. One thought is toward
perishing, the other toward salvation. Faith begins and ends at the cross...for
by one man...God gave us His Son. Take away the cross, you forfeit eternity.
You see, brothers and sisters, when we work out in our minds to stay in the
revealing of the Determinate Counsel, if we stay right there and then just
work out from there as far as our mind can handle, then we'll be in safe
hands. Our minds will be safe, and our hearts will be safe, because we'll be
kept humble. The reason most cannot understand the determinate wisdom
of God is because they fail to enter His counsel. The worst sin that was ever
to be committed was foreknown and ordained by God the Father and God
the Son.
Wisdom is personified as a woman who has much to offer to any who may
heed her words.
Proverbs 1:20-33; 8:1
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