Perspectives on Election by Chad Owen Brand

Author:Chad Owen Brand
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

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1. John Murray, “The Plan of Salvation,” in Collected Writings of John Murray (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1977), 2:124, explains this term this way: “The distinct elements comprised in the design or plan have often been spoken of as the distinct decrees. If this term is adopted, then the expression ‘the order of the decrees’ means the same as the order that the various elements of salvation sustain to one another in the eternal counsel of God.”

2. Benjamin B. Warfield, The Plan of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d.), 14–15.

3. God's purpose and his providential execution of his eternal purpose determine all things. This is why Calvin wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.23.2: “God's will is, and rightly ought to be, the cause of all things that are. For if it has any cause, something must precede it, to which it is, as it were, bound; this is unlawful to imagine. For God's will is so much the highest rule of righteousness that whatever he wills, by the very fact that he wills it, must be considered righteous. When, therefore, one asks why God has so done, we must reply: because he has willed it. But if you proceed further to ask why he so willed, you are seeking something greater and higher than God's will, which cannot be found.”

4. While we must insist on the equal ultimacy of election and reprobation in the divine decree, we must not speak of an exact identity of divine causality behind both. For while divine election is alone the root cause of the sinner's salvation, divine reprobation takes into account the reprobate's sin apart from which his condemnation must never be conceived and for which God is in no way the chargeable cause (see Westminster Confession of Faith, III.vii). Although this is the case, nevertheless, as John Murray cautions in his review of G. C. Berkouwer's Divine Election in Collected Writings of John Murray (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1982), 4:330, emphasis original: “The necessary distinctions which must be observed, in respect of causality, between election unto life … and ‘reprobation’ unto death… do not in the least interfere with the truth which is the real question at issue, to wit, the pure sovereignty of the differentiation inhering in the counsel of God's will. … The ‘equal ultimacy’ is here inviolate. God differentiated between men in his eternal decree; he made men to differ. And, ultimately, the only explanation of the differentiation is the sovereign will of God.”

5. Many Christians today desire to suppress all study of the eternal plan of God out of fear that the doctrine of election will destroy the Christian's certainty of salvation (on the contrary, it actually grounds his certainty), and because it is, they say, both divisive and detrimental to the “free will” of man. John Calvin warned against such suppression: “Scripture is the school of the Holy Spirit, in which, as nothing is omitted that is both necessary and useful to know, so nothing is taught but what is expedient to know.

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