Q. 1. “What is God’s righteousness?”
“[God’s righteousness is]
His unswerving commitment to Himself, in all His attributes and Persons, as the
standard of all His behaviour. Righteousness requires a standard. God’s standard
for all His actions is Himself. God is righteous when He acts in all areas in
accordance with His own nature.” (Rev. Angus Stewart)
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Q. 2. “How does common grace/the
well-meant offer ‘militate against the divine righteousness’? Why would a
general love need a ‘general judicial ground’ and what is even meant by that? …
The Bible does say He ‘cannot look on iniquity’ (Hab. 1:13) but how would that
preclude God from loving His creatures ‘as creatures’ (by which I mean that God
made all men; all things God makes are good;
all men are the work of His hands)?”
A desire to save, which the
well-meant offer is, without any basis for salvation in the death of Christ
and contrary to a limited atonement, denies the justice of God in that it
posits a saving love without the
satisfaction of divine righteousness and puts contradiction in the will of
God, that is, in God Himself, in that, concerning justice, God wills the salvation only of those for whom Christ
died, but concerning His grace He
desires the salvation of all.
Such is the blatant contradiction of
justice by the well-meant offer that defenders of the offer are today teaching
a universal atonement in order to accommodate the well-meant offer. I
have called attention to this significant development of the theology of the
well-meant offer in two book reviews I have written in the most recent issue of
the Protestant Reformed Theological Journal.
“Hate the sin but love the sinner” is
an old defense of the well-meant offer. God then hates Judas’ betrayal of
Jesus and suicide, but loves Judas.
This defense of the offer fails on a
multitude of accounts. It implies the love of God for Satan, one of God’s
creatures. It contradicts plain biblical testimony: God hated Esau,
according to Romans 9—not only Esau’s sin, but Esau. Similarly, the
Psalms are full of the declaration that God hates the workers of iniquity.
It contends for the heresy that God loves all humans with a saving love, thus
implying that the love of God fails
and that when love is successful it is the sinner himself who must be credited for his salvation. Not
the love of God, but the creature himself
is the cause of salvation. It implies that God loves the damned in hell
eternally, for they remain His creatures. This is not only
absurdity. It is also disparagement of the love of God: It cannot
deliver the objects of love.
Saving grace and love are particular
(Romans 8 and 9). Nor may the clay complain against the Potter, why
hast Thou made me thus? (Prof. David J. Engelsma, 10/09/2018)
“God has His own people
in the world. These He knew with divine love in Christ from before the foundation
of the world. To them He assumed an attitude of grace in our Redeemer from
eternity … But as well as He knows the elect, He knows the reprobate. They are
not in Christ. They stand before Him in all their sin and transgression. They
are guilty. They have forfeited all. For time as well as for eternity they have
lost the right to any of the blessings of grace. They are, in a word, objects
of His wrath … To maintain that,
objectively speaking, God can assume an attitude of grace to them, say, for six
thousand years, is to make an attack upon God's holiness and righteousness.
No sinner can stand in any relation to the holiness of God without being
deprived of all grace. No naked sinner can maintain himself or be maintained as
an object of love in view of God's righteousness. And principally it makes no
difference whether you assume such an attitude of love and favor in God over
against the sinner outside of Christ for an endless eternity or for a single
minute. The fact remains the same.” (Herman Hoeksema, quoted in “The
Canons and Common Grace,” by Steven Key, PTRJ, April 2004)
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Q.
3. “God doesn’t need a legal basis to
extend grace and show favor to men who are outside of Christ, because, (a)
common grace does not remove the guilt of sin, and therefore does not carry
pardon with it; and (b) it does not lift the sentence of condemnation, but only
postpones its execution.” (Louis Berkhof)
(a)
The issue is how God can justly love
the wicked (for whom no atonement is made). For the God who is of purer eyes
than to behold evil and cannot look on sin (Hab. 1:13), it would be unjust to love them outside of Christ.
There goes divine simplicity: an unjust divine love.
(b)
The one making this claim needs to prove that this delay is ‘grace’ and not
simply providence, a providence with its own divine purpose, including giving
the wicked more time to heap up more wrath to themselves (Rom. 2:5), develop in
their sin, make themselves ripe for judgment, bring forth any children through
whom the elect will be gathered, be used to test and try the saints, etc. (Rev. Angus Stewart, 12/06/2019)
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