Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your
fathers have forsaken me, saith the Lord, and have walked after other gods, and
have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and have not
kept my law; And ye have done worse than your fathers; for, behold, ye walk
every one after the imagination of his evil heart, that they may not hearken
unto me: Therefore will I cast you out of this land into a land that ye
know not, neither ye nor your fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day
and night; where I will not shew you favour. Therefore, behold, the
days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that
brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt (Jer. 16:11-14).
COMMON GRACE ARGUMENT:
Jeremiah 16:13 has been appealed to as a
text which supposedly teaches a grace or favour of God toward the reprobate. The argument is that God’s saying He will “not
shew these people favour” implies they were previously recipients and objects
of this favour.
(I)
Herman Veldman (1908-1997)
[Source: The
Standard Bearer, vol. 25,
no. 17 (June 1, 1949), pp. 395-396]
In the first place we would
observe the rather obvious fact that the text declares literally that the Lord
will not shew any favour unto them.
Is it not strange that a text quoted in support of a general favour declares
that no favour will be shown them? One is surely struck with the thought
that anyone, who quotes texts such as Jeremiah 16:13 must be desperate in his
search for Scriptural proof of the theory of a general favour of God. Secondly, the exponents of such a general grace
of God appeal to this text, I presume, because it presupposes that, whereas the
Lord will not shew them favour in a strange land, He had shown them favour in
the past, the land of Canaan. And to this we have no objection. However,
let us please note the following. If favour had been shown them in the past,
what right do the exponents of “common grace” have to interpret this favour or
grace of Jeremiah 16:13 as a common, general, non-saving
favour of God? For, it is indeed true that this people had been shown the
favour of God in the land from which the Lord had driven them. The land of
Canaan was the land of promise, the land of the temple and of the sacrifices
and shadows and types and symbols—in that land the grace of God had been shown
them abundantly, revealed to them, had surrounded them in abundance. Every day
they had come into contact with this grace of the living God. The daily sacrifices at the temple were a
continuous testimony of the amazing grace and pity of the Lord who blots out
all our sins in the blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord. But, does this mean that,
while all that grace of God was revealed unto them, each one had individually
been a personal recipient of the favour or grace of the Lord? To see the sacrifices
day in and day out was surely no guarantee in itself that one’s sins were
actually blotted out by the living God. If this outpouring of the grace of God
throughout the Old Testament be considered a token of the general love
or grace of God, one conclusion is warranted: the blood of the Lamb of Calvary
was intended by God to be for all men. And this is Arminianism. Hence,
Jeremiah 16:13 acquainted us with the fact that the Lord had driven the people
of Israel out of this land of the promise, and that, in a strange land, this
favour of the Lord would not be shown unto them. And, surely, this does not
imply that these ungodly, while in the land of Canaan, had personally
been the objects of the love and favour of God. In this connection, I
would like to refer the readers to Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 25 and let them
judge for themselves whether his presence in the land of Canaan assured every
Israelite personally of the mercy and favour of the Lord.
-----------------------------------------
(II)
More
to come! (DV)
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