Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God

There is not indeed the same reason of promises and threatenings altogether, for in promising the obligation lies upon God, and the right to demand, is in the party that performs the condition of the promise: But in threatenings, the obligation lies upon the sinner, and God's right to punish is declared thereby: So that tho God doth not punish, his Will is not changed; because his Will was to declare the demerit of sin, and his right to punish upon the Commission of it; tho he may not punish according to the strict letter of the threatening the person sinning, but relax his own law for the honour of his attributes, and transfer the punishment from the offender to a person substituted in his room; this was the case in the first threatening against man, and the substituting a surety in the place of the Malefactor.

There is not indeed the same reason of promises and threatnings altogether, for in promising the obligation lies upon God, and the right to demand, is in the party that performs the condition of the promise: But in threatnings, the obligation lies upon the sinner, and God's right to punish is declared thereby: So that tho God doth not punish, his Will is not changed; because his Will was to declare the demerit of sin, and his right to punish upon the Commission of it; tho he may not punish according to the strict letter of the threatning the person sinning, but relax his own law for the honour of his attributes, and transfer the punishment from the offender to a person substituted in his room; this was the case in the first threatning against man, and the substituting a surety in the place of the Malefactor.

But the answer to these cases is this,^* that where we find predictions in Scripture declared, and yet not executed, we must consider them, not as absolute but conditional, or as the Civil Law calls it, an interlocutory Sentence. God declared what would follow by natural causes, or by the demerit of man, not what he would absolutely himself do: And in many of those predictions, tho the condition be not expressed, yet it is to be understood; so the promises of God are to be understood with the condition of perseverance in well doing; and threatenings with a clause of revocation annexed to them, provided that men repent: And this God lays down as a general case, alway to be remembered as a rule for the interpreting his threatenings against a Nation, and the same reason will hold in threatenings against a particular person.