A92141:63
Influences of the life of grace
Influences of the life of grace. Or, A practical treatise concerning the way, manner, and means of having and improving of spiritual dispositions, and quickening influences from Christ the resurrection and the life. By Samuel Rutherfurd, Professor of Divinity in the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.Influences of the life of grace. Or, A practical treatise concerning the way, manner, and means of having and improving of spiritual dispositions, and quickning influences from Christ the resurrection and the life. By Samuel Rutherfurd, Professor of Divinity in the Vniversity of St. Andrews in Scotland.
London: printed by T.C. for Andrew Crook, 1659
Title page typeset from the transcription.
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
3. The way of Adversaries destroys all eternal decrees in God, under pretence of eschewing a necessity; for by this from eternity the will of God was loose, lubric, potential, disjunctive, and fixed neither upon the breaking or not breaking the legs of Christ, that was left to the free-will and decree of the Soldiers. So God from eternity neither decreed nor determined the selling of Joseph, or the not selling of him; nor the crucifying of Christ, or the not crucifying of him; nor the believing of Jews and Gentiles, or the free not believing, for had he put a necessity of a decree on one of the opposites, on believing rather then on none-believing, he should (say the Adversaries) have fixed all free action, under a fatal and Adamantine Law of ⟨image 17⟩eternal and inexorable necessity, and so destroyed free-will; but so God should determine and order nothing in free and contingent events, but commit all to free-will, and to contingently working causes. 2. All Gods wise decrees of free and contingent events in every page almost of the Scripture, must be utterly destroyed. 3. He could foretell nothing by free agents; prophesies and predictions must perish, for God could not say from eternity, I shall afflict my people Judah by the Babylonians; I shall impoverish Job, and spoil him by the Sabeans; I will deliver to death my Son, to the death of the Cros• by Herod, Pilate and the Jews: for that necessity should destroy all contingency of second causes, for God cannot (saith Strangius) deny his influence to one of the opposites and give it to the other but he must destroy freedom, then must he decree to give his influences to both opposites, and so should nothing be determined from eternity which comes to pass in time, ah, providence, or fortune rather. 4. God should will and decree one of the opposites in time de novo, and every day, and he should will and do in time many things which he decreed not to do from eternity, because (say they) his will and decree was from eternity fixed upon no contingent acts. 5.
3. The way of Adversaries destroys all eternal decrees in God, under pretence of eschewing a necessity; for by this from eternity the will of God was loose, lubrick, potential, disjunctive, and fixed neither upon the breaking or not breaking the legs of Christ, that was left to the free-will and decree of the Souldiers. So God from eternity neither decreed nor determined the selling of Joseph, or the not selling of him; nor the crucifying of Christ, or the not crucifying of him; nor the believing of Jews and Gentiles, or the free not believing, for had he put a necessity of a decree on one of the opposites, on believing rather then on none-believing, he should (say the Adversaries) have fixed all free action, under a fatal and Adamantine Law of