N02384:576
A complete body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the…A compleat body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the…
A complete body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the Assembly's Shorter catechism wherein the doctrines of the Christian religion are unfolded, their truth confirmed, their excellence displayed, their usefulness improved; contrary errors & vices refuted & exposed, objections answered, controversies settled, cases of conscience resolved; and a great light thereby reflected on the present age. / By the Reverend & learned Samuel Willard, M.A. late Pastor of the South Church in Boston, and vice-president of Harvard College in Cambridge, in New-England. ; Prefaced by the pastors of the same church. ; [Six lines of Scripture texts]A compleat body of divinity in two hundred and fifty expository lectures on the Assembly's Shorter catechism wherein the doctrines of the Christian religion are unfolded, their truth confirm'd, their excellence display'd, their usefulness improv'd; contrary errors & vices refuted & expos'd, objections answer'd, controversies settled, cases of conscience resolv'd; and a great light thereby reflected on the present age. / By the Reverend & learned Samuel Willard, M.A. late Pastor of the South Church in Boston, and vice-president of Harvard College in Cambridge, in New-England. ; Prefac'd by the pastors of the same church. ; [Six lines of Scripture texts]
printed by B. Green and S. Kneeland for B. Eliot and D. Henchman, 1726
AN EXPOSITION OF THE ASSEMBLY's SHORTER CATECHISM: IN Two Hundred a… › Sermon 20 (Question 4 cont.)
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. IN his Affections. God is pleased to assume to himself Affections, as love, hatred, desire, loathing, delight, anger, &c. these also so far as we conceive them to belong to God are Unchangeable; and for this reason we find that God cannot repent, (Numb. 23.19) 1 Sam. 15.29. And also the strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he is not a man that he should repent. Now Repentance in propriety of speech, is a change upon the Affections: hence when Christ loveth one, he loves to the end. Rational Affections are postures of the will to an Object: Affections in God are nothing else but the respect of his decreeing Will to the Creature, and because his Will is unalterable, therefore these change not. Nor doth this Unchangeableness in God's Will destroy the freedom or liberty of it; it is no contradiction to say that God is free to do as he will, and yet is Immutable in his Decrees; for God willed all these things from Eternity, because all pleased him, and having so willed he can never be again dissatisfied at his own Will, because the reasons upon which he so determined stand forever: he is therefore said to be of one mind, Job. 23.13. Nor doth it argue a change in his Will, because he hath commended one thing and proposed another; his command saith what should be, his purpose what shall be; God's willing the act of Adam's eating the forbidden fruit, & his willing it to be Adam's duty not to eat it, show nothing of two wills, for both of these are concurring media to the same end. And whereas God seems to promise and not perform, to threaten and not execute; this rightly understood makes no Argument to prove him Changeable: he himself gives us a Clue through this Labyrinth, Jer. 18.7,—11. At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it: If that nation against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.—God dispenseth his absolute purposes to his Creatures, under conditionate promises and threatenings. Finally, when God is said in Scripture, to Repent, it is accommodated to humane language, it intends only a Change in his Providences, not in his Will; in the Creature, and not in God: He decreed Unchangeably, all the Changes that go over the World: