N02384:867
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 32 (Question 7)
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.
First, THAT there is a Divine Decree, will appear, more particularly from Two Evidences.
1. FROM the Works of Efficiency: If there be any Works done by God, then there was a Decree for the doing of them: It is proper to a Cause by Counsel, and such we conceive God to be, to deliberate and conclude before he Acts: Rashness and Incogitancy are Defects, and not the Commendations of a Rational Agent: If therefore God doth all He purposed to do all; unless we will say that He doth He neither knows nor regards what; which would contradict that Infinite Wisdom which is in Him: Hence that assertion, Eph. 1.11. — Who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.
2. FROM the Consideration of his Omnipotency. When we consider that the Works of God wrought in Efficiency, are not natural and necessary, but Voluntary and Contingent; He was under no Compulsion to make a World, He did it for his Pleasure, Rev. 4.11. — For thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created; And then remember that he is able to do every Work of Power, and therefore hath not gone to the utmost of his Ability, but there was the Residue of the Spirit with Him; it saith that there must be something that made a Partition between the Possible Beings, which never shall actually be, and those Future Things that shall in Time have Existence; and what could that be but the Decree? inasmuch as they wholly depend on his Will.