B. (a) Ps. 119:89-91—“For ever, O Jehovah, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: Thou hast established the earth and it abideth. They abide this day according to thine ordinances; For all things are thy servants.” (b) Acts 17:26—“he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”; cf. Zach. 5:1—“came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the mountains were mountains of brass”—the fixed decrees from which proceed God's providential dealings? (c) Job 14:5—“Seeing his days are determined, The number of his months is with thee, And thou hast determined his bounds that he cannot pass.” (d) John 21:19—“this he spake, signifying by what manner of death he should glorify God.” (e) Good acts: Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure, even saying of Jerusalem, She shall be built; and of the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid”; Eph. 2:10—“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.” Evil acts: Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”; 1 K. 12:15—“So the king hearkened not unto the people, for it was a thing brought about of Jehovah”; 24—“for this thing is of me”; Luke 22:23—“For the Son of man indeed goeth, as it hath been determined: but woe unto that man through whom he is betrayed”; Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did crucify and slay”; 4:27, 28—“of a truth in this city against thy holy Servant Jesus, who thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel foreordained to come to pass”; Rom. 9:17—“For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power”; 1 Pet 2:3—“They stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed”; Rev. 17:17—“For God did put in their hearts to do his mind, and to come to one mind, and to give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God should be accomplished.”
C. (a) 1 Cor. 2:7—“the wisdom which hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory”; Eph 3:10, 11—“manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our lord.” Ephesians 1 is a pæan in praise of God's decrees. (b) The greatest decree of all is the decree to give the world to Christ. Ps. 2:7, 8—“I will tell of the decree:... I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance”; cf. verse 6—“I have set my king Upon my holy hill of Zion”; 1 Cor. 15:25—“he must reign, till he hath put all his enemies under his feet.” (c) This decree we are to convert into our decree; God's will is to be executed through our wills. Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.” Rev. 5:1, 7—“I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the back, close sealed with seven seals.... And he [the Lamb] came, and he taketh it out of the right hand of him that sat on the throne”; verse 9—“Worthy art thou to take the book, and to open the seals thereof”—Christ alone has the omniscience to know, and the omnipotence to execute, the divine decrees. When John weeps because there is none in heaven or earth to loose the seals and to read the book of God's decrees, the Lion of the tribe of Judah prevails to open it. Only Christ conducts the course of history to its appointed end. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 268-283, on The Decree of God as the Great Encouragement to Missions.
2. From Reason.
A. From the Divine Foreknowledge.
Foreknowledge implies fixity, and fixity implies decree.—From eternity God foresaw all the events of the universe as fixed and certain. This fixity and certainty could not have had its ground either in blind fate or in the variable wills of men, since neither of these had an existence. It could have had its ground in nothing outside the divine mind, for in eternity nothing existed besides the divine mind. But for this fixity there must have been a cause; if anything in the future was fixed, something must have fixed it. This fixity could have had its ground only in the plan and purpose of God. In fine, if God foresaw the future as certain, it must have been because there was something in himself which made it certain; or, in other words, because he had decreed it.
We object therefore to the statement of E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 74—“God's knowledge and God's purposes both being eternal, one cannot be conceived as the ground of the other, nor can either be predicated to the exclusion of the other as the cause of things, but, correlative and eternal, they must be coequal quantities in thought.” We reply that while decree does not chronologically precede, it does logically precede, foreknowledge. Foreknowledge is not of possible events, but of what is certain to be. The certainty of future events which God foreknew could have had its ground only in his decree, since he alone existed to be the ground and explanation of this certainty. Events were fixed only because God had fixed them. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:397—“An event must be made certain, before it can be known as a certain event.” Turretin, Inst. Theol., loc. 3, quaes. 12, 18—“Præcipuum fundamentum scientiæ divinæ circa futura contingentia est deoretum solum.”
Decreeing creation implies decreeing the foreseen results of creation.—To meet the objection that God might have foreseen the events of the universe, not because he had decreed each one, but only because he had decreed to create the universe and institute its laws, we may put the argument in another form. In eternity there could have been no cause of the future existence of the universe, outside of God himself, since no being existed but God himself. In eternity God foresaw that the creation of the world and the institution of its laws would make certain its actual history even to the most insignificant details. But God decreed to create and to institute these laws. In so decreeing he necessarily decreed all that was to come. In fine, God foresaw the future events of the universe as certain, because he had decreed to create; but this determination to create involved also a determination of all the actual results of that creation; or, in other words, God decreed those results.
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 84—“The existence of divine decrees may be inferred from the existence of natural law.” Law = certainty = God's will. Positivists express great contempt for the doctrine of the eternal purpose of God, yet they consign us to the iron necessity of physical forces and natural laws. Dr. Robinson also points out that decrees are “implied in the prophecies. We cannot conceive that all events should have converged toward the one great event—the death of Christ—without the intervention of an eternal purpose.” E. H. Johnson, Outline Syst. Theol., 2d ed., 251, note—“Reason is confronted by the paradox that the divine decrees are at once absolute and conditional; the resolution of the paradox is that God absolutely decreed a conditional system—a system, however, the workings of which he thoroughly foreknows.”The rough unhewn stone and the statue into which it will be transformed are both and equally included in the plan of the sculptor.