God has decreed the harvest only as the result of man's labor in sowing and reaping; God decrees wealth to the man who works and saves; so answers are decreed to prayer, and salvation to faith. Compare Paul's declaration of God's purpose (Acts 27:22, 24—“there shall be no loss of life among you.... God hath granted thee all them that sail with thee”) with his warning to the centurion and sailors to use the means of safety (verse 31—“Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved”). See also 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”; Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”; Deut. 29:29—“the secret things belong unto Jehovah our God: but the things that are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.” See Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 252-354.
Ps. 59:10 (A. V.)—“The God of my mercy shall prevent me”—shall anticipate, or go before, me; Is. 65:24—“before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear”; Ps. 23:2—“He leadeth me”; John 10:3—“calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.” These texts describe prevenient grace in prayer, in conversion, and in Christian work. Plato called reason and sensibility a mismatched pair, one of which was always getting ahead of the other. Decrees and freedom seem to be mismatched, but they are not so. Even Jonathan Edwards, with his deterministic theory of the will, could, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom, insist on the use of means, and could appeal to men as if they had the power to choose between the motives of self and of God. God's sovereignty and human freedom are like the positive and the negative poles of the magnet,—they are inseparable from one another, and are both indispensable elements in the attraction of the gospel.
Peter Damiani, the great monk-cardinal, said that the sin he found it hardest to uproot was his disposition to laughter. The homage paid to asceticism is the homage paid to the conqueror. But not all conquests are worthy of homage. Better the words of Luther: “If our God may make excellent large pike and good Rhenish wine, I may very well venture to eat and drink. Thou mayest enjoy every pleasure in the world that is not sinful; thy God forbids thee not, but rather wills it. And it is pleasing to the dear God whenever thou rejoicest or laughest from the bottom of thy heart.”But our freedom has its limits. Martha Baker Dunn: “A man fishing for pickerel baits his hook with a live minnow and throws him into the water. The little minnow seems to be swimming gaily at his own free will, but just the moment he attempts to move out of his appointed course he begins to realize that there is a hook in his back. That is what we find out when we try to swim against the stream of God's decrees.”
3. That they make God the author of sin.
To this we reply:
(a) They make God, not the author of sin, but the author of free beings who are themselves the authors of sin. God does not decree efficiently to work evil desires or choices in men. He decrees sin only in the sense of decreeing to create and preserve those who will sin; in other words, he decrees to create and preserve human wills which, in their own self-chosen courses, will be and do evil. In all this, man attributes sin to himself and not to God, and God hates, denounces, and punishes sin.
Joseph's brethren were none the less wicked for the fact that God meant their conduct to result in good (Gen. 50:20). Pope Leo X and his indulgences brought on the Reformation, but he was none the less guilty. Slaveholders would have been no more excusable, even if they had been able to prove that the negro race was cursed in the curse of Canaan (Gen. 9:25—“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren”). Fitch, in Christian Spectator, 3:601—“There can be and is a purpose of God which is not an efficient purpose. It embraces the voluntary acts of moral beings, without creating those acts by divine efficiency.” See Martineau, Study, 2:107, 136.
Mat. 26:24—“The Son of man goeth even as it is written of him: but woe unto that man through whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had not been born.” It was appointed that Christ should suffer, but that did not make men less free agents, nor diminish the guilt of their treachery and injustice. Robert G. Ingersoll asked: “Why did God create the devil?”We reply that God did not create the devil,—it was the devil who made the devil. God made a holy and free spirit who abused his liberty, himself created sin, and so made himself a devil.
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:299—“Evil has been referred to 1. an extra-divine principle—to one or many evil spirits, or to fate, or to matter—at all events to a principle limiting the divine power; 2. a want or defect in the Deity himself, either his imperfect wisdom or his imperfect goodness; 3. human culpability, either a universal imperfection of human nature, or particular transgressions of the first men.” The third of these explanations is the true one: the first is irrational; the second is blasphemous. Yet this second is the explanation of Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyat, stanzas 80, 81—“Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin Beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with predestined evil round Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin. Oh Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, And ev'n with Paradise devise the snake: For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blackened—man's forgiveness give—and take!” And David Harum similarly says: “If I've done anything to be sorry for, I'm willing to be forgiven.”