Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 360
“Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will.” Ephesians 1:5.
It is at once a Doctrine of Scripture and of common sense, that whatever God does in time He predestined to do in eternity. Some men find fault with Divine Predestination and challenge the justice of eternal decrees. Now if they remember that predestination is the counterfoil of history, as an architectural plan—the carrying out of which we read in the facts that happen—they may perhaps obtain a slight clue to the unreasonableness of their hostility. I never heard anyone among professors wantonly and willfully find fault with God’s dealings, yet I have heard some who would even dare to call in question the equity of His counsels. If the thing itself is right, it must be right that God intended to do the thing. If you find no fault with facts, as you see them in Providence, you have no ground to complain of decrees, as you find them in predestination—for the decrees and the facts are just the counterparts, one of the other! Have you any reason to find fault with God, that He has been pleased to save you and save me? Then why should you find fault because Scripture says he predetermined that He would save us? I cannot see, if the fact itself is agreeable, why the decree should be objectionable! I can see no reason why you should find fault with God’s foreordination if you do not find fault with what actually happens as the effect of it. Let a man but agree to acknowledge an act of Providence, and I need to know how he can, except he runs in the very teeth of Providence, find any fault with the predestination or intention that God made concerning that Providence. Will you blame me for preaching, this morning? Suppose you answer, No. Then can you blame me that I formed a resolution last night that I would preach? Will you blame me for preaching on this particular subject? Do, if you please, then, and find me guilty for intending to do so; but if you say I am perfectly right in selecting such a subject, how can you say I was not perfectly right in intending to preach upon it? Assuredly you cannot find fault with God’s predestination if you do not find fault with the effects that immediately spring from it! Now we are taught in Scripture, I affirm again, that all things that God chose to do in time, were most certainly intended by Him to be done in eternity, and He predestined such things should be done. If I am called, I believe God intended before all worlds that I should be called; if in His mercy He has regenerated me, I believe that from all eternity He intended to regenerate me! And if in His loving kindness He shall at last perfect me and carry me to Heaven, I believe it always was His intention to do so. If you cannot find fault with the thing, itself, that God does, in the name of reason, common sense, and Scripture, how dare you find fault with God’s intention to do it?
But there are one or two acts of God which, while they certainly are decreed as much as other things, yet they bear such a special relation to God’s Predestination, that it is rather difficult to say whether they were done in eternity or whether they were done in time. Election is one of those things which was done absolutely in eternity; all who were elect, were elect as much in eternity as they are in time. But you may say, Does the same affirmation apply to adoption or justification. My late eminent and now glorified predecessor, Dr. Gill, diligently studying these Doctrines, said that adoption was the act of God in eternity, and that as all Believers were elect in eternity, so beyond a doubt they were adopted in eternity. He went further than that to include the Doctrine of Justification, and he said that inasmuch as Jesus Christ was before all worlds justified by His Father, and accepted by Him as our Representative, therefore all the elect must have been justified in Christ from before all worlds! Now I believe there is a great deal of truth in what he said, though there was a considerable outcry raised against him at the time he first uttered it. However, that being a high and mysterious point, we would have you accept the Doctrine that all those who are saved, at last, were elect in eternity when the means as well as the end were determined. With regard to adoption, I believe we were predestined hereunto in eternity, but I think there are some points with regard to adoption which will not allow me to consider the act of adoption to have been completed in eternity. For instance, the positive translation of my soul from a state of nature into a state of Grace is a part of adoption, or at least it is an effect of it, and so close an effect that it really seems to be a part of adoption, itself—I believe that this was designed, and in fact that it was virtually carried out in God’s Everlasting Covenant. I think that it was then actually brought to pass in all its fullness.