How doth God execute his decrees?
God executes his decrees in the works of creation and providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of his own will.
We meet up with God’s accommodation to us in the words this question and answer are presented. Note it says decrees, plural. We often make use of language that is less precise than it ought to be so that we can make better sense of things than if we were forced to consider things as they really are.
God does this often in scripture by presenting Himself in ways and manners that accommodate our feebleness. Before returning to this topic let us pause for this consideration.
“To this effect is the passage of the Apostle already quoted that by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the Word of God (Heb. 11:3); because, without proceeding to his Providence, we cannot understand the full force of what is meant by God being the Creator, how much soever we may seem to comprehend it with our mind, and confess it with our tongue.”
John Calvin, ICR chapter 16
This is an important connection we must make when considering the way God has revealed Himself to us. We are told in the opening verses of Genesis 1 that He is Creator but that also then means He is sustainer.
Deism is stupid. Here is why…
“In short, it imagines that all things are sufficiently sustained by the energy divinely infused into them at first. But faith must penetrate deeper. After learning that there is a Creator, it must forthwith infer that he is also a Governor and Preserver, and that, not by producing a kind of general motion in the machine of the globe as well as in each of its parts, but by a special providence sustaining, cherishing, superintending, all the things which he has made, to the very minutest, even to a sparrow.”
John Calvin, ICR chapter 16
God, in all of Scripture reveals He is not an absent God; He is a providential, present and acting God. As much as He was active in Creation He is present in every moment of time and space. Even when it says he regretted creating man as a prelude to the flood of Noah.
God, speak of Himself as regretting or changing His mind. These are accommodations to our understanding and must not then inform us that God in fact changes or repents or regrets. He speaks so that we might understand as if He were a man, like us.
He is not! and that must be maintained above all. His is unchanging God.
“The Christian, then, being most fully persuaded, that all things come to pass by the dispensation of God, and that nothing happens fortuitously, will always direct his eye to him as the principal cause of events, at the same time paying due regard to inferior causes in their own place. What then is meant by the term repentance? The very same that is meant by the other forms of expression, by which God is described to us humanly. Because our weakness cannot reach his height, any description which we receive of him must be lowered to our capacity in order to be intelligible.”
John Calvin, ICR chapter 17
This excursion into how God accommodates our weakness is here also used when describing God’s decrees – more than one.
God is properly One, Infinite, Immutable and Independent Being and as such, has a decree (singular)not many decrees. We are accommodated in considering these under several headings but that is for our sake not His. We ought to understand His work and He accommodates us as we speak in these ways. God in His single decree brought about all space, all time, all events, all people, all circumstances and all of everything, all at once.
We see this singular nature of His decree in Ephesians 1:11
“In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will.”
His singular purpose and His singular will brought EVERYTHING into existence. This brings a new depth to the attribution of Christ, the Creator, being even more significantly the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.
Louis Berkoff helpfully elucidates this doctrine more fully,
“The decree of God is His eternal plan or purpose, in which He has foreordained all things that come to pass. Since it includes many particulars, we often speak of the divine decrees in the plural, though in reality there is but a single decree. It covers all the works of God in creation and redemption, and also embraces the actions of men, not excluding their sinful deeds. But while it rendered the entrance of sin into the world certain, it does not make God responsible for our sinful deeds. His decree with respect to sin is a permissive decree.”
Summary of Christian Doctrine, Part II: The Doctrine of God and Creation, Chapter VIII: The Divine Decrees.
It should be burned indelibly in our mind that God causes all things to be according to his infallible foreknowledge and not by some fiction of Him seeing things that already are. All things are not as they are, as if they existed and God works around them or through them because they existed prior. All things exist only on account of God decreeing them to be as such.
This topic will be addressed in more detail as we consider the manner in which God elects and predestines mankind for redemption. For now let us close with this helpful statement from the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 3, paragraphs 1,2 :
1) God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established. 2) Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions, yet hath He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.
These are difficult and deep things to consider. They ought to impress upon our minds that God is much bigger than we can ever fully comprehend. Matters of smallness, anything in the created realm, are no match for His magnificence and these truths ought to comfort us.
In every trial, every difficultly, every heartbreak, God, our loving Savior and Father, has brought all of these events and circumstances to bear on us His children for our discipline, good and benefit.
Trust Him and seek Him in these times, for there is none better to trust than Him who has decreed them all.
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