ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Westminster Confession’s teaching that God has ordained whatever comes to pass.
It is argued that this assertion does not imply that God is the author of sin, or that God forces individuals to do what they would not otherwise do, or that either the liberty that human beings originally had or the contingency of certain natural events is naturally necessitated. On the contrary, the divine decree, it is argued, respects the difference in natures of the events decreed. It is further denied that God ordains what he forecasts will happen.
The chapter next looks at the alternative perspective of Keith Ward, who rejects the idea that God unchangeably decrees whatever comes to pass on the grounds that it makes genuinely interpersonal relations between God and human beings impossible. Against this, it is argued that it is compatible with the view that God decrees whatever comes to pass that God is indeed a responsive God, who not only timelessly decrees sin but also decrees his response to it in the Incarnation of the Son.
The chapter concludes by drawing out two consequences of belief in the divine decree, firstly, that it promotes a determination to be an instrument in furthering God’s purposes, and, secondly, that it promotes the taking of every event that befalls one and others as from the hand of God.
