when he assumed human nature. There was an union of the two natures,
but no change of the Deity into the humanity, or of the humanity into
the Deity: both preserved their peculiar properties. The humanity was
changed by a communication of excellent gifts from the divine nature,
not by being brought into an equality with it, for that was impossible
that a creature should become equal to the Creator. He took the “form
of a servant,” but he lost not the form of God; he despoiled not
himself of the perfections of the Deity. He was indeed emptied, “and
became of no reputation” (Phil. ii. 7); but he did not cease to be God,
though he was reputed to be only a man, {a340} and a very mean one too.
The glory of his divinity was not extinguished nor diminished, though
it was obscured and darkened, under the veil of our infirmities; but
there was no more change in the hiding of it, than there is in the
body of the sun when it is shadowed by the interposition of a cloud.
His blood while it was pouring out from his veins was the “blood of
God” (Acts xx. 28); and, therefore, when he was bowing the head of
his humanity upon the cross, he had the nature and perfections of
God; for had he ceased to be God, he had been a mere creature, and his
sufferings would have been of as little value and satisfaction as the
sufferings of a creature. He could not have been a sufficient Mediator,
had he ceased to be God: and he had ceased to be God, had he lost any
one perfection proper to the divine nature; and losing none, he lost
not this of unchangeableness, which is none of the meanest belonging
to the Deity. Why by his union with the human nature should he lose
this, any more than he lost his omniscience, which he discovered
by his knowledge of the thoughts of men; or his mercy, which he
manifested to the height in the time of his suffering? That is truly a
change, when a thing ceaseth to be what it was before: this was not in
Christ; he assumed our nature without laying aside his own. When the
soul is united to the body, doth it lose any of those perfections that
are proper to its nature? Is there any change either in the substance
or qualities of it? No; but it makes a change in the body, and of a
dull lump it makes it a living mass, conveys vigor and strength to it,
and, by its power, quickens it to sense and motion.[619] So did the
divine nature and human remain entire; there was no change of the one
into the other, as Christ by a miracle changed water into wine, or
men by art change sand or ashes into glass: and when he prays “for the
glory he had with God before the world was” (John xvii. 5), he prays
that a glory he had in his Deity might shine forth in his person as
Mediator, and be evidenced in that height and splendor suitable to
his dignity, which had been so lately darkened by his abasement;
that as he had appeared to be the Son of Man in the infirmity of the
flesh, he might appear to be the Son of God in the glory of his person,
that he might appear to be the Son of God and the Son of Man in one
person.[620] Again, there could be no change in this union; for, in
a real change, something is acquired which was not possessed before,
neither formally nor eminently: but the divinity had from eternity,
before the incarnation, all the perfections of the human nature
eminently in a nobler manner than they are in themselves, and
therefore could not be changed by a real union.[621]
_Prop. III._ Repentance and other affections ascribed to God in
Scripture, argue no change in God. We often read of God’s repenting,
repenting of the good he promised (Jer. xviii. 10), and of the evil
he threatened (Exod. xxxii. 14; John iii. 10), or of the work he hath
wrought (Gen. vi. 6). We must observe, therefore, that,
1. Repentance is not properly in God. He is a pure Spirit, and is not
capable of those passions which are signs of weakness and impotence,
{a341} or subject to those regrets we are subject to. Where there is
a proper repentance there is a want of foresight, an ignorance of what
would succeed, or a defect in the examination of the occurrences which
might fall within consideration. All repentance of a fact is grounded
upon a mistake in the event which was not foreseen, or upon an after
knowledge of the evil of the thing which was acted by the person
repenting. But God is so wise that he cannot err, so holy he cannot
do evil; and his certain prescience, or foreknowledge, secures him
against any unexpected events. God doth not act but upon clear and
infallible reason; and a change upon passion is accounted by all
so great a weakness in man, that none can entertain so unworthy a
conceit of God. Where he is said to repent (Gen. vi. 6), he is also
said to grieve; now no proper grief can be imagined to be in God. As
repentance is inconsistent with infallible foresight, so is grief no
less inconsistent with undefiled blessedness. God is “blessed forever”
(Rom. ix. 8), and therefore nothing can befall him that can stain that
blessedness. His blessedness would be impaired and interrupted while
he is repenting, though he did soon rectify that which is the cause
of his repentance. “God is of one mind, and who can turn him? what his
soul desires that he doth” (Job xxiii. 13).
2. But God accommodates himself in the Scripture to our weak capacity.
God hath no more of a proper repentance, than he hath of a real body;
though he, in accommodation to our weakness, ascribes to himself the
members of our bodies to set out to our understanding the greatness of
his perfections, we must not conclude him a body like us; so, because
he is said to have anger and repentance, we must not conclude him
to have passions like us. When we cannot fully comprehend him as he
is, he clothes himself with our nature in his expressions that we may
apprehend him as we are able, and by an inspection into ourselves,
learn something of the nature of God; yet those human ways of
speaking ought to be understood in a manner agreeable to the infinite
excellency and majesty of God, and are only designed to mark out
something in God which hath a resemblance with something in us; as we
cannot speak to God as gods, but as men, so we cannot understand him
speaking to us as a God, unless he condescend to speak to us like a
man. God therefore frames his language to our dulness, not to his own
state, and informs us by our own phrases, what he would have us learn
of his nature, as nurses talk broken language to young children. In
all such expressions, therefore, we must ascribe the perfection we
conceive in them to God, and lay the imperfection at the door of the
creature.
3. Therefore, repentance in God is only a change of his outward
conduct, according to his infallible foresight and immutable will.
He changes the way of his providential proceeding according to the
carriage of the creature, without changing his will, which is the rule
of his providence. When God speaks of his repenting “that he had made
man” (Gen. vi. 6), it is only his changing his conduct from a way of
kindness to a way of severity, and is a word suited to our capacities
to signify his detestation of sin, and his resolution to punish {a342}
it, after man had made himself quite another thing, than God had made
him; “it repents me,” that is, I am purposed to destroy the world, as
he that repents of his work throws it away;[622] as if a potter cast
away the vessel he had framed, it were a testimony that he repented
that ever he took pains about it, so the destruction of them seems
to be a repentance in God that ever he made them; it is a change of
events, not of counsels. Repentance in us is a grief for a former
fact, and a changing of our course in it; grief is not in God, but
his repentance is a willing a thing should not be as it was, which
will was fixed from eternity; for God, foreseeing man would fall,
and decreeing to permit it, he could not be said to repent in time
of what he did not repent from eternity; and therefore, if there were
no repentance in God from eternity, there could be none in time.[623]
But God is said to repent when he changes the disposition of affairs
without himself; as men, when they repent, alter the course of their
actions, so God alters things, _extra se_, or without himself, but
changes nothing of his own purpose within himself. It rather notes
the action he is about to do, than anything in his own nature, or
any change in his eternal purpose. God’s repenting of his kindness
is nothing but an inflicting of punishment, which the creature by
the change of his carriage hath merited: as his repenting of the
evil threatened is the withholding the punishment denounced, when the
creature hath humbly submitted to his authority, and acknowledged his
crime. Or else we may understand those expressions of joy, and grief,
and repentance, to signify thus much, that the things declared to be
the objects of joy, and grief, and repentance, are of that nature,
that if God were capable of our passions, he would discover himself
in such cases as we do; as when the prophets mention the joys and
applaudings of heaven, earth, and the sea, they only signify that
the things they speak of are so good, that if the heavens and the sea
had natures capable of joy, they would express it upon that occasion
in such a manner as we do; so would God have joy at the obedience
of men, and grief at the unworthy carriage of men, and repent of his
kindness when men abuse it, and repent of his punishment when men
reform under his rod, were the majesty of his nature capable of such
affections.[624]
_Prop. IV._ The not fulfilling of some predictions in Scripture,
which seem to imply a changeableness of the Divine will, do not argue
any change in it. As when he reprieved Hezekiah from death, after a
message sent by the prophet Isaiah, that he should die (2 Kings xx.
1‒5; Isa. xxxviii. 1‒5), and when he made an arrest of that judgment
he had threatened by Jonah against Nineveh (Jon. iii. 4‒10). There is
not, indeed, the same reason of promises and threatenings altogether;
for in promising, the obligation lies upon God, and the right to
demand is in the party that performs the condition of the promise: but
in threatenings, the obligation lies upon the sinner, and God’s right
to punish is declared thereby; so that though God doth not punish, his
will is not changed, because his will was to declare the demerit of
sin, and his right to punish {a343} upon the commission of it; though
he may not punish according to the strict letter of the threatening
the person sinning, but relax his own law for the honor of his
attributes, and transfer the punishment from the offender to a person
substituted in his room: this was the case in the first threatening
against man, and the substituting a Surety in the place of the
malefactor. But the answer to these cases is this, that where we
find predictions in Scripture declared, and yet not executed, we
must consider them, not as absolute but conditional, or as the civil
law calls it, an interlocutory sentence.[625] God declared what
would follow by natural causes, or by the demerit of man, not what
he would absolutely himself do: and in many of those predictions,
though the condition be not expressed, yet it is to be understood;
so the promises of God are to be understood, with the condition
of perseverance in well doing; and threatenings, with a clause of
revocation annexed to them, provided that men repent: and this God
lays down as a general case, alway to be remembered as a rule for
the interpreting his threatenings against a nation, and the same
reason will hold in threatenings against a particular person. (Jer.
xviii. 7‒10) “At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and
concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and destroy it;
if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil,
I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them;” and so when
he speaks of planting a nation, if they do evil, he will repent of the
good, &c. It is a universal rule by which all particular cases of this
nature are to be tried; so that when man’s repentance arrives, God
remains firm in his first will, always equal to himself; and it is not
he that changes, but man. For since the interposition of the Mediator,
with an eye to whom God governed the world after the fall, the right
of punishing was taken off if men repented, and mercy was to flow out,
if by a conversion men returned to their duty (Ezek. xviii. 20, 21).
This, I say, is grounded upon God’s entertaining the Mediator; for the
covenant of works discovered no such thing as repentance or pardon.
Now these general rules are to be the interpreters of particular cases:
so that predictions of good are not to be counted absolute, if men
return to evil; nor predictions of evil, if men be thereby reduced to
a repentance of their crimes. So Nineveh shall be destroyed, that is,
according to the general rule, unless the inhabitants repent, which
they did; they manifested a belief of the threatening, and gave glory
to God by giving credit to the prophet: and they had a notion of this
rule God lays down in the other prophets; for they had an apprehension
that, upon their humbling themselves, they might escape the threatened
vengeance, and stop the shooting those arrows that were ready in
the bow.[626] Though Jonah proclaimed destruction without declaring
any hopes of an arrest of judgment, yet their natural notion of God
afforded some natural hopes of relief if they did their duty, and
spurned not against the prophet’s message; and therefore, saith one,
God did not always express this condition, because it was needless;
his own rule revealed in Scripture was sufficient to some; and the
natural notion all men had of God’s goodness upon their repentance,
made {a344} it not absolutely necessary to declare it. And besides,
saith he, it is bootless; the expressing it can do but little good;
secure ones will repent never the sooner, but rather presume upon
their hopes of God’s forbearance, and linger out their repentance till
it be too late. And to work men to repentance, whom he hath purposed
to spare, he threatens them with terrible judgments; which by how
much the more terrible and peremptory they are, are likely to be more
effectual for that end God in his purpose designs them; viz. to humble
them under a sense of their demerit, and an acknowledgment of his
righteous justice; and, therefore, though they be absolutely denounced,
yet they are to be conditionally interpreted with a reservation of
repentance. As for that answer which one gives, that by forty days
was not meant forty natural days, but forty prophetical days, that
is years, a day for a year; and that the city was destroyed forty
years after by the Medes; the expression of God’s repenting upon their
humiliation puts a bar to that interpretation; God repented, that is,
he did not bring the punishment upon them according to those days the
prophet had expressed; and, therefore, forty natural days are to be
understood; and if it were meant forty years, and they were destroyed
at the end of that term, how could God be said to repent, since
according to that, the punishment threatened was, according to the
time fixed, brought upon them? and the destruction of it forty years
after will not be easily evinced, if Jonah lived in the time of
Jeroboam, the second king of Israel, as he did (2 Kings xiv. 25);
and Nineveh was destroyed in the time of Josiah, king of Judah. But
the other answer is plain. God did not fulfil what he had threatened,
because they reformed what they had committed: when the threatening
was made, they were a fit object for justice; but when they repented,
they were a fit object for a merciful respite. To threaten when sins
are high, is a part of God’s justice; not to execute when sins are
revoked by repentance, is a part of God’s goodness. And in the case
of Hezekiah (2 Kings xx. 1, 5), Isaiah comes with a message from God,
that he should “set his house in order,” for he shall die; that is,
the disease was mortal, and no outward applications could in their own
nature resist the distemper: “Behold, I will add to thy days fifteen
years; I will heal thee” (Isa. xxxviii. 1, 5). It seems to me to be
one entire message, because the latter part of it was so suddenly
after the other committed to Isaiah, to be delivered to Hezekiah;
for he was not gone out of the king’s house, before he was ordered
to return with the news of his health, by an extraordinary indulgence
of God against the power of nature and force of the disease, “Behold,
I will add to thy life;” noting it as an extraordinary thing; he was
in the second court of the king’s house when this word came to him
(2 Kings xx. 4); the king’s house having three courts, so that he
was not gone above half‑way out of the palace. God might send this
message of death, to prevent the pride Hezekiah might swell with for
his deliverance from Sennacherib: as Paul had a messenger of Satan to
buffet him to prevent his lifting up (2 Cor. xii. 7); and this good
man was subject to this sin, as we find afterwards in the case of the
Babylonish ambassadors; and God delayed this other part of the message
to humble him, and {a345} draw out his prayer: and as soon as ever
he found Hezekiah in this temper, he sent Isaiah with a comfortable
message of recovery; so that the will of God was to signify to him the
mortality of his distemper, and afterwards to relieve him by a message
of an extraordinary recovery.
_Prop. V._ God is not changed, when of loving to any creatures he
becomes angry with them, or of angry he becomes appeased. The change
in these cases is in the creature; according to the alteration in the
creature, it stands in a various relation to God: an innocent creature
is the object of his kindness, an offending creature is the object of
his anger; there is a change in the dispensations of God, as there is
a change in the creature making himself capable of such dispensations.
God always acts according to the immutable nature of his holiness,
and can no more change in his affections to good and evil, than he can
in his essence. When the devils, now fallen, stood as glorious angels,
they were the objects of God’s love, because holy; when they fell,
they were the objects of God’s hatred, because impure; the same reason
which made him love them while they were pure, made him hate them when
they were criminal. The reason of his various dispensations to them
was the same in both, as considered in God, his immutable holiness;
but as respecting the creature, different; the nature of the creature
was changed, but the Divine holy nature of God remained the same:
“With the pure thou wilt show thyself pure, and with the froward, thou
wilt show thyself froward” (Ps. xviii. 26): he is a refreshing light
to those that obey him, and a consuming fire to those that resist him.
Though the same angels were not always loved, yet the same reason that
moved him to love them, moved him to hate them. It had argued a change
in God if he had loved them alway, in whatsoever posture they were
towards him; it could not be counted love, but a weakness and impotent
fondness; the change is in the object, not in the affection of God;
for the object loved before is not beloved now, because that which
was the motive of love, is not now in it; so that the creature having
a different state from what it had, falls under a different affection
or dispensation. It had been a mutable affection in God to love that
which was not worthy of love with the same love wherewith he loved
that which had the greatest resemblance to himself; had God loved the
fallen angels in that state and for that state, he had hated himself,
because he had loved that which was contrary to himself and the
image of his own holiness, which made them appear before, good in his
sight. The will of God is unchangeably set to love righteousness and
hate iniquity, and from this hatred to punish it; and if a righteous
creature contracts the wrath of God, or a sinful creature hath the
communications of God’s love, it must be by a change in themselves.
Is the sun changed when it hardens one thing and softens another,
according to the disposition of the several subjects? Or when the sun
makes a flower more fragrant, and a dead carcass more noisome? There
are divers effects, but the reason of that diversity is not in the sun,
but in the subject; the sun is the same, and produceth those different
effects by the same quality of heat; so if an unholy soul approach to
God, God looks angrily {a346} upon him; if a holy soul come before him,
the same immutable perfection in God draws out his kindness towards
him: as some think, the sun would rather refresh than scorch us, if
our bodies were of the same nature and substance with that luminary.
As the will of God for creating the world was no new, but an eternal
will, though it manifested itself in time, so the will of God for the
punishment of sin, or the reconciliation of the sinner, was no new
will: though his wrath in time break out in the effects of it upon
sinners, and his love flows out in the effects of it upon penitents.
Christ by his death reconciling God to man, did not alter the will of
God, but did what was consonant to his eternal will; he came not to
change his will, but to execute his will: “Lo, I come to do thy will,
O God” (Heb. x. 7). And the grace of God in Christ was not a new grace,
but an old grace in a new appearance; “the grace of God hath appeared”
(Tit. i. 11).
_Prop. VI._ A change of laws by God argues no change in God, when
God abrogates some laws which he had settled in the church, and enacts
others. I spake of this something the last day; I shall only add this:
God commanded one thing to the Jews, when the church was in an infant
state; and removed those laws, when the church came to some growth.
The elements of the world were suited to the state of children (Gal.
iv. 3). A mother feeds not the infant with the same diet as she doth
when it is grown up. Our Saviour acquainted not his disciples with
some things at one time which he did at another, because they were
not able to bear them: where was the change; in Christ’s will, or in
their growth from a state of weakness to that of strength? A physician
prescribes not the same thing to a person in health, as he doth to one
conflicting with a distemper; nor the same thing in the beginning as
he doth in the state or declination of the disease. The physician’s
will and skill are the same, but the capacity and necessity of the
patient for this or that medicine, or method of proceeding, are not
the same. When God changed the ceremonial law, there was no change in
the Divine will, but an execution of his will; for when God commanded
the observance of the law he intended not the perpetuity of it;
nay, in the prophets he declares the cessation of it; he decreed to
command it, but he decreed to command it only for such a time; so
that the abrogation of it was no less an execution of his decree, than
the establishment of it for a season was; the commanding of it was
pursuant to his decree for the appointing of it, and the nulling of it
was pursuant to his decree of continuing it only for such a season; so
that in all this there was no change in the will of God. The counsel
of God stands sure; what changes soever there are in the world, are
not in God or his will, but in the events of things, and the different
relations of things to God: it is in the creature, not in the Creator.
The sun alway remains of the same hue, and is not discolored in itself,
because it shines green through a green glass, and blue through a blue
glass; the different colors come from the glass, not from the sun; the
change is alway in the disposition of the creature, and not in the
nature of God or his will.
V. _Use 1._ For information.