Jesus and his followers have completed their journey and arrived just outside Jerusalem. It is the first day, Sunday, of what will be known as Passion Week. Jesus has been traveling to the city for weeks, but what is about to happen has been more than 500 years in the making. Zechariah 9:9 says, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” Zechariah prophesied between 518-515 BC. Almost five and a half centuries after this proclamation, Jesus is bringing it to pass perfectly.

As was the case with his mother, and would be the case with his tomb, the animal Jesus would ride into Jerusalem on had to be unused. The colt needed to be set apart because its use would be sacred. Such an animal would not be easy to find, for it had been over a year since Jesus had been in Jerusalem. However, he does not simply tell the disciples to look for an unbroken colt, he tells them exactly where they will find it. In addition to this, he knows what will happen when they try to take the animal, and tells them what to say. The events of the rest of the week will occur in the same manner. Not one of them will be random or haphazard.

Such is the nature of the plan of redemption. From the beginning it was the Father’s will his Son should die to restore creation to its initial perfection. Through the prophets he explicitly explained how the plan would come to pass. And, everything happened exactly as he said it would.

Even as there was not one random moment during Passion Week, there has not been one random moment this week. The plan of redemption is being worked out with the same precision as it was leading up to the cross. Our ignorance regarding our circumstances in life often causes us fear and discouragement, but this should never be. The great work of the cross has been accomplished, and even now, Jesus Christ is bringing the plan of redemption to perfect completion.

Doubtless the resolutions display the marks of relative youth — references to God are frequent, while references to Christ and to grace are noticeably infrequent. Edwards’ sense of the need for radical consecration was then greater than his ability to show how such devotion would need to be resourced in Christ over the long haul. While this is not wholly lacking, there is no doubt that introspection dominates over divine provision. That notwithstanding, the “Resolutions” provide a very powerful illustration of an often-repeated divine pattern: those the Lord means to use significantly he often deals with profoundly in early years.

Edwards stood in a great puritan tradition of resolution-forming and covenant-making. Both are lost spiritual arts, substituted at best by life-plans that tend to focus on the externals. Edwards, by contrast, was deeply concerned with the internals. He early grasped the value of a deliberate binding of the conscience to a life of holiness and of expressing such commitment in a concrete, objective, and also very specific way. Thus for him, the practice of keeping a journal (in which half of his resolutions are found) was not merely an exercise in narcissism but a careful guarding of the heart against sin. In addition, Edwards was conscious from his teenage years that dealing with indwelling sin (“mortifying” it in the older terminology) meant a commitment to deal generally with all sin, and also repenting of — and mortifying — “particular sins, particularly” (Westminster Confession of Faith, 15.5; Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5, 8–10. Indeed, these words of Paul form the unwritten backdrop to a number of the resolutions).

What can we learn for Christian living today from the resolutions themselves? Here are only three of many outstanding lessons:

Life is for the glory of God. Resolution 4 epitomizes this: “Resolved, never to do any manner of thing, whether in soul or body, less or more, but what tends to the glory of God; nor be, nor suffer it, if I can avoid it.”

These words have a Daniel-like ring about them (Dan. 1:8). When coupled with Edwards’s further principle that we learn from Scripture how God is to be glorified in our lives, this is both a life-goal statement and a life-simplifying one. The question, what will most tend to the glory of God in this situation? asked against the background of growing biblical wisdom wonderfully simplifies and clarifies the choices of life. In a world full of apparent complexities, this is an invaluable litmus test to use — not least if, like Edwards, you are a teenager.

Life should be lived in the light of eternity. This was, of course, a dominant perspective throughout Edwards’ later life. But it was already powerfully present in his late teens. He sought to relate the whole of life to its end (in both senses of the word). In pain he reflected on the sufferings of hell (resolution 10). He lived from death and judgment backwards into the present (resolution 17), and endeavored to do so as if each hour might be his last (resolution 19). He sought to make future happiness a central goal (resolutions 22, 50, 55). Thus, if living for the glory of God simplifies all of life, living in the light of eternity solemnizes all of life and enables one increasingly to give weight to every thought, word, and deed.

Life is lived best by those who guard the heart. Edwards guarded his emotions and affections — and his verbal and physical expressions of them — with great care. This emerges in several resolutions (including 31, 34, 36, 45, 58, and 59). Particularly noteworthy is resolution 25. Here he stresses that, if he wishes so to live in a holy manner, he must be “resolved, to examine carefully, and constantly, what that one thing in me is, which causes me in the least to doubt of the love of God; and to direct all my forces against it.” Whether consciously or not, Edwards here recognized a cardinal element in the original temptation — to malign and thus destroy a sense of the generous love and goodness of God to Adam and Eve (“Has he set you in this garden and forbidden you to eat of all the trees?” see Gen. 3:1).

As early as the age of nineteen, therefore, Edwards recognized that if he lost a sense of the greatness and generosity of the divine love, there would be no resources of grace to motivate the life of holiness to which he committed himself in his resolutions. Therein lay wisdom far beyond his years.

When he penned his final series of resolutions in the summer of 1723, Edwards appears to have been reading through Thomas Manton’s sermons on Psalm 119. He refers to the idea of being open to God found in Manton’s exposition of Psalm 119:26 (sermon 27 in a series of 190). There Manton had given directives for those “who would speed with God.” Edwards was certainly such a young man. Great intellect though he was, he recognized that to “speed with God” was a matter of the heart. That is why all of us — teenagers included — can still aspire today to share the devotion to God he expressed so powerfully in his resolutions.

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Dr. Ferguson is Senior Minister at First Presbyterian Church (Columbia, SC) and Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary.

From Ligonier Ministries and R.C. Sproul. © Tabletalk magazine. Website: www.ligonier.org/tabletalk. Email: tabletalk@ligonier.org. Toll free: 1-800-435-4343.

Calvin notes, as a matter of great importance, the relationship between man’s knowledge of God and his knowledge of self. You cannot have one without the other, though it is not possible to discern which comes first. As we look upon ourselves our thoughts should immediately turn to thoughts of him. Likewise, we cannot think about God apart from consideration of his creative activities (he made us) and his ongoing governance of the universe in which we dwell.

Paul tells the men of Athens (Acts 17:28) that in God “we live and move and have our being.” For this reason alone we cannot know God until we know ourselves. In consideration of our poverty we understand the “infinitude of benefits reposing in God” provides. As we consider our own sins and weaknesses they are rightly contrasted with the holiness and strength of God. Simply put, when we are happy and content with ourselves we do not seek God or knowledge of him. Yet when we take stock of who we really are we look heavenward for help. “We cannot seriously aspire to him before we begin to become displeased with ourselves.”

Likewise, we cannot know ourselves until we know God. The issue here is a matter of standards. Apart from knowledge of God we tend to measure ourselves against others; most often those with serious moral deficiencies. In comparison to those we are able to think of ourselves with high esteem. When we come to some understanding of who God is (particularly and understanding of his holiness) our standard changes to one by which our self-estimation is not so favorable. Yet it is only by comparing ourselves to God’s standard that we gain any true knowledge of who we are. “It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.”

Calvin uses an illustration involving our eyesight that is particularly helpful. As we look at things on the earth we see them quite clearly and may come to hold the quality of our eyesight in high regard. Yet, if we were to look up to the sun we would quickly be blinded by its radiance and realize the limitations of our sight. “The power of sight that was particularly strong on earth is at once blunted and confused by great brilliance.” This experience parallels the way we think about our own moral goodness. When compared to earthly things we do rather well. The moment we gaze heavenward for comparison the results are drastically changed. “…then, what masquerading earlier as righteousness was pleasing in us will soon grow filthy in its consummate wickedness.”

The connection between knowledge of God and knowledge of self, Calvin argues, is responsible for the two-fold reaction that is common in Scripture from those who encounter the living God. Saints who experience the presence of God are commonly stricken with both “dread and wonder,” he writes. While the normal state of a man is to be “firm and constant,” exposure to the presence of God inevitably overwhelms them. (e.g. Judges 13:22: And Manoah said to his wife, “We shall surely die, for we have seen God.”; Isaiah 6:5 And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”)

Knowledge of God as holy and infinite coupled with knowledge of self as sinful and finite leaves us with the dual experience of dread and wonder. Perhaps the most extended example of this in Scripture occurs in the book of Job. Late in the book Job begins to think too highly of himself and to believe that he is justified in his complaint against God for the calamity he has experienced. Job’s fundamental problem is two-fold: he has forgotten who he is and he has forgotten who God is. Appropriately, God instructs Job on both matters (Chapters 38-41) in a section that begins with the terrifying question “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2)

What is most illuminating about this exchange, for our purposes, is Job’s response to God in Chapter 42. Having encountered the holiness and power of God Job can only answer, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6). Job thought he understood who God was, but not until he saw him (answering out of the whirlwind) was he filled with the result of knowing God: dread and wonder.

The result of these emotions is one of Calvin’s favorite topics: piety. Knowing God involves far more than simply believing that he exists. Knowing God involves the kind of dutifulness in religion that Calvin called piety. “I call piety that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces.” To know God is to know who is he (in relation to us), what he has done
for us, what we are required to do in response to him, and, knowing God involves the performance of those duties. The recognition that we are his handiwork results in the kind of all-of-life devotion Paul commands in Romans 12:1;  ”I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

This section offers one of the most beautiful passages of the Institutes’ early pages:

…it will not suffice simply to hold that there is One whom all ought to honor and adore, unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of every good, and that we must seek nothing elsewhere than in him. This I take to mean that not only does he sustain the universe (as he once founded it) by his boundless might, regulate it by his wisdom, preserve it by his goodness, and especially rule mankind by his righteousness and judgment, bear with it in his mercy, watch over it by his protection; but also that no drop will be found either of wisdom and light, or of righteousness or power or rectitude, or of genuine truth, which does not flow from him, and of which he is not the cause.

Knowledge of God keeps us from idolatry because if we know him we can imagine no greater God. Knowledge of God keeps us from fear and worry because if we know him we know their is no safer one in whom to trust. Knowledge of God restrains sin in our lives because we fear his wrath and desire, out of love, to obey him and serve him faithfully. “Here indeed is pure and real religion: faith so joined with an earnest fear of God that this fear also embraces willing reverence and carries with it such legitimate worship as is prescribed in the law.”

At the same time, however, although we cannot permit the passage to be interpreted in the terms of the debate in question, it would not be quite true to say it has no bearing upon that debate.

One thing, for instance, which the passage tells us, and tells us with great emphasis, is that the love which it celebrates is a saving love; not a love which merely tends towards salvation, and may – perhaps easily – be defeated in its aim by, say, the unwillingness of its objects. The very point of the passage lies, on the one side, in the mightiness of the love of God; and, on the other, in the unwillingness not of some but of all its objects.

The love here celebrated is, we must remember, the love of God – of the Lord God Almighty: and it is love for the world – which altogether “lies in the evil one.” It is a love which is great and powerful and all-conquering, which attains its end and will not stand helpless before any obstacle. It is the precise purpose of the passage to teach us this, to raise our hearts to some apprehension of the inconceivable greatness of the love of God, set as it is upon saving the wicked world. It would be possible to believe that such a love as this terminates equally and with the same intent upon each and every man who is in “the world,” only if we may at the same time believe that it works out its end completely and with full effect on each and every man. But this the passage explicitly forbids us to believe, proceeding at once to divide the “world” into two classes, those that perish and those that have eternal life. The almighty, all-conquering love of God, therefore, certainly does not pour itself equally and with the same intent upon each and every man in the world. In the sovereignty that belongs of necessity to his love as to all love, he rather visits with it whom he will.

But neither will the text allow us to suppose that God grants this immeasurable love only to a few, abstracted from the world, while the world itself he permits to fall away to its destruction. The declaration is not that God has loved some out of the world, but that he has loved the world. And we must rise to the height of this divine universalism.

It is the world that God has loved with his deathless love, this sinful world of ours. And it is the world, this sinful world of ours, that he has given his Son to die for. And it is the world that through the sacrifice of his dear Son, he has saved, this very sinful world of ours. “God sent not the Son into the world,” we read, “to judge the world; but that the world should be saved through him” (John 3:17). That is to say, God did not send his Son into the world for the purpose of judging the world, but for the purpose of saving the world – a declaration which could not be true if, despite his coming, the world were lost and only a select few saved out of it. The purposes of God do not fail.

You must not fancy, then, that God sits helplessly by while the world, which he has created for himself, hurtles hopelessly to destruction, and he is able only to snatch with difficulty here and there a brand from the universal burning. The world does not govern him in a single one of his acts. He governs it and leads it steadily onward to the end which, from the beginning, or before a beam of it had been laid, he had determined for it. As it was created for his glory, so shall it show forth his praise. And this human race on which he has impressed his image shall reflect that image in the beauty of the holiness which is its supreme trait.

The elect – they are not the residuum of the great conflagration, the ashes, so to speak, of the burnt-up world, gathered sadly together by the Creator, after the catastrophe is over, that he may make a new and perhaps better beginning with them and build from them, perchance, a new structure, to replace that which has been lost. Nay, they are themselves “the world” – not the world as it is in its sin, lying in the evil one, but the world in its promise and potency of renewed life.

Through all the years, one increasing purpose runs, one increasing purpose: the kingdoms of the earth become ever more and more the kingdoms of our God and his Christ. The process may be slow; the progress may appear to our impatient eyes to lag. But it is God who is building! And under his hands the structure rises as steadily as it does slowly, and in due time the capstone shall be set into its place, and to our astonished eyes shall be revealed nothing less than a saved world!

Meanwhile, we who live in the midst of the process see not yet the end. These are days of incompleteness, and it is only by faith that we can perceive the issue. The kingdom of God is as yet only in the making, and the “world” is not yet saved. So, there appear about us two classes – there are those that perish as well as those that have eternal life. With the absoluteness which characterizes the writer of this gospel, these two classes are set before us in the text and in the paragraph of which it forms a part, in their intrinsic antagonism. They are believers and unbelievers in the Son of God. And they are believers and unbelievers in the Son of God, because they are in their essential natures good or bad, lovers of light or lovers of darkness. “For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light…. But he that doeth the truth cometh to the light” (John 3:20–21). Throughout the whole process of the world’s development, therefore, the Light that has come into the world draws to himself those who are of the light. He, that is, who through love of the world came into the world to save the world – yea, and who shall save the world – in the meantime attaches to himself in every generation those who in their essential nature belong to him.

How they came to be his, and therefore to be attracted to him, and therefore to enter into the life that is life indeed – to become portions no longer of the world that lies in the evil one, but of the reconstructed world that abides in him – the paragraph in which our text is set leaves us much uninformed. Accordingly, some rash expositors wish to insist that to it the division of men into the essentially good and the essentially bad is an ultimate fact. They speak therefore much of the ineradicable dualism of Jesus’ conception, not staying to consider the confusion thus wrought in the whole paragraph. For in that case how could there be talk of the Son of God coming into the world to save the world? Obviously, to the text, those who belong to the Son themselves require saving. That is to say, no less than the lost themselves, they belong by nature to the “evil one,” in whom the whole world – not a part of it only – we are told explicitly, “lieth.”

And if we will but attend to the context in which our paragraph is set, we will perceive that we are not left without guidance to its proper understanding. For we must remember that this paragraph is not an isolated document standing off to itself and complete in itself, but is a comment upon the discourse of our Lord to Nicodemus. It necessarily receives its color and explanation, therefore, from that discourse of which it is either a substantive part or upon which it is at least a reflection. And what does that discourse teach us except this: that all that is born of flesh is flesh, and only what is reborn of Spirit is Spirit; that no man can enter the kingdom of God, therefore, except he be born again of God; and that this birth is not at the command of men, but is the gift of a Spirit which is like the wind that bloweth where it listeth, the sound whereof we hear though we know not whence it cometh and whither it goeth – but can say of it only, Lo, it is here!

Here then is the explanation of the essential difference in men revealed in the varying reception they give to the Son of God. It is not due to accident of birth or to diversity of experience in the world, least of all to inherent qualities of goodness or badness belonging to each by nature. It is due solely to this – whether or not they have been born again by the Spirit and so are of the light and come spontaneously to the light when it dawns upon their waiting eyes.

The sequence in this great process of salvation, then, according to our passage, when taken in its context, is this: the fight of the Son of God to save the world; the preparation of the hearts of men to receive the Son of God in vital faith; the attraction of these “children of the light” to the Light of the world; and the rebuilding of the fabric of the world along the lines of God’s choosing into that kingdom of light which is thus progressively prepared for its perfect revelation at the last day.

Thus, then, it is that God is saving the world – the world, mind you, and not merely some individuals out of the world – by a process which involves not supplanting but reformation, re-creation. We look for new heavens and a new earth, it is true; but these new heavens and new earth are not another heaven and another earth, but the old heaven and old earth renewed; or, as the Scriptures phrase it, “regenerated.” For not the individual merely, but the fabric of the world itself, is to be regenerated in that “regeneration when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of his glory” (Matt. 19:28). During the process, there may be much that is discarded. But when the process is completed, then also shall be completed the task which the Son of Man has taken upon himself, and the “world” shall be saved – this wicked world of sinful men transformed into a world of righteousness.

Surely, we shall not wish to measure the saving work of God by what has been already accomplished in these unripe days in which our lot is cast. The sands of time have not yet run out. And before us stretch, not merely the reaches of the ages, but the infinitely resourceful reaches of the promise of God. Are not the saints to inherit the earth? Is not the re-created earth theirs? Are not the kingdoms of the world to become the kingdom of God? Is not the knowledge of the glory of God to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea? Shall not the day dawn when no man need say to his neighbor, “Know the Lord,” for all shall know him from the least unto the greatest?

O raise your eyes, raise your eyes, I beseech you, to the far horizon. Let them rest nowhere short of the extreme limit of the divine purpose of grace. And tell me what you see there. Is it not the supreme, the glorious, issue of that love of God which loved, not one here and there only in the world, but the world in its organic completeness; and gave his Son, not to judge the world, but that the world through him should be saved?

And he spake with me, saying, Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And he … showed me the holy city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God…. And the city hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine upon it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the lamp thereof is the Lamb. And the nations shall walk amidst the light thereof: and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it. And the gates thereof shall in no wise be shut by day (for there shall be no night there): and they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it: and there shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they that are written in the Lamb’s book of life. (Rev. 21:9–11, 23–27)

Only those written in the Lamb’s book of life, and yet all the nations! It is the vision of the saved world. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.” It is the vision of the consummated purpose of the immeasurable love of God.
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Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was professor of theology at Princeton Seminary from 1887 to 1921.