Westminster Confession of Faith 3.3
"By the decree of God, for the manifestation of His glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death."
Summary
If God has foreordained whatsoever comes to
pass, then by necessity He has to have foreordained the eternal destiny of all things,
including men and angels. All men and angels are either foreordained by God to
everlasting life or everlasting death. He executes this foreordination by
decree. God decrees it to be so, and it must therefore be so. He does not do
this arbitrarily, but for the manifestation of His own glory, which is the
express purpose for which all things were created in the first place. Romans 9,
along with other scriptures, deals with this issue thoroughly: “What if God,
wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much
longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that He might
make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had
prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom He called, not of the Jews only,
but also of the Gentiles?” God will be glorified in and by both the just
punishment of sinners outside of Christ and by the merciful forgiveness of
sinners in Christ. God does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ez
18:32). He is not vindictive in His foreordination, nor does He do it sinfully.
As stated in WCF 3.1, God does not violate the will of wicked men, even in His
foreordination to eternal punishment. God foreordains the elect to eternal life
and the reprobate to eternal destruction, and He does so in such a way that their will is in no way violated or forced.
+ Blessings in Christ +
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