Permission & Hardening

God might, indeed, by his absolute power, prevent evil; but he will not wrong and despoil his own creature, man, whom he created righteous and holy. He acts with man in a manner that corresponds with the nature with which he has endowed him. Hence he proposes laws to which he attaches rewards and punishments—he commands us to embrace the good and shun the evil; and that we may do this, he both grants his grace, without which we can do nothing, and also encourages our diligence and labor. But if a man come short of doing what he ought, his sin and negligence are chargeable upon himself, and not upon God, although God had the power to prevent it, and yet did not.

First, the offering of occasions which can be procured only by the peculiar providence of God by the concourse of circumstances and the proposition of objects, fitted to move faculties constituted in this or that way (in which manner God does not infuse wickedness into the minds of men, but draws out into action the wickedness latent there).

God doth not infuse the lust, or excite it, though he doth present the object about which the lust is exercised. God delivered up Christ to the Jews, he presented him to them, but never commanded them to crucify him, nor infused that malice into them, nor quickened it; but he, seeing such a frame, withdrew his restraining grace, and left them to the conduct of their own vitiated wills. … God created the grape, and filled the vine with a sprightliness, but he doth never infuse a drunken frame into a man, or excite it. … In short, though it be by God's permission that we can do evil, yet it is not by his inspiration that we will to do evil; that is wholly from ourselves.

When God is here spoken of as hardening some of the children of men, it is not to be understood that God by any positive efficiency hardens any man's heart. There is no positive act in God, as though he put forth any power to harden the heart. To suppose any such thing would be to make God the immediate author of sin. God is said to harden men in two ways: by withholding the powerful influences of his Spirit, without which their hearts will remain hardened, and grow harder and harder; in this sense he hardens them, as he leaves them to hardness. And again, by ordering those things in his providence which, through the abuse of their corruption, become the occasion of their hardening.

God hardens some men's hearts, as he did Pharaoh's, and he wills to harden them, or he hardens them according to his decreeing will; "Whom he will he hardens", (Romans 9:18) this he does not by any positive act, by infusing hardness and blindness into the hearts of men; which is contrary to his purity and holiness, and would make him the author of sin; but by leaving men to their natural blindness and hardness of heart; for the understanding is naturally darkened; and there is a natural blindness, hardness, and callousness of heart, through the corruption of nature, and which is increased by habits of sinning.

God certainly does not in either case effect or infuse blindness or hardness into the sinner (cf. James 1:13–14), yet neither does he only not take away blindness and hardness, by not circumcising the heart (Jer. 6:10, 26; Acts 7:51), or by not conferring spiritual light to the mind, or softness and malleability to the heart (Matt. 13:14–15; Isa. 6:9–10), but in addition: (1) on account of preceding sins, in a just and holy way, he takes away or diminishes the remnants of wisdom and moral goodness that a sinner has, and also augments and aggravates his original blindness and hardness.

God is said to blind and to harden men not only negatively (by not enlightening and softening) and privatively (by withdrawing his grace whatever it may have been after men have abused it) and permissively (by not hindering), but also positively. Not by bringing in blindness or hardness (which is natural to man), but both objectively by presenting external objects to them which although ordained to another direction by their own nature, yet he knows will be drawn in a different way by their vice; and judicially by smiting them internally with blindness (the light which they abused being taken away or extinguished); and by loosening the reins to their lusts and delivering them up and enslaving them to Satan.

Thus God is said to harden men, not by positive hardening, or working anything in the creature, but by not working, not softening, leaving a man to the hardness of his own heart, whereby it is unavoidable, by the depravation of man’s nature, and the fury of his passions, but that he should be further hardened. … If you put fire near to wax or resin, both will melt; but when the fire is removed, they return to their natural quality of hardness and brittleness. The positive act of the fire is to melt and soften, and the softness of the rosin is to be ascribed to that, but the hardness is from the resin itself, wherein the fire hath no influence, but only a negative act by a removal of it; so when God hardens a man, he only leaves him to that stony heart which he derived from Adam, and brought with him into the world.

When his light is taken away, nothing remains but blindness and darkness: when his Spirit is taken away, our hearts become hard as stones: when his guidance is withdrawn, we immediately turn from the right path: and hence he is properly said to incline, harden, and blind those whom he deprives of the faculty of seeing, obeying, and rightly executing.

Suitably upon the will and affections he hath several acts, -- obfirming the one in corruption, and giving up the other to vileness, Rom. 1:24, 26, until the heart become thoroughly hardened, and the conscience seared; not forcing the one, but leaving it to follow the judgment of practical reason, -- which being a blind, yea, a blinded guide, whither can it lead a blind follower, but into the ditch? -- not defiling the other with infused sensuality, but provoking them to act according to inbred, native corruption, and by suffering frequent vile actings to confirm them in ways of vileness.

God may be said to cause men to err from his ways, and to harden their hearts from his fear, by withholding, upon their provocation, some such supply of his Spirit and actings of his grace as they have formerly enjoyed, to keep up their hearts to the ways and in the fear of God.

Thus, God is said to harden a wicked man because of his demerits when, being provoked by that man’s impiety, He takes occasion to withdraw granted grace and to do certain things through which He knows that this man will grow worse.

For in those people God did not make the common sins but found them there, as we have noted before. And although God, in his just but to us hidden judgment, does abandon and harden them more and more (Romans 9:18), yet it is they who by their own free choice first become hardened (Romans 11:7) and abandon the benefits of general providence; they abuse God’s longsuffering, as Paul testifies in Romans 1:18, 26, and 28.

As for those wicked and ungodly men whom God, as a righteous judge, for former sins, doth blind and harden; from them He not only withholdeth his grace, whereby they might have been enlightened in their understandings, and wrought upon in their hearts; but sometimes also withdraweth the gifts which they had, and exposeth them to such objects as their corruption makes occasions of sin; and withal, gives them over to their own lusts, the temptations of the world, and the power of Satan.

Not by permitting the evil action, because he is bound by no law to hinder sin. Not by determining it; for as he who puts out a fire so that it may not spread further is not the cause of the fire, so he who fixes bounds to sin is not the cause of sin. Not by directing it to a good end; for as it is the highest art to prepare a wholesome medicine from venomous animals, so it is glorious for God to draw light even out of darkness, and something good out of evils.

God acted nothing, but only ceased to act, and therefore could not be the efficient cause of man’s sin. As God is not the author of good but by willing and effecting it, so he is not the author of evil but by willing and effecting it. But he doth not positively will evil, nor effect it by any efficacy of his own. Permission is no action, nor the cause of that action which is permitted, but the will of that person who is permitted to do such an action is the cause.

He wills it not by his effective will, but by his permissive will; and therefore cannot be chargeable with being the author of sin; since there is a wide difference between doing it himself, and doing it by others, or ordering it to be done, which only can make him the author of sin; and voluntarily permitting or suffering it to be done by others.

God leaves the sinner so far as he sees meet to the swing of his own lusts, and denies him restraining grace. … And when the restraint is taken off the sinner, he runs furiously, to evil. 3. God bounds sin, and restrains men in their sins, as he does the raging sea, allowing it to go so far, but no further.

The almighty power, unsearchable wisdom, and infinite goodness of God, so far manifest themselves in His providence, that His determinate counsel extends itself even to the first fall, and all other sinful actions both of angels and men (Rom. 11:32–34; 2 Sam. 24:1; 1 Chron. 21:1); and that not by a bare permission, which also He most wisely and powerfully bounds, and otherwise orders and governs (2 Kings 19:28; Ps. 76:10), in a manifold dispensation to His most holy ends (Gen. 50:20; Isa. 10:6–7, 12); yet so, as the sinfulness of their acts proceeds only from the creatures, and not from God, who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin (Ps. 50:21; 1 John 2:16).

To make God the author of sin is such foul blasphemy, that it can never enter any Christian man’s mind without a shudder. It is indeed true that God had made man mutably good, had infallibly foreseen his sin, had foreordained the permission of the sin and given man no doubt sufficient strength to shun sin, but inoperable without His influx; that meanwhile He had inflowed into man’s faculties for natural actions by not inflowing into the moral entity of such actions. … But it is not less true, that God neither is nor could in any way become the author of sin.

Yes, there is even in ourselves sin and corruption enough, so that there is no need that God should infuse into us either a new or greater measure of wickedness. Therefore, when God is said in the Scripture to harden (Ex. 7:13), to blind (John 12:40) and to deliver us up into a reprobate sense (Rom. 1:28), it is to be understood that God does it by just judgment, as a just judge and avenger.

The decree which is the cause of the futurition of sin is nevertheless neither its physical cause (by the infusion of evil) nor its ethical cause (by the approbation of it). So although sin necessarily follows the decree, it cannot be said to flow from the decree. The decree does not flow into the thing, nor is it effective of evil, but only permissive and directive.

For two things are to be considered in evil actions: the action itself, and the ἀνομία [anomia, lawlessness] of the action. The action itself, as a natural motion, takes place by the efficacious working of God; but the anomia or wickedness takes place by the active permission of God. … for as in a horse the cause of the motion is one thing and the cause of the limping another, so it is one thing to be the cause of the action and another to be the cause of the wickedness cleaving to it.

In evil actions, however, he so concurs as neither to effect, assist, nor approve of them, but to permit and efficaciously direct; not by infusing wickedness, but by so determining rational creatures physically to the substance of the act in the genus of being, that they (when left to themselves failing from the law) move and determine themselves to bad actions in the genus of morals, performing them freely and voluntarily (hekousiōs). Hence the guilt rests upon them alone.

As to the pravity or sin that is in actions, as God decreed the futurition of sin, or permitted it to take place, and did not hinder it; so all the sin or vitiosity that is in actions proceeds entirely from the creature, and the evil lusts and passions that are in his heart. Thus a man's taking up a stone, and throwing it, is a natural action, which the providence of God enables him to perform; but his throwing it at another man with an intention to kill him, is permitted by God, otherwise it could not take place.