Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to Sunday School. Last week, Matthew Brennan was giving us an update on Ireland. And so today, as we resume, we're coming back to chapter three of our Confession of Faith, which deals with God's decree. And two weeks ago, when we talked about the decree, we said that what God decreed was a divine idea that God knows all things possible because He knows Himself. He knows Himself and all that He can create. And then from all that He can create, God chose to decree this world, God's power to create is greater than this world that He has made, but He has made this world. And so, because God decreed in Himself all things come from Him, a number of questions immediately come up when you say that God decreed all things. Such as, if all things come from God and God decreed all things, How then does that include evil? Did evil come from God? Was there evil in God and then God decreed it and evil is part of the decree because evil is part of God? If all things come from God and evil are part of all things, what is the relationship between evil and God? Another related question that very much is connected to this is, What about the liberty of man and of creatures and created things to act? Do we have liberty to act if God has decreed all things? Does God's decree mean that we are just robots and we don't have freedom to act, freedom of choice, freedom of will, and all such things? If God decreed all things, and yet sinners do sinful things, is God complicit in their sin? Is God somehow participating in their sin? So in chapter three of our confession, paragraph one, let's just read that paragraph again, and you'll see that the confession responds to these objections immediately, and we're going to look at them in some detail. So Second London Confession of Faith, chapter three, paragraph one, The idea of evil things is not in God, because God does not make evil things. Evil isn't a thing, but God does make good things that can fall away from their goodness. And that is what he permitted. And so God has a foreknowledge, now we're moving from the knowledge of simple intelligence to the knowledge of vision, if you remember from two weeks ago. God has a foreknowledge of defective acts and thoughts in his creatures. What this means is that God knows all the ways that His creatures can fall away from the goodness He gave them, and He knows all of the ways in which they can think silly things. So the silly thoughts and the bad ideas and the sin is all in our heads, and God knows them as possibilities of his good creatures falling away from goodness, but he doesn't know those things as evil itself as a formal object in his own mind, because it isn't a thing. It's only a privation of the good things that he has made. So when we ask silly and stupid questions, is there such a thing as a four-sided triangle? God doesn't know four-sided triangles because they don't exist, but God knows the silly questions that we can ask. And God doesn't know evil as a formal object in God himself, but he knows all the ways that we can corrupt and pervert the goodness that he has given to us in this creation. So evil doesn't proceed from God and His decreeing and His creating. Evil proceeds from His creatures whom He has permitted to fall from their goodness according to their own free choices and desires. And that's how it began with the angels who turned away from God and to themselves, sought their own glory, and then tempted man for their own glory to seek man's loyalty to themselves. And man was tempted and fell because of the angels who fell first. And all of it is a falling away from God, which he permitted to ultimately reconcile men to himself. But the question we're answering, the question we're asking and answering is, is there evil in the mind of God? And the answer is no. In fact, God speaks this way in Jeremiah. Three different times he uses the same language. The context is Israelites who are imitating the pagan nations who would sacrifice their children in the fire. And when his people do these things, God says in Jeremiah three times, which I did not command, I didn't tell them to do this, nor did it come into my mind. Where did this idea to burn your children come from, you wicked people? It came from your hearts and your minds. I never told you to do this. This wasn't from my mind. This is in your head. And James 1 verse 13 forbids us from saying that evil comes from God to us. Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God. For God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. God never commands sin, he never commends sin, nor does he put sin into people's heads or people's minds. Evil does not come from God, he's not the author. of sin and to say that God decreed all things in himself as a divine idea does not necessitate logically that God is the author of sin because God is the author of good creatures whom he permits to fall away from that goodness according to their own liberty and decisions. And you'll have to bear with me for going quickly because we just have a lot to cover and the concepts are unavoidably somewhat complex. So does God know evil, not as a formal object in his own mind, but with a foreknowledge of the defective acts and thoughts of his creatures and all the silly things that we can say and all the sinful things that we can say and think and do? Secondly, many struggle with the fact that God has decreed all things. How can we therefore have any real agency of our own? How are we not just robots that follow the script of the playwright? Well, our confession of faith mentions something called second causes. And it's a little bit rude of the confession to just assume you know what those are. Everyone's, oh yeah, second causes, of course. Second causes are a specific thing that you need to learn what they are. I remember in 2007, I was asked to teach on this for the high school Sunday school class. And I looked back at those notes from 2007, and they weren't terrible, to be honest. But I remember back then asking, what are second causes? When you have to teach something, you often have to learn it for yourself right before you teach it. Don't assume teachers know things on their own, they had to learn it just before they taught you. Second causes, it's not as complicated as it sounds. First cause, there's only one, is God. Second causes, plural, everything not God. God is the first cause and there's only one first cause. All things created are second causes. And God, the first cause, has created the world with things that have real agency and causality. We make things happen, but he has created different kinds of second causes. He's created a world where things happen in different kinds of ways, and so there are different kinds of second causes. The first of these are necessary causes. God has decreed the world in such a way that certain things happen by necessity or necessarily. So for example, I do not recommend that you do this, but if you go outside and you climb one of the pillars of the courtyard and you get onto the roof, jump off and see what happens. What will happen when you jump off of the roof? What happens if every single one of us, let's do some science. We all line up on the long roof of the courtyard. We say, okay, we're all going to jump off at once and see what happens. Every single one of us necessarily will fall to the ground because gravity God has created the world in such a way that things like gravity, it's one example, is a necessary cause. It necessarily does what it does all the time. We get weather reports every day, all day. But you never get a gravity report. You never get gravity is going to be half force tomorrow or anything like that. Gravity is a necessary force. And when we talk about the laws of nature and such things, these operate by necessity. They don't take days off. Gravity has a relativity to it because it's proportional to size. The bigger the object, the more it pulls you. But they all pull according to the same formula, the same way of calculating mass and therefore force and so on. So yes, you could have more or less gravity, but it's still according to the same laws. Gravity acts by necessity. But if we all fell from the roof when we jumped, would you say, God threw me to the ground? Would you attribute your fall to the first cause? Say, God threw me on the ground. You'd say, you jumped and gravity pulled you. But God decreed gravity. God decreed a world with gravity. So I'm gonna start saying now and continue saying, you should never say it was one or the other. It was God or it was man. If that's the question you're asking or the way that you're operating, that's wrong. You should never think in binary terms here of either God does it or creation does it. We're going to see that in all things, God is at work as the first cause, and in all things, the secondary causes are at work according to their being as their causes. So you chose to jump, gravity pulled you, God decreed this world. Some things happen necessarily. If you put your hand in fire, it will burn you. We live in a predictable world, a world where NASA and Elon Musk, SpaceX, they can land on the moon and they can get a rover on Mars because there is such predictability and stability to the world that God decreed that they can make precise enough calculations to do amazing things like that. If God had not decreed the world with secondary causes that act necessarily, it would be impossible. It would be pure chaos. But not all things act necessarily. God also made second causes that are free. So the second kind of second causes is or are free causes. And what we mean by free is it might happen, it might not happen. It doesn't have to happen. It's not necessary. Things that happen not by necessity. There's no compulsion. There's no necessity. They are free to happen or not happen. These are things even like your heartbeat. You might think my heartbeat is a necessary cause because it just beats, but it's not a necessary cause. It could stop beating at any moment. Your heart doesn't beat by necessity. Your heart is a free cause. it started beating one day, it can stop. But God decreed gravity to act necessarily from the moment of creation until now. And I should back up and say that when necessary causes are overridden, that's what we call miracles. You go in the fire, you are not burned. That's a miracle. You ascend into the air and you are not pulled down, that's a miracle, and so on and so forth. You walk on water and you're not pulled beneath the waves, that's a miracle. When necessary causes are overridden, we see a power that no one has in this world. But free causes, that's what we're talking about. Free causes are our decisions. You chose to come to church today. You chose to wear the clothes that you're wearing. You chose to sit where you're sitting. If you didn't choose to come here and you've been abducted, please tell the deacons during the break and we will help you. Blink five times to... You are free to come here or not come here. And you chose. You made a decision. You are a free cause, a second cause. You're not God. You had liberty and freedom. We'll talk more about liberty in the next point, but free causes are one of the second causes that God has decreed. And every day, all around us, to us, an incalculable number of free causes are happening all the time. I mean, traffic is like, The free cause conglomeration of all free cause conglomerations, you know, everybody making decisions all the time, although most people seem completely oblivious on the roads, you know how it is, etc. Okay, so thirdly, The third kind of second causes that God has decreed are contingent causes. But contingent causes are a subset of free causes. They are a specific kind of free causes. So they're free, happen or not happen, but they're contingent, meaning there's no agent that is willing them to happen. So contingent causes are things like rolling a dice. Is it a die? Is one dice a die? Is that real? Are we sure about that? Anyway, when you throw the thing that's called a die or a dice, Can you force the six? Can you roll a six without cheating? Can you roll a six? No, you can't, it's contingent. There are too many variables involved for you to will the six when you throw it. And so, this is what all, not all, but much of betting and chance, games of chance, depend upon contingency, that a fair game is where no one can impose their will on the outcome. And so you understand, we all threw the same dice, and you get what you get with the throw of the dice. So when you get the six, do you say, God gave me a six? Or do you say, it bounced in such a way that the six came up? Well, again, it's not an either or. God is sovereign over all things, and he is working, the Proverbs say, that the lot is cast into the lap, but it's every decision is from the Lord. So we'll talk more about that. But contingent causes mean there's no agent that's intending for this to happen. So we talk about accidents. Accidents are real. You say, how did this happen? No one meant for it to happen. It just did because that's the way secondary causes work. Sometimes things happen that no one intended. So God's decree establishes second causes. God's decree makes a world where necessary causes happen necessarily. Free causes happen or not happen with liberty. And contingent causes happen or not happen with contingency. Let's dive in a little deeper to the nature of the liberty of second causes. Are they really free? What is the nature of the liberty of second causes? Well, the first thing to say is that the liberty or the freedom of second causes is a relative liberty and not an absolute liberty. Remember, relative means in relation to something, absolute means with no relation. So our liberty is not a liberty from the first cause. That would be an absolute liberty where God made man able to act independent of God's agency. If God did that, he would have made us also first causes. where we have our own power to cause independent of Him. He did not. He made us second causes, so we have real liberty, but it's a dependent liberty. It depends upon the first cause. It depends upon the fact that God made us, and God sustains us in being, and God has given to us a capacity to act. So our liberty is a true liberty, but it is a dependent liberty. It is not independent of God, but dependent upon him. We have created liberty, creaturely freedom. Let's develop that further. As creatures with true freedom, secondly, our liberty is a correspondent liberty. What I mean is our freedom to act, our freedom to act as second causes, corresponds to or matches our nature. So God made you a human. If you're a lizard person, please also let us know. He made you a human and you can do human things. But you can only do human things. I've said this before in Sunday school. If you say up, up, and away, none of you will fly through the roof. You don't have that power. Your freedom to act is correspondent to your nature, to who you are and what you are. God did not give you power to act beyond that, but he did give you power to act within the sphere of who and what you are. The scriptures describe us in this way. Joseph, in Genesis 31, says, it is in my power to do you harm. If he wanted to, he could do great harm to his brothers. He had the power to do that. Daniel 11, the king shall do as he wills. 2 Samuel 7, Nathan said to the king, go, do all that is in your heart. I am able to do human things. I can sit down, I can stand up, I can walk around, I can speak. God made me with a liberty to act, but a liberty that is dependent on him as the first cause, and a liberty that is correspondent to my nature. So I am not free to act independent of God, and I am not free to act beyond or against who and what I am. If I don't have power to do something and I can't do it, it's not because God has deprived me of power. He has taken away my liberty. It's that I'm not the kind of thing that can do that. Thirdly, this is in some ways a restatement of the first thing that our liberty is a dependent liberty. Here we affirm that our liberty is a concurrent liberty, the doctrine of concurrence, or in Latin, concursus. Concurrent liberty means that the freedom of all second causes, or all free second causes, but truly all second causes, concurs. It works together. It runs beside the first cause. God, the first cause, concurs with all secondary causes in their activities and operations. To concur is to run side by side. concurrent, a current here, a current there, concurrence. They are distinct, they are separate, but they go together. And so the first cause, God, concurs with all second causes. God moves second causes to move themselves naturally and freely according to their nature. So God creates and sustains the creatures that act necessarily or freely or contingently, and God sovereignly is decreed and is governing all things toward the ends that he decreed But the second causes are happening necessarily, freely, and contingently according to, as I said, their nature. So again, this is why we are not on the horns of a dilemma, did God do it, or did the creature do it? God operates with first cause agency, creatures operate with second cause agency, and they concur. Proverbs 19 verse 21, many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. God's decree is happening through the necessary free and contingent actions of creatures. James 4, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. God bounds and guides all things. Genesis 50, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. You willed to do evil and you did evil, but God has a first cause sovereignty that, again, bounds and guides things to where he wants them to end. Acts 2.23, this Jesus you delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. You crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. Notice you are guilty for what you have chosen to do. You crucified Him. You killed Him. You condemned Him wrongly. You delivered Him up. But it was all according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. Did God put those ideas in their heads? No, they were their ideas and their actions. Was God moving them by compulsion to act? And they said, we don't know why we're crucifying him. No, they wanted to do those things and they chose to do those things and God permitted them to do those things. But it was according to his plan, according to his foreknowledge, according to his first order causality. There's only one first cause. Can anyone else do what these verses describe? You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. You delivered him up, or you crucified and killed him, but God had foreordained this, and so on. Can anyone else, anything else, do what the first cause can do? There's only one. Only one. He is God. Fourthly and lastly, looking at sin more directly. We considered it under the first heading, the divine idea and evil, but now more in the practical side of things. When men do evil things, is God complicit for sin? Is God not just the author of sin, but is God a participant in sin? And so four things to say briefly. The first is that sin is a defect. An efficient cause, that should have another F, shouldn't it? Let's pretend, or not. 17th century literature has destroyed my spelling. Efficient causes produce effects. Deficient causes produce defects. So an efficient cause, well let's just ask the question, is God an efficient cause or a deficient cause? God is an efficient cause because he has perfect power. God's omnipotence, his complete active potency, that's his omnipotence, his total active potency creates and acts with perfect power. When he's, if God's writing on a page, his penmanship would be perfect because he can cause the pen to go exactly where it should be. Our handwriting is, well, I'm looking at Campbell. Some people's handwriting is not efficient. He can read it, that's all that matters. God is a perfectly efficient cause. So he only produces perfect effects. That was the beginning. God decreed in himself, all that he made was behold, very good, exactly. God did not create something and say, ooh, that needs fixing. Sometimes, well, if you work on an essay or a book, there's always something wrong. There's always something wrong. No matter how many times you try to exercise the book of all its demons, there's still typos in it. But God is not like that. We have an efficiency and we produce effects, but we are very often deficient causes. We do things imperfectly. And sin is doing something imperfectly. Hamartion in Greek, not hitting the mark. The terminology of sin in many languages is about missing. An efficient cause hits the mark, but sin is deviating. Sin is lawlessness, John says, anomion. The law says, go here. Sin goes there. Sin is doing something defectively or deficiently. If God is an efficient cause, a perfectly efficient cause, he cannot sin. He cannot cause a defect. He cannot possibly sin. Sin again, therefore, is the defective acts and thoughts of creatures. And God permits his creatures to fall away from their original goodness and then to persist in that, thinking defective things and doing defective things. But God is not doing them. Yes, God is the first cause sovereign, permitting those sins, permitting the creature to act according to its nature and according to its liberty, permitting it, but God himself is not producing the defective acts or thoughts, the creature is. Sin is the result of man's free choices. But let's back up. Someone would say, but if God permits sin, then he is morally culpable for it because he didn't stop it. God must, it's the, if God is all powerful, then he can't be good argument, which fails because God has no obligation to provide every possible good for every creature which he would have to do in order to prevent them from sinning. For God to prevent sin instead of permitting it, he would have to be obligated to provide to every creature the good that they need to restrain themselves from sinning. He does not owe that. God does not owe every possible good to every creature. He does not owe it to the creature to prevent them from sinning. So it is within his sovereignty to permit it. We have a neighbor-to-neighbor obligation that does make us to some degrees morally culpable when we do not prevent sin on our level, but God is not on our level, and the first cause, God does not owe to the creature every possible good which would be necessary to prevent every possible sin. So we become morally culpable when we do not prevent evil in certain ways and to certain degrees, but it's not the same for God. Sin is a defect. God permits the defective thoughts and acts of men, which are the result of man's own free choices according to man's nature. But we must always remember that though God does not owe man every possible good which would be necessary to prevent him from committing every possible sin, while that's true, God's permission of sin is not just a bare permission. He always, always, always, every sin that He permits in the world, everything is all bounded, guided, and governed towards His good and holy ends. And you'll bear with me for using the illustration one more time after many, many times, but it's a very apt illustration, the illustration of the miller. If you have a river, that of water, of course, that follows by the laws of nature. Water flows as water flows. Water is going to do what water is going to do. and water will continue to flow in its natural course. Now imagine that that river, that current, that flow of water is man's sin. Man's sin is flowing according to man's nature. It's what we are, it's what we do. We are sinners and we sin, and God permits the course and the current of our sin. But, What happens if a miller comes and sets up a water mill on that river? Now, the natural course and current of water is going to produce something that water in itself could never possibly produce. The miller, if you've ever seen a water-powered mill, they're really neat. In Massachusetts, there's a place called Old Sturbridge Village, and you can go there and see an old blacksmith, and an old mill, and an old town, and it's really wonderful. And the water-powered mill, they made it into a sawmill. You can attach different things once the wheels are set up, the gears are set up, but it was a sawmill, so the saw is, with the cutting logs. Would you find in any river in the whole world sawn logs around? No, rivers don't produce sawn logs. It is not in the nature of water to saw logs or produce lumber. Or you could set up the mill to grind flour and make bread, essentially. You will never get bread from a river in itself. So also, sin in itself, the course of man's sin, will never produce anything good in and of itself because it's all bad. It's not in the nature of sinful men to produce good things. But God is able to use the course of man's sin by His sovereignty and produce out of it great good and glorious things for His glory and the salvation of His elect. because he's the Master Miller, who has a sovereignty and a power and a will and an agency above and beyond the created things. And this is exactly what Joseph said, you meant it for evil, but God, the Master Miller, meant it for good. Or what Peter said in Acts, you crucified and killed God for predestined and for new, all of these things. The crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate example of God bounding and guiding and governing the current of man's sin to produce his ends, good, glorious ends. And so God's permission of sin is not a hands-off, a bare permission. I have nothing to do with this, I have nothing to do with this. God's permission of sin is always to accomplish his ultimate purposes. And that gives us great comfort in this life. that all of the wicked and terrible things that we see, school shootings, nuclear war, invasions and bombings and terrorist attacks and the hard-heartedness and wickedness of men and women one to another and so on and so forth, all of the wickedness of this world, we say these things did not come from the mind of God. He did not decree that man should do this and then force man to do this and put this in man's mind. He decreed to permit men to fall away from these things for greater and good and holy ends. And we have to trust him in those things. None of this is permitted with a bare permission. It's all permitted with a first cause permission that works all things together according to the counsel of his good and holy will. So when you sin, don't say, God made me do it. If you jump off of the roof and you break your ankles, don't say God broke your ankles, and yet God is sovereign over your sin, God is sovereign over your broken ankles, God is sovereign over all things because he is the first cause which concurs with all second causes, but not in such a way that he is the author of sin or is a participant in sin, nor in such a way that he takes away the liberty or the contingency of secondary causes, rather he establishes them. And that is what our confession of faith is talking about, all in just paragraph one. Dense paragraphs, dense statements of theology that assert, without so much arguing, and so we have taken the time to go through the arguments and some of the relevant scripture passages to show these things. So I hope that that's helpful. We will continue in chapter three, not next week. Next week, because of the pastor's conference, we'll have a number of people in town, and I've asked them to teach Sunday school and to preach in the morning, and so on. And so next week, Cameron Porter from British Columbia will come and teach on the doctrine of Christ the mediator in chapter eight. And so we can look forward to that. But later, we will continue in Chapter 3. And as I said before, Lord willing, we will finish Chapter 3 at the end of this semester. We won't leave it hanging. So thank you for your attention. And you are dismissed.