OF god's prescience or foreknowledge. 135
us, because our God is not among us?" etc. The sum of a good part of what is recorded in the Book of Judges is here foretold by God. The people's going a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, their forsaking of God, their breaking his covenant, the thoughts of their hearts and their expressions upon the consideration of the evils and afEictions that should befall them, were of their free actions; but now all these doth God here foretell, and thereby engages the honour of his truth unto the certainty of their coming to pass.
1 Kings xiii. 2 is signal to the same purpose : " 0 altar, altar, behold, a child shall be born unto the house of David, Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer the priests of the high places that burn incense upon thee, and men's bones shall be burnt upon thee." This prediction is given out three hundred years before the birth of Josiah. The accomplishment of it you have in the story, 2 Kings xxiii. 17. Did Josiah act freely? was his proceeding at Bethel by free actions, or no ? If not, how shall we know what actions of men are free, what not ? If it was, his free actions are here foretold, and therefore, I think, foreseen.
1 Kings xxii. 28, the prophet Micaiah, in the name of the Lord, having foretold a thing that was contingent, and which was accom- plished by a man acting at a venture, lays the credit of his prophecy (and therein his life, for if he had proved false as to the event he was to have suffered death by the law) at stake, before all the people, upon the certainty of the issue foretold : " And Micaiah said, If thou return at all in peace, the Lord hath not spoken by me. And he said. Hearken, O people, every one of you."
Of these predictions the Scripture is full. The prophecies of Cyrus in Isaiah, of the issue of the Babylonish war and kingdom of Judah in Jeremiah, of the several great alterations and changes in the empires of the world in Daniel, of the kingdom of Christ in them all, are too long to be insisted on. The reader may also consult Matt. xxiv. 5 ; Mark xiii. 6, xiv. 80 ; Acts xx. 29 ; 2 Thess. ii. 3, 4, etc. ; 1 Tim. iv. 1 ; 2 Tim. iii. 1 ; 2 Pet. il 1 ; and the Revelation almost throughout. Our first proposition, then, is undeniably evident. That God, by himself and by his prophets, hath foretold things future, even the free actions of men.
(2.) The second proposition mentioned is manifest and evident in its own light : What God foretelleth, that he perfectly foreknow.s. The honour and repute of his veracity and truth, yea, of his being, depend on the certain accomplishment of what he absolutely fore- tells. If his predictions of things future are not bottomed on his certain prescience of them, they are all but like Satan's oracles, con- jectures and guesses of what may be accomplished or not, — a sup- position whereof is as high a pitch of blasphemy as any creature in this world can possibly arrive unto.
(3.) By this prerogative of certain predictions in reference to
JS6 VINDICI^ EVANGELiaE.
things to come, God vindicates his own deity ; and from the want of it evinces the vanity of the idols of the Gentiles, and the falseness of the prophets that pretend to speak in his name: Isa. xli. 21-24, "Produce your cause, saith the Lord; bring forth your strong rea- sons, saith the King of Jacob. Let them bring them forth, and show us what shall happen : let them show the former things, what they be: or declare us things for to come. Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods. Behold, ye are of nothing." The Lord calling forth the idols of the Gentiles, devils, stocks, and stones, to plead for themselves, before the denunciation of the solemn sentence ensuing, verse 24, he puts them to the plea of foreknowledge for the proof of their deity. If they can foretell things to come certainly and infallibly, on the account of their own knowledge of them, gods they are, and gods they shall be esteemed. If not, saith he, " Ye are nothing, worse than nothing, and your work of nought ; an abomination is he that chooseth you." And it may particularly be remarked, that the idols of whom he speak- eth are in especial those of the Chaldeans, whose worshippers pre- tended above all men in the world to divination and predictions. Now, this issue doth the Lord drive things to betwixt himself and the idols of the Avorld ; If they can foretell things to come, that is, not this or that thing (for so, by conjecture, upon consideration of second causes and the general dispositions of things, they may do, and the devil hath done), but any thing or every thing, they shall go free; that is, " Is there nothing hid from you that is yet for to be?" Being not able to stand before this interrogation, they perish before the judgment mentioned. But now, if it may be replied to the living God himself that this is a most unequal way of proceeding, to lay that burden upon the shoulders of others which himself will not bear, bring others to that trial which himself cannot undergo, for he himself cannot foretell the free actions of men, because he doth not foreknow them, would not his plea render him like to the idols whom he adjudgeth to shame and confusion? God himself there, concluding that they are "vanity and nothing " who are pretended to be gods but are not able to foretell the things that are for to come, asserts his own deity, upon the account of his infinite understanding and knowledge of all things, on the account whereof he can fore- show all things whatever that are as yet future. In lik."; manner doth he proceed to evince what is from himself, what not, in the predictions of any, from the certainty of the event: Deut. xviii. 21, 22, " If thou say in thine lieart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously : thou shalt not be afraid of him."