Grace Freely Offered
Grace Notes July 2004
Many readers of this magazine will be used to hearing the gospel regularly preached in such a way that Christ is offered to the hearers without restraint; all are urged to come to the Saviour, to repent and believe that they may have eternal life. I was converted under such preaching. It was directly and passionately evangelistic and also wholly true to the doctrines of grace.
We should not take such preaching, and such men, for granted. Some of our forebears, sincere and godly men, who formulated the rules of faith of many of our churches in previous generations, took a very different view. They could not see how the tenets of Calvinism – total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, perseverance of the saints – could allow the gospel to be proclaimed indiscriminately. They concluded that a man in his sin must not be pressed to do that which he is incapable of doing by nature. Nor, they maintained, should the unsearchable riches of Christ in the gospel be offered to all as though there were no distinction between the elect and the non-elect.
The following examples are taken from old Strict Baptist articles of faith:
Article XXIV
We believe that the invitations of the gospel… are intended only for those who have been made by the blessed Spirit to feel their lost state as sinners and their need of Christ as their Saviour.
Article XXVI
We reject the doctrine that men in a state of nature should be exhorted to believe in or turn to God.
Article XXXIII
For ministers… to address unconverted persons… indiscriminately, calling upon them to savingly repent, believe and receive Christ, or perform any other acts dependent upon the new creative power of the Holy Ghost, is, on the one hand, to imply creature power, and, on the other, to deny the doctrine of special redemption.
Article XXXIV
We believe that any such expressions as convey to the hearers the belief that they possess a certain power to flee to the Saviour, to close in with Christ, to receive Christ, while in an unregenerate state… must therefore be rejected. And we further believe that we have no Scripture warrant to take the exhortations in the Old Testament intended for the Jews in national covenant with God, and apply them in a spiritual and saving sense to unregenerated men.
Their position became known as ‘anti duty-faith’, because they caricatured those who urged all to repent and believe as maintaining that saving faith was ‘a legal duty’. Anti duty-faith clauses in many cases persisted on paper even after it had become a minority view and was practically ignored. It was not until the 1980s that the ‘anti duty-faith’ clause was removed from the articles of faith of the Metropolitan Association of Strict Baptist Churches (now the Association of Grace Baptist Churches (South East)).
It seems significant that the compilers of Grace Hymns decided to omit from Charles Wesley’s hymn, ‘Jesus! The name high over all’ the following verse, which is found in Christian Hymns:
‘O that the world might taste and see
The riches of his grace;
The arms of love that compass me
Would all mankind embrace.’
Presumably these sentiments were deemed unworthy of inclusion.
Hugh Martin writes in his commentary on Jonah:
‘We are not to modify the freeness of God’s offered mercy on pretence of taking care of the glory of God, and the maintenance of His law. This was substantially Jonah’s sin - the sin of pretending to be more careful of God’s glory, and more qualified to advance it, than God himself’.
The free offer of the gospel was offensive not only to Jonah in the Old Testament but also to Peter in the New. Both were made exceedingly uncomfortable by the fact of God’s intention that not only should the gospel be proclaimed to the heathen, to Gentiles, but that many of them would believe. Both had to learn that their loyalty to God and his honour, to the doctrine of election, did not and must not imply any restriction at all in the scope of their commission. Their course must be to obey the revealed will of God, not to make themselves arbiters of his secret will.
Of course the free offer of the gospel has been the conviction of Reformed preachers and theologians through the centuries. Listen for example to Gresham Machen (‘The Christian View of Man’):
‘What a great mistake it is, then, to think that the doctrine of predestination is contrary to the free offer of salvation to all. Of course, it remains true in the fullest and richest sense that whosoever will may come. None who will trust in Christ is excluded. None, I say, none without any exception whatsoever. …Never have we any right to withhold the gospel from any man wherever he may be.’
And from Horatius Bonar:
‘We believe in human impotence, in the bondage of the human will, in the enmity of the human heart to God. We believe in the sovereignty of Jehovah, and His eternal purpose. We believe in the absolute necessity of the Holy Spirit's work, alike before and after conversion. At the same time… we proclaim a free and world-wide invitation to sinners; we present to every sinner a gracious welcome to Christ, without any preliminary qualification whatsoever. We bid no man wait till he has ascertained his own election, or can produce evidence of regeneration, or sufficient repentance, or deep conviction. We tell every man, as he is, to go to the Saviour this moment, assured that he will not be cast out or sent away.’
Another writer has said: ‘In no part of the gospel is pardon offered to man on the ground of his being one of the elect but everywhere on the ground of his being on of the species.’
Let us pray that God will raise up more men who will be lovers of the doctrines of grace and unfettered, direct preachers of the gospel of grace!