God Begging

~God Begging~

Related Notes:

  1. “Arg. 2. Consider that God yet offers to open your hearts, though we perhaps have stopt our ears thousands of times, yet he once more stands at the door and knocks, and cries, open, open. And I make my appeal to your own Consciences (if there be any life or tenderness in them) whether you find not God striving to come in, while by the hammer of his Word he knocks and begs you by his Messenger to give your hearts to him. Is not God at this instant convincing some that he is a lost perishing creature in himself? is he not shewing you the incomparable excellency of Christ, and his all-sufficiency to save Sinners? Oh how think you to escape if you neglect so great Salvation! you have heard of that fearful resolution of God against the impenitent old World, when by the preaching of Noah a hundred years together God had perswaded them to repent, yet all to no purpose? what says God at last? My spirit shall not alway[s] strive with man. Oh when God strives with us in mercy, and we strive with God by impenitency ‘tis sad! Wo[e] to him that thus strives with his maker.”—James Strong (1618/19–1694), Lydia’s heart opened: or, divine mercy magnified in the conversion of a sinner by the Gospel Being the sum of several sermons preached lately by James Strong, M.A. and Minister of the Gospel (London: Printed by A.M. for Edward Brewster at the Crane in Pauls-Church-Yard, 1675), 27–28. I can’t find any biographical data on Strong, yet.
  2. August 1, 2021: Steve Lawson on preachers needing to plead, entreat, and beg sinners to come to Christ here (click) or here (click). From the 2013 Shepherds’s Conference: General Session 8 (see min. 51:05–53:08).
  3. September 5, 2022: Even Francis Turretin, like scores of other Calvinists, comes close to using the metaphor of God “begging” men in his philanthropy, but Turretin uses the “creeping on the ground” idea with respect to what God “wishes” to do with men’s minds through the sacraments in the church. He wrote: “Hence it is evident how great is the philanthropy (philanthrōpia) of God, who, letting himself down as it were to us creeping upon the ground [qui ad nos humi repentes quodammodo sese demittens], wishes [vult] to seize not only our minds but also our external senses with the haste and admiration of his grace, inasmuch as he subjects it to the bodily senses, to the hearing in the spoken word, to the touch and sight in the sacraments.”—Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger, 3 vols. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992–1997), 3:342; Institutio theologiæ elencticæ, 19.1.15.

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