March 26, 2009

Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981) on Common Grace and God's Strivings

"The second effect of common grace is that the Holy Spirit strives with men and women. Take that statement in Genesis 6:3: 'My spirit shall not always strive with man.' It does not exhaust the meaning of those words, but it does, at any rate, mean that a time was coming when instead of keeping men and women alive, in spite of their sin, God would stop and the flood would come and they would all be destroyed. The striving, in other words, has two meanings. It means 'keeping in existence, keeping going', and it also means that God was there, as it were, pleading through His Spirit, trying to get men and women to see the enormity of their sins and of their actions before it was too late. You find the same idea in Stephen's sermon recorded in the seventh chapter of Acts. He says, 'Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost' (Acts 7:51). The Holy Ghost is there, with this general work of conviction, but people resist it instead of yielding to it."
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Great Doctrines of the Bible (Wheaton, Ill: Good News Publishers, 2003), 2:27.

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Again, as with Edwards, notice Lloyd-Jones' inseparable connection between common grace and God's saving will.

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