Dear Prof. Engelsma,
One of the arguments that advocates of common grace or a general love of God make is as follows:
“God must have loved and delighted in Satan and the fallen [reprobate] angels prior to their fall—for, prior to that fall, they were morally-ethically upright and perfect … right? (‘Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee’—Ezekiel 28:15). How could God hate/abominate a creature that is, at that moment in time, morally-ethically perfect and holy, and who has not committed any sin? Doesn’t God love and delight in such beings? True, the moment they sinned God must have hated them—for He hates and abominates ‘sinners’—but prior to that hatred/abomination, He must have loved/delighted in them.
If this is all true, two implications necessarily follow …
- the idea that God has ‘nothing but hatred’ for the reprobate (and Satan and his host are ‘reprobated’ from eternity) doesn’t make sense in the light of this
- the idea of God loving someone and then hating them doesn’t go against His unchangeableness/immutability (for He must’ve loved Satan and then hated him)
Application to common grace and a general love of God: Therefore God can love reprobate human beings for a time, followed by His hating them (in hell) without an ‘impingement upon His immutability.’”
What are your thoughts on this?
David
Dear David,
The state of Satan, known in his created state as Lucifer (Isaiah 14), with regard to a love of God for him in that state, proves nothing concerning a common grace of God towards the reprobate ungodly. For the reprobate ungodly never exist in a sinless condition, as did Satan, which would raise the difficulty of a possible love of God for them, which would later become a hatred of God for them.
The state of Satan raises the difficulty of a seeming mutability of God—He seemingly changes from love for an object to a hatred of the same object. But it has nothing to do with a common grace that applies to the reprobate ungodly, who are the totally depraved objects of God’s hatred from their conception and in eternity. God eternally and only hated Esau (Romans 9). The theory of common grace posits a grace of God towards the reprobate ungodly all the while that He also hates them. Whatever may be the explanation of Lucifer/Satan, the difficulty is not that God is gracious to the object of His hatred at one and the same time. The difficulty is rather that it could seem that God first loves and then hates someone. This is not the theory of common grace. This theory has God hating and being gracious to the same person at the same time.
The unusual state of Satan, namely, that he is a person who changes from totally good for a little while into totally depraved (soon after the creation week), and the fact that this difficulty has nothing to do with the controversy over common grace, incline me to consign the matter to the sphere of the unrevealed mysteries of revelation.
But having some insight after nearly 60 years of close study of Scripture, being probably overly bold, and desiring to shed further light on this not unimportant subject, I offer the following.
So far as the full revelation of Scripture sheds light on the mysterious state of Lucifer/Satan, my own thinking is as follows. When He created Satan, as the glorious Lucifer, God loved the work itself, that is, outstanding angelic beauty, intelligence and power, while hating the person who possessed these attributes. The secret to solving the apparent mutability of God in His attitude towards Lucifer/Satan is to distinguish between the angel’s glorious attributes and the angel’s person. Note well: in the unfallen state of Lucifer/Satan, the glorious attributes of the angel were not yet corrupted into the condition of hatred and opposition towards God. God, therefore, could take delight in the attributes themselves, as He cannot in the qualities of the reprobate now.
The problem here is a hatred of God for a person who at the time is sinless. The supralapsarian view of predestination has no problem with this. It has God in eternity reprobating in hatred humans who appear in the counsel as unfallen and sinless, but importantly as persons who will fall and become totally depraved.
I acknowledge the difficulty of the state of Lucifer/Satan in relation to the love and hatred of God.
I have never come across the solution of the difficulty as proposed above, or even the difficulty itself. Until you and your audience posed it.
I repeat: the difficulty offers no support to the theory of common grace, particularly the heresy of the well-meant offer.
Blessings.
Cordially in Christ,
Prof. David J. Engelsma
(28/01/2023)
