Again, it is false that Malachi speaks only of temporary affliction; nor is his business with the destruction of Edom. You pervert the whole meaning of the Prophet by this laboured subtlety. The Prophet makes it quite plain what he means, by using the clearest terms. His meaning is to upbraid the Israelites with their ingratitude; because, while God has been loving them, in return they are neither loving Him as a father, nor fearing him as a master. He proves the fact of his having loved them, both by Scripture and by actual performance. For instance, although Jacob and Esau were brothers, as Moses writes in Gen. 25, God had nonetheless loved and chosen Jacob before he was born (as we have just shown); but He had so hated Esau as to have reduced his country to a wilderness.
Moreover, God hates, and He persists in hating, with such pertinacity, 573 that after having brought Jacob back from captivity, and restored him, he still did not allow the Edomites to be restored. If they so much as say they will build, He threatens their destruction. If the Prophet’s own plain text 574 does not contain these things, let the whole world charge me with telling a lie. It is not the temerity of the Edomites, then, which is reprehended here, but the ingratitude of the sons of Jacob (as I have said). They do not see that what God is conferring on them, and what he is taking away from their brothers the Edomites, is for no other reason than He loves the one, and hates the other. 575
How will it now stand good, that the Prophet is speaking only of temporary affliction? For he declares in plain terms that he is speaking about two distinct nations of people, who had descended from the two Patriarchs. God had taken up one of these to be his people, and had preserved them; the other had been abandoned, and at length was destroyed. Now, the act of taking up a people as His people, or not taking them up as such, has no respect to temporal good or evil only, but to everything. For our God is not the God of our temporal possessions only, but of everything we have and look for. Nor will He choose to be your God, or to be worshipped by you, with half a shoulder, or a limping foot, but with all your strength and with all your heart — so as to be your God both here and hereafter, in all circumstances, cases, times, and works.
SECT. 29. Jacob and Esau are a trope for Jew and Gentiles.
The third of these elaborate excogitations is this:
‘By a tropological form of expression, he declares that God neither loves all the Gentiles nor hates all the Jews; but some out of each. By this tropical interpretation, it is made clear [she says] that this testimony has no voice for proving necessity, but for repelling the arrogance of the Jews.’
Having made this way of escape for herself, she next goes to the length of maintaining that God is said to hate those who are not yet born, inasmuch as He knows beforehand that they will do things worthy of hatred. Thus the hatred and love of God are no obstacle to Freewill. In the end, she comes to the conclusion that the Jews have been cut off from the olive tree by the merit of unbelief; that the Gentiles have been grafted into it by the merit of faith — making Paul the author of this sentiment — and she gives hope to those who have been cut off, that they will again be grafted in; and she gives fear to those who have been grafted in, lest they be cut off.
Let me die if Diatribe knows herself what she is saying! But perhaps there is also some rhetorical figure here, which teaches scholars to obscure the sense wherever there is any danger of being entrapped by the word. I see none of those tropical forms of speech here; Diatribe may imagine them in her dreams, but she does not prove them. It is no wonder, then, that the testimony of Malachi does not oppose her if taken in a tropological sense, when it has no such sense at all. Again, our subject of disputation is not that cutting off and grafting in which Paul speaks of afterwards, 576 when he exhorts.
We know men are grafted in by faith, and are cut off by unbelief, and that they are to be exhorted to believe, so that they may not be cut off. But it does not follow from this, nor is it proved, that they can believe or disbelieve through the power of the free will. And it is this free will which is the subject of our debate. We are not discussing who are believers and who not; who are Jews and who are heathens; what follows for believers and for unbelievers; all this belongs to the exhorter. Our question is, by what merit, by what work, men attain to that faith by which they are grafted in; or to that unbelief by which they are cut off. This is what belongs to the teacher. 577 Describe this merit to us! Paul teaches that this befalls, not by any work of ours, but only by the love and hatred of God. And when it has befallen men to believe, He exhorts them to perseverance, that they may not be cut off. Still, exhortation does not prove what we can do, but what we ought to do. I am forced to use almost more words in keeping my adversary from wandering elsewhere, and leaving his cause, than in pleading the cause itself. However, to have kept him to the point is to have conquered him — so clear and invincible are the words which we have under consideration. Hence, he does almost nothing else but turn aside from it, hurrying away in an instant out of sight, pleading another cause than that which he had taken in hand.
SECT. 30. Paul does not quote the simile of clay in the hand of the potter — Temporal afflictions do not evade its force.
She takes her third passage from Isa 45.9, “Does the clay say to its potter, what are you making? And from Jer 18.6, “As the clay is in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.” She then says,
‘These words, again, are much stronger combatants in Paul, than in the Prophets from where they are taken. In the Prophets they are spoken about temporal affliction; but Paul applies them to eternal election and reprobation’
Thus she gives Paul a black-eye for his temerity, or for his evaded ignorance.
But, before we see how she proves that neither of these passages exclude Freewill, let me first observe that Paul does not appear to have taken this passage from the Prophets, nor does Diatribe prove that he has. Paul tends to bring in the name of the writer, or to protest that he takes his sentiment from the Scriptures. Here he does neither. It is therefore more probable that Paul uses this general simile (which different writers adopt for the illustration of different causes), in a sense of his own, for the illustration of the cause which he has in hand. Just as he does with that simile, “A little leaven corrupts the whole lump;” in 1Cor. 5.6 he applies this to corruptive manners, and elsewhere he casts it in the teeth of those who were corrupting the word of God — just as Christ also mentions the leaven of Herod and of the Pharisees. Mk 8.15
So then, although the Prophets may especially speak of temporal affliction, Paul still uses it in a sense of his own, against Freewill. But this is a point which I decline to address now, so that I may not be so often occupied and put off with questions that are foreign to the subject. But I do not know how far it can be shown that Freewill is not taken away, if we are clay in the afflicting hand of God; or why Diatribe insists on this distinction. For it is unquestionable that afflictions come upon us from God, against our own will; and we are under the necessity of bearing them, whether we will or not. Nor do we have it in our own power to avert them, even though we are exhorted, it is true, to bear them with a willing mind. 578
SECT. 31. The cavil from 1Tim 2.20 is repelled.
But it is worthwhile to hear Diatribe prosecute her cavil that, by introducing this simile, Paul does not exclude Freewill in his argument. She objects that there are two absurdities; one she gathers from Scripture, the other from reason. The Scriptural one runs as follows.
When Paul had said in 2Tim. 2.20 that in a great house there are vessels
