ish according to the strict letter of the threatening the person sinning, but relax his own law for the honour of his attributes, and transfer the punishment from the offender to a person substituted in his room. This was the case in the first threatening against man, and the substituting a surety in the place of the malefactor.

But the answer to these cases is this, that where we find predictions in Scripture declared, and yet not executed, we must consider them not as absolute, but conditional, or as the civil law calls it, an interlocutory sentence. God declared what would follow by natural causes, or by the demerit of man, not what he would absolutely himself do. And in many of those predictions, though the condition be not expressed, yet it is to be understood. So the promises of God are to be understood with the condition of perseverance in well doing; and threatenings with a clause of revocation annexed to them, provided that men repent. And this God lays down as a general case, always to be remembered as a rule for the interpreting his threatenings against a nation, and the same reason will hold in threatenings against a particular person. "At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them;" and so when he speaks of planting a nation, if they do evil, he will repent of the good, Jer. xviii. 7-10. It is a universal rule by which all particular cases of this nature are to be tried: so that when man's repentance arrives, God remains firm in his first will, always equal to himself, and it is not he that changes, but man. For since the interposition of the Mediator, with an eye to whom God governed the world after the fall, the right of punishing was taken off if men repented and mercy was to flow out, if by a conversion men returned to their duty, Ezek. xviii. 20, 21. This I say is grounded upon God's entertaining the Mediator; for the covenant of works discovered no such thing as repentance or pardon. Now these general rules are to be the interpreters of particular cases: so that predictions of good are not to be counted absolute, if men return to evil; nor predictions of evil, if men be thereby reduced to a repentance of their crimes.

So Nineveh shall be destroyed, that is, according to the general rule, unless the inhabitants repent, which they did; they manifested a belief of the threatening, and gave glory to God by giving credit to the prophet: and they had a notion of this rule God lays down in the other prophets; for they had an apprehension that upon their humbling themselves, they might escape the threatened vengeance, and the shooting those arrows that were ready in the bow. Though Jonah proclaimed destruction without declaring any hopes of an arrest of judgment; yet their natural notions of God afforded some natural hopes of relief, if they did their duty, and spurned not against the prophet's message: and therefore saith one,1 "God did not always express this condition, because it was needless; his own rule revealed in Scripture was sufficient to some, and the natural notion all men had of God's goodness upon their repentance, made it not absolutely necessary to declare it. And besides," says he, "it is bootless; the expressing it can do but little good; secure ones will repent never the sooner, but rather presume upon their hopes of God's forbearance, and linger out their repentance till it be too late: and to work men to repentance, whom he has purposed to spare, he threatens them with terrible judgments; which by how much the more terrible and peremptory they are, are likely to be more effectual for the end God in his purpose designs them, namely, to humble them under a sense of their demerit, and an acknowledgment of his righteous justice; and therefore though they be absolutely denounced, yet they are to be conditionally interpreted with a reservation of repentance." As for that answer which one gives, that by forty days was not meant forty natural days, but forty prophetical days, that is, years, a day for year; and that the city was destroyed forty years after by the Medes, the expression of God's repenting upon their humiliation, puts a bar to that interpretation: God repented, that is, he did not bring the punishment upon them according to those days the prophet had expressed; and therefore forty natural days are to be understood; and if it were meant of forty years, and they were destroyed at the end of that term, how could God be said to repent, since according to that, the punishment threatened was, according to the time fixed, brought upon them? And the destruction of it forty years after will not be easily evinced, if Jonah lived in the time of Jeroboam the second king of Israel, as he did, 2 Kings xiv. 25; and Nineveh was destroyed in the time of Josiah king of Judah. But the other answer is plain. God did not fulfil what he had threatened, because they reformed what they had committed. When the threatening was made, they were a fit object for justice; but when they repented, they were a fit object for a merciful respite. To threaten when sins are high, is a part of God's justice; not to execute when sins are revoked by repentance, is a part of God's goodness. And in the case of Hezekiah, Isaiah comes with a message from God, that he should set his house in order, for he shall die; that is, the disease was mortal, and no outward applications could in their own nature resist the distemper. "Behold, I will add unto thy days fifteen years; I will heal thee," 2 Kings xx. 1. 5; Isa. xxxviii. 1. 5. It seems to me to be one entire message, because the latter part of it was so suddenly after the other committed to Isaiah to be delivered to Hezekiah; for he was not gone out of the king's house, before he was ordered to return with the news of his health, by an extraordinary indulgence of God against the power of nature and force of the disease. Behold, I will add to thy life; noting it an extraordinary thing. He was in the second court of the king's house when this word came to him, 2 Kings xx. 4; the king's house having three courts, so that he was not gone above half way out of the palace. God might send this message of death to prevent the pride Hezekiah might swell with for his deliverance from Sennacherib; as Paul had a messenger of Satan to buffet him to prevent his lifting up, 2 Cor. xii. 7: (and this good man was subject to this sin, as we find afterwards in the case of the Babylonish ambassadors:) and God delayed this other part of the message to humble him, and draw out this prayer; and as soon as ever he found Hezekiah in this temper, he sent Isaiah with a comfortable message of recovery. So that the will of God was to signify to him the mortality of his distemper, and afterwards to relieve him by a message of an extraordinary recovery.

(5.) Proposition. God is not changed, when of loving to any creatures he becomes angry with them, or of angry he becomes appeased. The change in these cases is in the creature; according to the alteration in the creature, it stands in a various relation to God: an innocent creature is the object of his kindness, an offending creature is the object of his anger: there is a change in the dispensation of God, as there is a change in the creature making himself capable of such dispensations. God always acts according to the immutable nature of his holiness, and can no more change in his affections to good and evil, than he can in his essence. When the devils, now fallen, stood as glorious angels, they were the objects of God's love, because holy: when they fell, they were the objects of God's hatred, because impure; the same reason which made him love them while they were pure, made him hate them when they were criminal. The reason of his various dispensations to them was the same in both, as considered in God, his immutable holiness; but as respecting the creature, different; the nature of the creature was changed, but the Divine holy nature of God remained the same: "With the pure thou wilt show thyself pure; and with the froward thou wilt show thyself froward," Psal. xviii. 26. He is a refreshing light to those that obey him, and a consuming fire to those that resist him. Though the same angels were not always loved; yet the same reason that moved him to love them moved him to hate them. It had argued a change in God, if he had loved them always, in whatsoever posture they were towards him: it could not be counted love, but a weakness and impotent fondness: the change is in the object, not in the affection of God. For the object loved before is not beloved now, because that which was the motive of love, is not now in it: so that the creature having a different state from what it had, falls under a different affection or dispensation.

It had been a mutable affection in God, to love that which was not worthy of love, with the same love wherewith he loved that which had the greatest resemblance to himself. Had God loved the fallen angels in that state and for that state, he had hated himself, because he had loved that which was contrary to himself, and the image of his own holiness, which made them appear before good in his sight. The will of God is unchangeably set to love righteousness and hate iniquity, and from this hatred to punish it; and if a righteous creature contracts the wrath of God, or a sinful creature has the communications of God's love, it must be by a change in themselves. Is the sun changed when it hardens one thing and softens another, according to the disposition of the several subjects? or when the sun makes a flower more fragrant, and a dead carcass more noisome? There are divers effects, but the reason of that diversity is not in the sun, but in the subject: the sun is the same and produces those different effects by the same quality of heat. So if an unholy soul approach to God, God looks angrily upon him, the same immutable perfection in God draws out his kindness towards him; as some think the sun would rather refresh than scorch us, if our bodies were of the same nature and substance with that luminary.

As the will of God for creating the world was no new, but an eternal will, though it manifested itself in time; so the will of God for the punishment of sin, or the reconciliation of the sinner, was no new will; though his wrath in time breaks out in the effects of it upon sinners, and his love flows out in the effects of it upon penitents. Christ by his death reconciling God to man, did not alter the will of God, but did what was consonant to his eternal will: he came not to change his will but to execute his will. "Lo, I come to do thy will, O God," Heb. x. 7. And the grace of God in Christ, was not a new grace, but an old grace in a new appearance; "the grace of God-hath appeared," Tit. ii. 11.

(6.) Proposition. A change of laws by God argues no change in God, when God abrogates some laws which he had settled in the church and enacts others. I spoke of this something the last day: I shall only add this. God commanded one thing to the Jews when the church was in an infant state, and removed those laws when the church came to some growth. The elements of the world were suited to the state of children, Gal. iv. 3. A mother feeds not the infant with the same diet as she does when it is grown up. Our Saviour acquainted not his disciples with some things at one time which he did at another, because they were not able to bear them. Where was the change, in Christ's will, or in their growth from a state of weakness to that of strength? A physician prescribes not the same thing to a person in health, as he does to one conflicting with a distemper; nor the same thing in the beginning, as he does in the state or declination of the disease. The physician's will and skill are the same, but the capacity and necessity of the patient for this or that medicine or method of proceeding are not the same.

When God changed the ceremonial law, there was no change in the Divine will, but an execution of his will; for when God commanded the observance of the law he intended not the perpetuity of it; nay, in the prophet he declares the cessation of it. He decreed to command it, but he decreed to command it only for such a time; so that the abrogation of it was no less an execution of his decree, than the establishment of it for a season

was.

The commanding of it was pursuant to his decree for the appointing of it, and the nulling of it was pursuant to his decree of continuing it only for such a season; so that in all this there was no change in the will of God.

The counsel of God stands sure: what changes soever there are in the world, are not in God or his will, but in the events of things, and the different relations of things to God: it is in the creature, not in the Creator. The sun always remains of the same hue, and is not discoloured in itself, because it shines green through a green glass, and blue through a blue glass; the different colours come from the glass, not from the sun. The change is always in the disposition of the creature, not in the nature of God or his will.

5. Use.

(1.) For information.

[1.] If God be unchangeable in his nature, and immutability be a property of God, then Christ has a Divine nature. This in the psalm is applied to Christ in the Hebrews, Heb. i. 11, where he joins the citation out of this psalm with that out of Psalm xlv. 6, 7. "Thy throne O God, is for ever and ever:thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth." As the first must necessarily be meant of Christ the Mediator, and therein he is dis