err grace for the reprobate

There is always a shifting of the “mystery” and the tossing around of the hot-potato of rationalism in Reformed thought. You assert mystery upon the relation of transitional (temporal) history to God’s sovereignty and yet you nonetheless engage in rationalism with an order of “decrees” within the one “eternal decree” in order to uphold a “real history”. But I would argue that there is mystery in the singular “decree” (Eph 1:11, etc.), in which linear, propositional orders cannot possibly be ascertained, and yet this one eternal decree does not at all preclude definite, historical means. And yet your axiomatic assertion of “the truth of real transitions in history”, though you want it to be mysterious in relation to sovereignty, is more or less a subtle (perhaps subconscious) attempt, in the context of this article, to make the eternal decree a temporal part of history (functionally reactionary to events rather than the sole cause of all events… especially reprobation). Thus, you can open this post with a baffling and very Arminian-sounding statement that there is a problem of history triumphing over the eternal decree. Common grace, no matter how you swing it, is much more a form of rationalism in attempting to mitigate perceived negative aspects of God’s sovereignty (in order to sit on the fence with Arminians) than Hoeksema’s consistent (though certainly unpopular) view that there is no such thing as grace for the elect. The “limiting concept”, of course, has to be presupposed to avoid certain undesirable conclusions.