Sunday sermon-B.B. Warfield on WHOSOEVER WILL
B.B. Warfield is a former theology professor and principal of Princeton Theological Seminary, and many consider the last great theologian at Princeton before the split in the early twentieth century. Here is an excerpt from his Plan of Salvation.
“We hear ringing up and down the land the passionate proclamation of what its adherents love to call a ‘whosoever will gospel’. It is no doubt the universality of the gospel offer which is intended to be emphasized. But do we not shoot beyond the mark when we seem to hang salvation purely on the human will? And should we not stop to consider that, if we seem to open salvation to ‘whosoever will’ on the one hand, on the other we open it only to ‘whosoever will’? And who, in this world of death and sin, I do not say merely will, but can, will the good? Is it not forever true that grapes are not gathered from thorns, nor figs from thistles; that it is only the good tree which brings forth good fruit while the evil tree brings forth always and everywhere only evil fruit? It is not only Hannah More’s Black Giles the Poacher who may haply ‘find it difficult to repent when he will’. It is useless to talk of salvation being for ‘whosoever will’ in a world of universal ‘won’t’. Here is the real point of difficulty: how, where, can we obtain the will? Let others rejoice in a ‘whosoever will gospel’: for the sinner who knows himself to be a sinner, and knows what it is to be a sinner, only a ‘God will’ gospel will suffice. If the gospel is to be committed to the dead wills of sinful men, and there is nothing above and beyond, who then can be saved?” The Plan of Salvation, pp. 48-49
