I gotta have my orange juice.

I wrote previously about James Jordan’s reflection on God’s covenant name and the merciful cutting off of wickedness. Jordan says,

The statement “visiting iniquity of fathers to the children of the third and fourth generation” means that if you become involved in image worship and your children and grandchildren don’t repent of it, you just move out of history and you move out of the covenant people. You wind up being like the Serbians. Your children are going to suffer from it. They were misapplying that to say, “Well, we suffer nowadays because our fathers sinned.” And the prophets came along and said, “no, if you repent, God will alleviate.”

That’s not what’s going on [in Exodus 34]. Now, the Sinaitic covenant was made with Israel. That covenant’s broken. There isn’t any covenant with Israel anymore. Now what are we going to do?

But I also discovered that I learned this from Gary North as well. North says,

And then Murray says the third thing you’ve got to have is a doctrine of final sanctification, that is, a final judgment in which God looks at what you’ve done and once again, at the end of the process, declares “not guilty.” And that there’s the final resolution and the final evaluation. There’s final judgment. And he said, you’ve got to have a concept of sanctification which includes definitive, progressive, and final.

Now, how do I use that? How should you use that? Because what we’re taught covenantally is that’s not just limited to people. That’s societies, too. That there is not just personal, definitive, progressive, and final sanctification, but there is also corporate and covenantal. And you have that with the bride of Christ. The bride of Christ, the church of Jesus Christ, is perfect in the eyes of God. It’s received all the perfections of Christ, but she’s not dressed in holy robes yet. That takes time. That’s what progressive sanctification is for the church. And at some final point, the church will receive her perfect robes and the marriage supper of the Lamb will take place. And that’s a corporate element of sanctification. It’s not just individual.

Now, what I’m arguing is that if it’s true of the individual and it’s true of the church of Jesus Christ, then I think I can make an application in terms of the development of societies. That certain societies become rebellious and are cut down because judgment takes place also in the midst of time, and you go to the fourth commandment. Visiting the iniquities under the third and fourth generation of them that hate me and showing loving kindness unto thousands of those that love me and keep my commandments. There you’ve got the model of history. That’s what that’s about. Because the thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments, in the Deuteronomic passage: it’s thousands of generations.

So you have the short-term development of evil, and then it ends. It’s cut short in the midst of history, and that inheritance is transferred. And we know that because the wealth of the wicked is laid up for the just. The compounding process takes place over long periods of time for the church of Jesus Christ and the elect.