It is certainly what God aims at in the disposition of things in redemption, (if we allow the Scriptures to be a revelation of God’s mind) that God should appear full, and man in himself empty, that God should appear all, and man nothing. It is God’s declared design that others should not “glory in his presence;” which implies that it is his design to advance his own comparative glory. So much the more man glories in God’s presence, so much the less glory is ascribed to God.
By its being thus ordered, that the creature should have so absolute and universal a dependence on God, provision is made that God should have our whole souls, and should be the object of our undivided respect. If we had our dependence partly on God, and partly on something else, man’s respect would be divided to those different things on which he had dependence. Thus it would be if we depended on God only for a part of our good, and on ourselves, or some other being, for another part: or if we had our good only from God, and through another that was not God, and in something else distinct from both, our hearts would be divided between the good itself, and him from whom, and him through whom, we received it. But now there is no occasion for this, God being not only he from or of whom we have all good, but also through whom, and is that good itself, that we have from him and through him. So that whatsoever there is to attract our respect, the tendency is still directly towards God, all unites in him as the centre. (Jonathan Edwards, God Glorified in Man’s Dependence)
The Gospel of grace alone to the glory of God alone stands supreme and all other doctrines must fall at its feet and be crushed. So the heart of proud man must fall and be crushed to the dust that it may an instrument of God’s glory. Scripture is clear that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble (Jam 4:6). God will not dwell with the proud, but with the contrite and the lowly (Isa 57:15). There is nothing in the grace of God that looks upon human souls and waits for it to move first or waits for it to become worthy. No, no, and an eternity of no after no must be written in response to that. The grace of God is what works in dead sinners to give them a desire after spiritual things. The grace of God is what works in sinners to make them alive. The grace of God is what works in sinners to give them faith and life. The grace of God is what works in sinners to give them love so that they can even do one thing that is good. There is nothing that a sinner can do apart from true love that is good, but the only source and origin of love in the universe is God Himself and He only gives love for Himself by grace alone.
It sounds so cruel and harsh in the modern world to speak of nice, kind, and learned men as Arminians or Pelagians and then go on to attack that position. But what must be seen is that the Pelagian system is an open attack on the grace of God while the Arminian system is a disguised attack on the grace of God. If we are to love grace and the glory of the grace of God we must stand against all that is opposed to His grace. Romans 11:6 tells us without the slightest equivocation that grace and works cannot be mixed: “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.” Putting a few extra words in a sentence can help explain what the meaning is. “But if it is by grace [alone], it is no longer on the basis of works [or any work or human effort at all], otherwise grace is no longer grace.” What is of grace can have no basis or part with human works as a basis for merit in the slightest. One drop of the poison of human works is deadly to pure grace.
In order to make this clearer it must be seen that by works simply means the human soul or will doing something apart from grace to obtain or receive grace. What that really means, then, is that a work is something a human does while grace is what God does. The will of man being involved in salvation that is apart from grace (by definition what a ‘free-will’ is) is then the human being doing something and God not doing something. So by simple definition it is salvation by the grace of God plus the work of man. It is the work of the human soul or will and so is a work. Clearly, then, this is at odds with what Edwards shows us (in the quote above). The soul that truly depends on God alone must depend on grace alone and that dependence or faith includes the faith and dependence itself. The soul that looks to itself for one choice of a ‘free-will’ is looking to itself for faith and so is a work that it believes God will respond to. In other words, apart from the total dependence of the sinner on Christ alone for all things by grace alone there is no salvation by grace alone to the glory of God alone. One drop of the choice of the human will that is free from grace (‘free-will’) makes the will dependent on itself and not on God alone. That destroys justification by grace alone and so the biblical teaching of faith alone as well. That is what both Pelagianism and Arminianism ends up doing.
God Loves... Himself 
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