Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Ames isn’t offering a comforting picture of God smiling benignly over the world; he’s drawing a hard boundary around who (or what) gets to count as a real cause. “Good pleasure” sounds gentle, almost pastoral, but in Reformed scholastic hands it’s a technical term: God’s beneplacitum, the inner resolve that doesn’t answer to anything outside itself. The phrase launders severity through sweetness. What looks like “pleasure” is actually sovereignty.

The sentence is built like a legal instrument. “Act of the divine will” rules out any notion that God is merely reacting to events, prayers, or human merit. “Freely” blocks the idea that God’s decisions are compelled by foreseen goodness in us or by some higher moral order. “Effectively” is the kill shot: this will doesn’t just intend; it accomplishes. God’s determination is not a wish but a working cause, a guarantee that history cannot finally slip the leash.

The context matters. Ames is writing in the early 17th-century Calvinist world shaped by fights over predestination and “free will” (think Arminius, the Synod of Dort). His intent is to secure a universe where salvation rests on God’s initiative, not on human performance - a theology designed to humble the ego and stabilize assurance.

The subtext is philosophical as much as devotional: if “all things” are determined this way, contingency and human agency become secondary, permitted, real in a limited sense, but never ultimate. Ames is insisting that the deepest story of the world is not chance, nor choice, but decree.