Matthew 23:37 — How Often Would I Have Gathered You¶

The text. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" (Matthew 23:37, ESV)

The Calvinist reading¶

The Reformed interpreter knows this verse is dangerous, and the standard response is not stupid. God has revealed one will in his commands and promises and another in his eternal decree, and the two are not the same. Deuteronomy 29:29 distinguishes "the secret things" from "the things that are revealed." God commands all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30) and takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezek 33:11), while his decree fixes what shall come to pass. Matthew 23:37, on this reading, belongs to the first category: it is the revealed will, the sincere command and invitation, not a report of the decretive counsels.

Calvin, in the Harmony, takes roughly this line — Christ speaks as the minister of the covenant, voicing the will of God as it is set before Israel in the law and prophets, while the hidden counsel remains hidden. Sproul popularizes the distinction in Chosen by God, and Piper devotes a book to it in Does God Desire All to Be Saved? The 1948 OPC report is the most candid Reformed statement: God "expresses an ardent desire for the fulfilment of certain things which he has not decreed in his inscrutable counsel to come to pass," and the committee calls this "indeed mysterious."

This is a serious attempt to preserve both the sincerity of the offer and the sovereignty of the decree; a Reformed reader should recognize it as his own.

The problems¶

1. The verse does not give a command; it gives a thwarted intention¶

A preceptive will is a will that commands. But Jesus does not say, "I commanded you to be gathered." He says, "I would have gathered your children... and you were not willing." The first verb is ēthelēsa, an actual volition with an intended action; the second is ēthelēsate, the same verb in the second person. The sentence places two wills side by side and says that the human one prevailed.

That is not the grammar of a command and a failure to obey. If all Jesus meant was "I commanded you and you disobeyed," the image of the hen and the chicks would do no work — a hen does not command her brood, she gathers it.

2. The judgment is grounded in their unwillingness, not in a decree¶

Verses 38–39 give the sentence: "your house is left to you desolate." The stated cause is the refusal of verse 37. If the refusal were itself the outworking of an eternal decree of reprobation, then the sentence would be God punishing people for doing what he decreed they do, and the pathos of the lament would be theater. The text's own causal chain is: Christ willed to gather → they were not willing → the house is left desolate.

You can see the same chain in Luke 19:41, where Jesus weeps over the city before pronouncing its judgment. Tears are not a preceptive announcement. They are the response of a person whose desire has been disappointed.

3. "He speaks only as man" creates a worse problem than it solves¶

A second escape says the lament is the human nature speaking, not the divine. But the text does not say that, and Chalcedon does not permit Christ's human will to be at odds with the divine. If the human Jesus genuinely wanted something the divine Son had eternally decreed not to happen, then either the human will is not perfectly conformed to the divine or the divine Son also wanted it. And the same speaker, in the same breath, pronounces the desolation of the city with the authority of God, quoting Jeremiah's temple oracle.

The Reformed reader cannot have it both ways: the voice that weeps is the voice that judges.

4. The two-wills distinction relocates the problem rather than solving it¶

Suppose the distinction is granted. Then God has a revealed will that he desires the salvation of people he has eternally decreed not to save, and he announces that desire in Scripture without telling the hearer that it is only the surface of a deeper and opposite will. That is not a mystery; it is a systematic misrepresentation, and the OPC committee knew it, which is why it called the result "mysterious" and why the minority report objected that the majority had gone beyond the confessions. The hyper-Calvinist is the one who notices that a desire which never issues in action is not a desire.

The casebook's argument is not that the Reformed have no answer here. It is that the answer costs them the plain sense of the text, and the cost is paid every time someone preaches this passage.

5. "How often" implies repeated, genuine offers¶

The phrase posakis ("how often") points to a history: the ministry of Jesus to Jerusalem, and before that the prophets, whose stoning the city is charged with in the same verse. God had been gathering that city for centuries, and the gathering had been resisted for centuries. That is a long record of frustrated divine action, not a single decree working itself out.

The non-Calvinist reading¶

God really does desire the salvation of people who refuse him, and his desire is not a secret wish behind a contrary decree. It is the will he expresses, acts on, and grieves over. The Son came to gather Jerusalem, sent prophets to gather her, and wept when she would not be gathered.

This does not make God weak or surprised. It makes him the God of Hosea 11:8, who cries out over Ephraim, and of Ezekiel 33:11, who swears he has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. The refusal is real, it is the creature's, and it is the reason for the judgment. God's sovereignty is exercised in granting that refusal real weight — which is a greater sovereignty, not a lesser one, than a decree that scripts the refusal and then mourns it.

What this does and does not prove¶

This text does not prove that God has no decree, and it does not settle the metaphysics of how divine and creaturely wills relate. A compatibilist can construct an account on which God decrees the refusal and still grieves it, and the casebook does not claim that such an account is impossible — only that it is not what this verse says.

What the verse does prove is that the "two wills" reading is an inference imposed on the text rather than drawn from it, and that the text's own explanation of Jerusalem's ruin is her unwillingness. If a theology must treat the most emotionally transparent sentence in the Gospels as a surface phenomenon, that is evidence about the theology.