The Other Day on X

I spent a Saturday afternoon in a long exchange with a Reformed brother on X. I am not going to name him. He argued in good faith, he stayed in the text longer than most, and by the end he was asking real questions rather than throwing labels. That is the kind of conversation the essays on this site are written for, so I have set it down here, end to end, in the order it happened.

I have kept his questions in his own words where I could, and I have kept my answers to what the verses say. Where I overreached in the moment, I have said so. One of my replies leaned on a clause I had not checked, and I have marked it below rather than quietly improving it. A record that only shows the wins is not a record.

The exchange started under the essay Bought, Then Perished, on 2 Peter 2:1, and it ended, as these things usually do, at the question of whether a man can refuse God. Everything in between is the ground Calvinists and Provisionists actually fight over, one verse at a time.

1. “According to you, Jesus failed.” (John 6:39)

He opened with the charge that if Christ died for all and not all are saved, Christ failed, and he quoted John 6:39: “this is the Father’s will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day.” What percentage lost, he asked. Sixty? Forty?

Read the verses on either side. Verse 37: “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.” Verse 40: “every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day.” The given are defined in the passage itself as the ones who come and believe. Of those, He loses none. One hundred percent.

“Died for all” is a different sentence about a different set. Provision is for every man (Heb 2:9). Keeping is for the ones who come (John 6:37; 10:28). The charge takes the promise about the second set and applies it to the first.

A man refusing what was provided for him is not the Provider failing. “How often would I have gathered thy children together... and ye would not!” (Matt 23:37). “The Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves” (Luke 7:30). Scripture puts the loss on the refuser every time, and never once calls it a failure of Christ.

What this does not prove: that no one is ever kept by Christ. Everyone who comes is. It proves only that the keeping promise is made to the comers, and the dying is for more than them.

2. “You preach a God who needs man’s yes to accomplish His will.” (Eph 1:11; Isa 46:10)

His second move was that Provisionism makes God’s will depend on man’s cooperation, and he cited Ephesians 1:11, God “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will,” and Isaiah 46:10, “My counsel shall stand.”

Both stand. His counsel stands. And Revelation 22:17 is part of that counsel: “whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” God wrote the invitation into His own plan. A God who purposes a real offer and then receives real answers is not weaker for it. He is doing what He said.

The one who has a will of God that does not come to pass is the Calvinist. “Who will have all men to be saved” (1 Tim 2:4). “Not willing that any should perish” (2 Pet 3:9). And men perish.

I know the reply. There are two wills, decretive and preceptive, and these verses express the second: what God commands and approves, not what He has determined to bring about. I understand the move. Here is why these two verses cannot be parked there. Paul does not say God commands all men to be saved; he says God wills it, thelei, and grounds it in the next two verses in a ransom given “for all” (2:6). Peter does not say God approves of repentance; he says God is “longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish,” and the longsuffering is the delay of judgment for the sake of that will. These are statements of what God wants to happen, tied to what God has done to make it possible. To file them under “precept” is to say the ransom was given for a wish God never meant to succeed. That is the split, and on that reading the half He wrote down does not come to pass as written.

He objected that I had misquoted him. He had said God needs man’s yes “to accomplish His will,” not “to remain God.” He was right about his own words, so I took them as written. The answer does not change: God does not need man’s yes to accomplish His will. God willed that the yes be real.

3. “Rev 22:17 is talking about believers.”

He said the invitation at the end of Revelation is addressed to believers in context and does not tell us how a natural man responds.

Where I overreached. In the moment I argued that the hearer “passes the call on” to the thirsty, an evangelistic relay. When I checked the grammar afterwards, the first two “Come”s are second person singular, addressed to a you, and a good many commentators, not only Reformed ones, read that you as Christ: the Spirit and the bride pray for His return (22:12, 20), and the hearer joins the prayer. On that reading the relay is not secure, and I should not have built on it before checking the person of the verb.

What holds, and it is stronger than the relay. The last two clauses switch to third person imperatives with substantival present participles and no restrictor: ho dipson erchestho, let the one thirsting come; ho thelon labeto, let the one willing take. Not “the elect who thirst.” Not “the believer who wills.” Anyone in that state. And what is offered is the water of life, dorean, as a gift. You do not invite a man to come and take life he already has. John is echoing Isaiah 55:1, “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters... without money and without price,” which was never a verse to the saved. And verse 15, two lines above, names the ones “without.” The invitation follows the naming of the outsiders.

So whoever the first Come is to, the last one is to whosoever will.

4. “HOW does God know they will say yes? Middle knowledge?”

He is God. “Whom he did foreknow” (Rom 8:29). “Elect according to the foreknowledge of God” (1 Pet 1:2). Scripture states foreknowledge and never explains its mechanics, and neither of us gets to.

I do not use middle knowledge. Molina is not Peter, and I am not going to defend a sixteenth-century Jesuit’s machinery to hold a first-century apostle’s sentence. God sees all time at once. Scripture says He foreknew. It does not hand us the mechanism, and I decline to invent one in either direction.

“God responding to man” is not a problem in the Bible. It is on every other page. “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil” (Jonah 3:10). A God who answers is not a God who has lost control. I wrote that case at length in The God Who Answers What You Do.

5. “HOW is the natural man free enough to say yes to what he hates?”

This was his best question, and he asked it three times, so it deserves the fullest answer.

By the word. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Rom 10:17). The gospel “is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth” (Rom 1:16). “The word of God is quick, and powerful” (Heb 4:12). The Spirit “will reprove the world of sin” (John 16:8). The world, not the elect.

That is the how. God does not leave the natural man to himself and hope. He sends the word with power and the Spirit with conviction, to every hearer. Some love the darkness and stay. Some come to the light (John 3:19-21). Nobody in that passage was made to do either.

6. “HOW is the work of the Spirit effectual? If by decree, the man is not free.”

Effectual in what it does, not irresistible in what it forces. The Spirit convicts the world (John 16:8) and teaches (6:45). Those are real works with real effect on every hearer. And Scripture says they can be refused: “ye do always resist the Holy Ghost” (Acts 7:51). “The Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves” (Luke 7:30). A work that can be resisted is not a decree. It is a summons.

(I have left John 12:32, “...will draw all men unto me,” out of the load-bearing list on purpose. The Reformed reader will say “all kinds,” and I do not need the verse to carry this section. John 16:8 says “the world,” and Acts 7:51 says “resist,” and those two do the work without the fight.)

“If by decree, then not free.” Yes. That is exactly why I do not say decree. The dilemma he posed is the argument against his own position.

“Even you have a God who chooses,” he said. He does. He chose the Son (1 Pet 2:4). He chose the terms: whosoever believeth. He chose a people in Him (Eph 1:4), entered by faith (1:13). He chose the plan, the means, and the door. What He did not do is pick the names before the door opened. That is the difference between corporate election and individual election, and it is the subject of The Address of Election.

7. The depravity stack (John 3:19; 8:34; Rom 3:11; 8:7; Eph 2:1; Rom 6:16)

He then laid out the natural man in six texts: loves darkness, a slave to sin, does not seek God, hostile in mind, dead in sin, either a slave to sin or a slave to righteousness. “No middle ground exists. Libertarian free will is a myth.”

All of that is true of the sinner. None of it says the word cannot reach him. Read each verse to the end.

“Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). Loved. A refusal, not an incapacity. Two verses later: “he that doeth truth cometh to the light” (3:21). Same passage as “whosoever believeth” (3:16).

Slave to sin, yes (John 8:34). How does a slave get out? “The truth shall make you free” (8:32). “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (8:36). Freedom comes through the truth heard.

Slave to sin or slave to righteousness, yes (Rom 6:16). The hinge is the next verse: “ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you” (6:17). Delivered, then obeyed.

Cannot submit, hostile in mind (Rom 8:7). Granted for the carnal mind. That is why the gospel is called “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth” (1:16). Not the power of a prior regeneration. The power of the gospel.

Dead in sin (Eph 2:1). Dead is the word, and I keep it. What the word does not carry is “unable to hear,” because the same letter spends five chapters addressing, warning, and commanding the people it just called dead, and Paul does not command corpses. As an illustration, not a proof, the same word describes the son who “was dead, and is alive again” after he “came to himself” and walked home (Luke 15:17, 24). A parable is not an ontology, so I do not rest on it. I rest on Ephesians itself, and on “ye will not come to me” (John 5:40), and on “ye have obeyed from the heart” (Rom 6:17).

No middle ground. Agreed. Nobody here is preaching neutrality. I am preaching a slave who hears the door has been opened and walks through it, and a slave who hears the same and will not. “Ye will not come to me” (John 5:40). That is Christ’s word for it.

8. “Verse 37 is regeneration FIRST. God removes the heart of stone.” (John 6:37; Eph 1:4; Ezek 36:26)

Regeneration is not in John 6. Not in verse 37, not in the chapter. Jesus defines the Father’s drawing three verses later, and He defines it as teaching: “every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me” (6:45). Heard, learned, comes.

And the order in John 6 runs the other way. “Every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day” (6:40). Believing, then life, then the raising. John 20:31 says it again. Ephesians 1:13: “after that ye believed, ye were sealed.”

Ephesians 1:4 says chosen “in him.” How does a man come to be in Christ? Nine verses later: “in whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth” (1:13). Chosen in Christ, entered by faith.

He pressed: can the natural man remove his own heart of stone? No. God does. We agree, so that is not the disagreement. The disagreement is when, and his own verse is where it shows. John 1:12-13: “as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born... of God.” The sentence as ordered runs received, believed, given power to become sons, born of God. The Reformed reading takes the last clause as the cause of the first, the birth producing the receiving. That reversal is the whole disagreement, and the sentence itself does not make it. I am reading the order John wrote.

Union with Christ makes us children, he said. Yes. And how does a man come to be in Christ? “Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:26). And the new birth itself, Scripture names the instrument: “born again... by the word of God” (1 Pet 1:23). “Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth” (James 1:18). God gives the new heart, through the word, to the one who hears and receives it. Not before the word. By it.

Ezekiel’s stone heart is a promise to regathered Israel (36:24-28), and the same prophet commands the same people, “make you a new heart and a new spirit” (18:31). He would not command what only He can do unasked.

9. “WHY would Jesus die for individuals knowing they are goats?”

Because that is who He is, and because Scripture says He did.

“The Lord that bought them,” and they perish (2 Pet 2:1). “The blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified,” trampled (Heb 10:29). I know “sanctified” there is a contested word, and I am not claiming it means saved; I am using the warning as the writer wrote it, blood shed for a man who then counted it unholy, not as a covenant label emptied of blood. Those men are not my theory. They are in the text, bought and lost.

Why? Ask the same question of everything else God does toward the ones who refuse. “All day long I have stretched forth my hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people” (Rom 10:21). He knew. He stretched them out anyway. He sent Ezekiel to a house He said would not hear: “speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear” (Ezek 2:7). He knew. He sent him anyway. “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (33:11). That is the God who dies for men He knows will refuse Him. It is the same God, doing the same thing at the cross that He does on every other page.

And it is why their condemnation is just. “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19). The light came to them. That is what makes the refusal theirs.

One more thing. They are not goats when He dies for them. In Scripture “goats” is never a name for the non-elect from eternity. In Matthew 25 it is the verdict pronounced at one judgment; in Ezekiel 34 and Zechariah 10 it is the oppressive leaders of God’s own people; in Leviticus 16 the two goats are the Day of Atonement offering, which the New Testament reads as a type of Christ (Heb 9:12-14), a figure and not a naming; in Daniel 8 it is an empire (8:21). “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). He died for sinners. Some became sheep. Some stayed what they were. The dying was for all of them.

10. “Your view of salvation is synergism.”

This was his closer, and it is the standard one. Because I say a man can resist, the effectual work depends on man not resisting, and that is synergism.

He had said one sentence earlier: “It’s the will of the triune God to save everyone.” That is my position. On his system that will does not come to pass.

Now the label. Synergism means man contributes a work. Paul says faith is the opposite of a work: “to him that worketh not, but believeth” (Rom 4:5). “It is of faith, that it might be by grace” (4:16). “Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith” (3:27). The charge takes the word Paul uses as the antonym of works and makes it a synonym. Receiving a gift is not co-authoring it. The empty hand is not a second paycheck.

“Depends on man not resisting.” Stephen said men resist the Holy Ghost (Acts 7:51). Jesus said “ye will not come to me” (John 5:40). Neither of them was a synergist for saying so. They were describing what Scripture describes: a real work of God that a man can still refuse. If naming that is synergism, the charge lands on Stephen before it lands on me.

The last punch is always the same: “not resisting is still the decisive one percent, so man contributes the decisive part.” No. God does all the saving. The decisive factor in refusal is the man; the decisive factor in salvation is Christ. Receiving is not a work, and Paul says so in the one verse that settles it: “to him that worketh not, but believeth” (Rom 4:5). A man who takes the water of life did not dig the well. He is not one percent of the water.

God does all the saving. Man does the refusing. That is the whole of it, and it is the Bible’s own division of labor.

Where it ended

He sent a link to the 1689 London Baptist Confession. I know it. Chapter 3 is the decree, chapter 10 is effectual calling. I also know chapter 1, paragraph 10: the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined “can be no other but the Holy Scripture delivered by the Spirit.” The confession itself sends us back to the text, which is where I had been all afternoon.

Then he said he looks at the whole Bible and I isolate. We agree on 2 Timothy 3:16, every word of it. That is why every answer above is the sentence next to the sentence he quoted: John 6:40 beside 6:39, 6:45 beside 6:44, Eph 1:13 beside 1:4, Rom 6:17 beside 6:16, John 3:21 beside 3:19, Matt 23:13 beside 23:37. None of those is isolated. Each one is the verse the system has to skip.

Two things I want to be plain about. I have not shown that a Reformed man cannot hold his ground; he can, by reading every one of those wide words as “the elect,” and he will. And I have not shown that he argued badly. He asked how four different ways and why once, and those are the questions of a man who wants his system to be true to the Bible.

What I have shown is smaller and I think worth more. Ten times he quoted a verse, and ten times the sentence beside it answered him, and every one of those ten answers ran the same way. Provision universal. Application by faith. The refusal in the man.

That is the reader this site is for. The door is open, brother.

The Next Day: Ten More

Added 27 September 2026.

The essay went up Sunday morning. By Sunday evening the same reader had asked ten more questions under it, and since the first ten are the reason the essay exists, the second ten belong at the bottom of it. Same rules: his questions in his words, unnamed, and every answer from the sentence beside the sentence he quoted. One of the ten I conceded. That’s recorded as a concession, because a record that only shows the wins isn’t a record.

Three other things came up that were not questions: a link to James White’s reviews of Dave Hunt, a note that Calvin wasn’t new because Gill traced him to the fathers, and the word “childish.” Hunt and White published their debate as one book (Debating Calvinism, 2004), so nobody’s hiding it; the church before Augustine is on the Historical Note page with the quotations; and “childish” isn’t a verse. None of the three gets a section.

11. “Is the natural man neutral?”

No, and nobody here says neutral. He is hostile, dead in sins, and loves the darkness (Rom 8:7; Eph 2:1; John 3:19). What meets him is not a level field. It is the word with power (Rom 1:16) and the Spirit convicting (John 16:8). That work is real and it lands on every hearer, and it leaves him able to do one of two things Scripture names: receive it or resist it. “They that gladly received his word were baptized” (Acts 2:41). “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost” (Acts 7:51). Not neutral. Confronted.

12. “Your own site says ’prevenient grace.’”

It did, and I said so and fixed it. The Provisionism page used the phrase “God’s prevenient grace” as a label for what the same sentence went on to describe: “his conviction of sin (John 16:8-11), his drawing through the gospel (Romans 10:17).” That is the word preached and the Spirit convicting through it, not a separate grace given before and apart from the word to restore a lost ability, which is what the Arminian term means. The label was wrong for the thing. The page now says the thing.

One footnote for the record, since the label was handed to me as an Arminian assumption. Gratia praeveniens is Augustine’s phrase. Article X of the Thirty-Nine Articles says we have no good will “without the grace of God by Christ preventing us.” Reformed dogmatics uses the term for the grace that precedes regeneration. Arminius borrowed it and made it resistible. I dropped the word to be clear, not because it was ever his to give away.

13. “Exactly what does the Spirit do to a man who hates God?”

John 16:8 names it: He “will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” Reprove is elenchō, to convict, to prove a man wrong to his face. Through the word preached, the Spirit shows a hostile man that he is guilty and Christ is right. The word itself is “quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword... a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Heb 4:12). That is an inward work. What it is not is regeneration before faith.

Watch it happen both ways in one book. Peter preaches, and they were “pricked in their heart” (Acts 2:37) and “gladly received his word” (2:41). Stephen preaches the same Christ to the same city, and his verdict is “ye do always resist the Holy Ghost” (7:51). Same Spirit, same word. Scripture never says the first crowd was regenerated first. It says one received and one resisted.

14. “Salvation depends on man’s yes.”

Wanting is not needing. Jesus wanted Jerusalem gathered, offered it, and Jerusalem said no: “how often would I have gathered thy children together... and ye would not!” (Matt 23:37). By this objection’s logic Jesus needed their yes. He did not. He wanted it, offered it, grieved when it was refused, and lost nothing. Salvation depends on Christ, entirely. Whether a man receives it depends on whether he receives it, and Scripture says exactly that: “he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed” (John 3:18).

15. “1 Timothy 2:1-4 in context is ’all kinds of men.’”

“All kinds” is not in the passage. “All men” is, twice: prayer “for all men” in verse 1, and God “will have all men to be saved” in verse 4, the same words. Verse 2 names kings and those in authority so that we will pray for them too, not so that “all” can shrink to categories. And Paul finishes the sentence in verse 6: Christ “gave himself a ransom for all.” Titus 3:2 uses the same phrase, “unto all men,” and no one reads that as courtesy owed to a sample of every kind.

16. “Inward or outward? If inward, that’s prevenient grace.”

Inward, through the word (John 16:8; Heb 4:12). What makes a grace “prevenient” in the Arminian sense is not that it is inward; it is that it is given before and apart from the word to restore an ability. I hold no such thing.

And the Reformed confessions agree the Spirit works inwardly on men who then refuse. Dort III/IV, article 9, puts the blame for unbelief on those who refuse the word and describes men who receive it and fall away. The Westminster Confession 10:4 speaks of “common operations of the Spirit” on the non-elect. Stephen’s word for what those men do is resist (Acts 7:51). If “inward and resisted” makes a grace Arminian, Dort and Westminster are Arminian.

17. “Regeneration first makes him willing. It’s never forced.”

Then the will did something after regeneration, which is my position on what the will does after conviction. The only question is the order, and I keep asking for the verse that states it. John 6:40: believing, then life. Ephesians 1:13: “after that ye believed, ye were sealed.” John 1:12-13: received, believed, given power to become sons, born of God. Three sentences run believing first. I have not been given one that runs the other way as a sentence rather than an inference.

18. “You’re isolating verses. I’m pointing to the whole counsel of God.”

The whole counsel of God is the verses, all of them, and a doctrine that is in the whole counsel is in a sentence somewhere. John 6 was brought as the proof text for regeneration before faith; I showed the word is not in the chapter. Reading a man’s own citation is not isolating it. If the doctrine is elsewhere in the counsel, name where.

19. “Romans 8:7-8: the carnal mind cannot.”

Read what it cannot do: “the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom 8:7-8). Cannot submit to the law. Cannot please God by it. Paul does not say cannot believe the gospel, and he could not, because two chapters earlier he set faith against law and works: “boasting... is excluded... by the law of faith” (3:27); “to him that worketh not, but believeth” (4:5). Believing is not law-keeping; it is the opposite of it. And Paul’s answer to the carnal mind is on his own page: the gospel “is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth” (1:16).

20. “The Spirit opens dead eyes, and the man willingly submits.”

“Willingly submits” means the will did something after the eyes were opened. Good. That is the position. The remaining question is whether opened eyes can still shut, and Scripture answers it twice in the passages already on this page: “ye do always resist the Holy Ghost” (Acts 7:51); “ye would not” (Matt 23:37). The Reformed reading calls that the outward call. I call it the same call the saved received, answered differently. That is the whole disagreement, and it is an honest one.

Twenty questions now, over two days, and the answers have run the same direction every time: provision universal, application by faith, the refusal in the man. One word was conceded and one page was fixed, which is what a record is for. The offer at the end of the first ten still stands. Name the line, and I’ll take that line up.

Verification notes, addendum. KJV checked letter for letter: Rom 8:7-8; Eph 2:1; John 3:18-19; Rom 1:16; John 16:8; Acts 2:37, 2:41, 7:51; Heb 4:12; Matt 23:37; 1 Tim 2:1, 2:4, 2:6; Titus 3:2; John 6:40; Eph 1:13; John 1:12-13; Rom 3:27, 4:5. Greek: elenchō (John 16:8, G1651); katanyssō (Acts 2:37) and dieprionto (Acts 7:54) are different verbs, which is why 7:54 is not cited as conviction and 7:51 carries the resistance claim. Dort III/IV article 9 confirmed against the Christian Reformed Church text: the article is titled Human Responsibility for Rejecting the Gospel and reads that those who are not converted are not to be blamed on the gospel, nor on Christ, nor on God, but on the people themselves, some of whom do not entertain the Word and others of whom entertain it, do not take it to heart, and relapse after a temporary faith. WCF confirmed against the OPC text: chapter 10, Of Effectual Calling, paragraph 4, others, not elected, may have some common operations of the Spirit. Thirty-Nine Articles, Article X (1571), “preventing us,” read in the Church of England text. Debating Calvinism: Five Points, Two Views, Dave Hunt and James White, Multnomah, 2004.

Changelog. 27 September 2026: published. 27 September 2026: ten further questions added as “The Next Day: Ten More” (§11–20), and the Provisionism page reworded where question 12 concedes the point.

Every verse above is KJV, checked letter for letter against the KJV text before it was quoted; elisions are marked with an ellipsis and punctuation inside quotation marks is the KJV’s own. Two kinds of Greek check were run and they are different things. Lemma identity (which word is on the token) was confirmed from Strong’s tagging for John 6:44-45 (helkyo, didaktoi, akousas, mathon), Rev 22:17 (thelon), John 1:12-13 (elabon, pisteuousin, egennethesan), Rom 4:5 (ergazomeno, pisteuonti), Luke 7:30 (ethetesan, boulen), Matt 23:37 and Luke 13:34 and 1 Tim 2:4 (thelo), Matt 23:13 (aphiemi), 1 Tim 2:6 (pas). Parsed form (person, number, mood) for Rev 22:17 was read from the SBL Greek text and the Englishman’s Concordance parse tags, not from our own tagging, which does not carry parses. Acts 7:51 antipiptete (G496) was checked in Blue Letter Bible’s lexicon, since our tagging has no Greek rows for that verse. Luke 13:34 is the same lament in Luke’s wording, not a verbatim parallel; what was checked is that no scribes-and-Pharisees vocative appears anywhere in the Luke 13 unit. Ezekiel 36:24-28 addressee (regathered Israel) and 18:31 imperative read in context. 1689 LBCF 1.10 quoted from the text at the1689confession.com, pending confirmation against the Founders edition. The Revelation 22:17 addressee of the first two imperatives is marked above as disputed and is not load-bearing.