Reprobation

In Christian doctrine, when a sinner is so hardened as to feel no remorse or misgiving of conscience for particularly vile acts, it is considered a sign of reprobation.

The doctrine does not stipulate that because of a reprobates' wicked deeds that God will not save them, but rather that God has effectively permanently withdrawn his offer of salvation by giving them over to a seared conscience, and now they are a reprobate capable of willingly committing these certain sins not common among mankind.

Moreover, Holy Scripture most especially highlights this eternal and undeserved grace of our election and brings it out more clearly for us, in that it further bears witness that not all people have been chosen but that some have not been chosen or have been passed by in God's eternal election-- those, that is, concerning whom God, on the basis of his entirely free, most just, irreproachable, and unchangeable good pleasure, made the following decision: to leave them in the common misery into which, by their own fault, they have plunged themselves; not to grant them saving faith and the grace of conversion; but finally to condemn and eternally punish them (having been left in their own ways and under his just judgment), not only for their unbelief but also for all their other sins, in order to display his justice.

As Mozley has said, the whole race after the fall was “one mass of perdition,” and “it pleased God of His sovereign mercy to rescue some and to leave others where they were; to raise some to glory, giving them such grace as necessarily qualified them for it, and abandon the rest, from whom He withheld such grace, to eternal punishment.” In all of the Reformed creeds in which the doctrine of reprobation is dealt with at all it is treated as an essential part of the doctrine of predestination.

The Westminster Confession, after stating the doctrine of election, adds: “The rest of mankind, God was pleased, according to the inscrutable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.”