What is God’s Will?

      We all remember the terrible news from Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania last fall – how a man took over a small school filled with Amish children.  He ultimately shot ten girls and killed several of them.

       Reporters interviewed the leaders of the Amish community.  One of the elders said, “We must accept this as the will of God?” 

       Was it the will of God?  Did God send that gunman to that school?

       Is God a monster? 

       This morning we begin a series of sermons on “The Will of God.”  I have been looking forward to this series because the subject is so important for each of our lives. I also need to clarify my own thinking.  No one ever learns as much as the teacher.  That is one reason I hope each of you will take the opportunity to minister in our church school.  I also strongly encourage you take part the small groups on the Will of God that begin this week.  About 200 people are taking part so far.

        Knowing God’s will is important in two areas -- obedience and understanding.

       Let’s look at obedience.  All Christians are supposed to want to know God’s will for their lives.  And, in fact, I find that most very desperately want this knowledge.  But how do we know what God wants us to do?

       No issue is more important for practical, day-to-day Christian living than making decisions based on the will of God.  And no issue is filled with more confusion, misinformation, mistaken scriptural use and even downright superstition than knowing God’s will.  Few things are as misunderstood, I believe, as the role of the Holy Spirit in making decisions.  This is costly. As J.I. Packer wrote, “Wrong ideas about God’s guidance lead to wrong conclusions about the right thing to do.”

       How, indeed, do we know what God wants us to do?  This is the question of obedience.

       Let’s look also at understanding.  Something happens and we wonder how God could have allowed it or even caused it to occur.  A child dies of crib death or is run down in the street by a drunk.  How is that the will of a loving and merciful father?  In my own life I think about my parents and horrible injuries they suffered in a car crash the day after Christmas many years ago.  Was I supposed to credit God with that?

       A lot comes down to what we mean by the phrase “The Will of God.” The phrase is used very loosely and that looseness of usage can have serious consequences for our understanding and our trust in God’s goodness.

       British Pastor Leslie Weatherhead tells of a friend of his, a medical doctor, whose beloved wife died of leukemia.  When she died he said, “Well I must just accept it.  It is the will of God.”  But before she died he fought for her life.  He brought in the best specialists and used all the scientific apparatus at his disposal.

       “During this time, was this doctor fighting against the will of God?” Weatherhead asks.  “If she had recovered, would he not have called her recovery the will of God?”  But we cannot have it both ways.  The woman’s recovery and the woman’s death cannot equally be the will of God in the sense of being His intention.

       Or, in the same way, we hear: “I suppose it’s the will of God, but if only the medics had arrived on time, they could have saved my husband.”  There’s a confusion of thought here.  If the medics had come earlier, would they have been able to outwit the will of God?

       Our usage of “The will of God” also raises questions about God’s power.  In Matthew 18:14, Jesus declares: “It is the will of my Father that not one of these little ones should perish.”  And yet they do perish.  Doesn’t God have the power to back up His good intentions?

       This dilemma of faith is summed up in a classic phrase: “If God is God he is not good, if God is good, He is not God”-- the claim is that the presence of evil in the world shows that God is either not all powerful or else he is not all good.

      The Lenten Season that starts this Wednesday is the time of preparation for Easter.  Traditionally, in the Roman Catholic Church, the people give up meat for Lent as a symbol of sacrifice.  This morning we are doing the opposite.  We have bitten off a huge chunk of meat, which should keep us chewing mentally, and spiritually for a long time too come.  But that is also good preparation for understanding the events of Easter.

       I do not often strongly rely on a book other than the Bible in preparing a sermon.  But this morning, I would like to share with you some insights from the English pastor Leslie Weatherhead.  These insights are contained in his small book, The Will of God that was first published in the midst of great suffering during World War Two.  If you would like, I would be glad to load you my copy.

       Weatherhead divides the phrase “The Will of God” into three distinct categories.  You might find it helpful to make a few notes on the outline provided.  The categories are: the intentional will of God, the circumstantial will of God, and the ultimate will of God.

        The intentional will of God is defined as God’s perfect intention.  It is the way in which “God pours Himself out in goodness, such as a true father longs to do for His children.” This has nothing to do with anything that is unpleasant or evil or unhappy.  Suffering and pain are clearly not the will of God in this sense.

       Weatherhead asks: “What kind of God would it be, who of His own intention, pours undeserved misery and unhappiness, disappointment and frustration, bereavement, calamity, and ill health on His beloved children, and then asks them to look up through their tears and say ‘Thy will be done’?”  He writes: “We simply must dispense with the idea that everything that happens to us is the will of God -- in the sense of being His intention.  We must come to terms with the idea that the intentional will of God can be defeated by the ignorance, folly and sin of man -- at least for a time.  If this were not true, then people would have no freedom at all.”

        In my life, I know that my parent’s injuries in that car wreck were the will of God -- to the extent that the laws of nature are God’s will and the laws of nature dictate that at high speed, flesh gives way to metal.  But I also need to realize that the accident and the pain were not God’s intention.  They were a result of human stupidity or malice -- part of the pain of living in a fallen world.

        Yes, I’m sure I could have found some comfort in thinking that the accident was the intention of God --  that He had some great purpose in mind when it happened that would eventually make the whole thing worthwhile.  But that wouldn’t be true and there is finally no comfort in self-deception.

       This brings us then to the circumstantial will of God, which is defined as God’s will or God’s plan within certain circumstances.

       An example is the story of Joseph from the Old Testament. 

       It was not God’s intention that Joseph’s brothers become jealous of Joseph, sell him into slavery in Egypt , and convince their father Jacob that Joseph had been killed by a wild beast.  That was evil and the Bible assures us that God is not the author of evil.  Evil was the will of the brothers and God’s intention for Joseph’s life was temporarily thwarted by the brother’s sin.

       But given the circumstance of Joseph being a slave in Egypt , God used Joseph as His champion for the salvation of his family.  When the now powerful Joseph, the number two man in Egypt , confronts his brothers with his identity and their sin, they naturally fear for their lives.  Joseph is on top and it’s payback time.  But Joseph says: “Do not be afraid.  What you meant for evil, God meant for good.”  God took the circumstances created by the sin of Joseph’s brothers and crafted those circumstances into a means of salvation.

       Or it may be, as some suggest, that God has in mind a certain person for each person to marry at the time they are born.  I have friends who have prayed for their future wives and their Christian growth even before they met them -- in confidence that God has an intentional will in the matter and that they will surely meet and marry the woman God has in mind for them.

       But what if you meet “the person” and don’t marry him or her?  What if you recognize God’s will in the matter but they don’t? Or what if you never marry at all?  Are you then doomed to be outside the will of God for the rest of your life?

       And it’s not just you.  I mean, happens if someone gets it wrong, either through disobedience or through spiritual neglect?  When guy #1 makes a mistake and marries the wrong girl, she now is unable to marry the man God actual chose for her (guy #2). So guy #2 has to find someone else (God’s “second best”).  But now Girl #2 can’t marry the guy God chose for her so guy #3) must marry someone else who then can’t marry the person God chose for her.  Just one mistake can mess up the whole world!*

      Fortunately it doesn’t work that way.  There isn’t just “the one.”  The biblical expectation is that you marry a believer of the opposite sex.  That’s it.  God has more than one road to His purpose in your life.  If you didn’t marry the “right one”, or if you don’t marry at all, God can make something great and beautiful from the situation at hand.  Paul describes this circumstantial will of God in Romans 8:28: “For we know that God causes all things to work for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose.” 

        Romans 8:28 does not mean that everything that happens to us is God’s best intention for us.  Not everything that happens is good.  Some of it is evil and is meant for evil.  But it does mean that God can take any circumstance and make something good out of it. 

      So we should avoid the mistake of thinking that even if we have deliberately and knowingly disobeyed the Lord, that we are forever thrown on the trash heap, can never do the Lord’s will, and are doomed to “second best.”  As Paul Little points out: “God has the most wonderful ways of reweaving the strands of our lives.  He takes us where we are when we come to Him in confession and repentance and uses us fully again…if not for the original good, then for another good.  Our disobedience does not take Him by surprise, and His grace reaches right out to us.”

        In the case of the Amish children, God can use the evil event as an opportunity to witness to Christian forgiveness – as the families of the slain girls met and prayed with the widow of their slayer.  A Michigan reporter named Gertrude Huntington wrote: "They know their children are going to heaven. They know their children are innocent ... and they know that they will join them in death. The hurt is very great, but they don't balance the hurt with hate."

       But why does God allow a fallen humanity to thwart His intentional will at all?  Why doesn’t he just step in, clean up the place, and get rid of evil? Why go to all the work of weaving and then reweaving?

       It’s a question of our freedom. 

       If we are free, then we are free to do both unimaginable good and unimaginable evil and everything in between. If we don't like that, we don't like freedom.

        But God likes our freedom.  God’s will is not just that we be with Him but that we are with Him by our own choice.  That requires freedom and freedom involves the ability to really mess things up.  The problem is that when we talk about the problem of evil, we always think about the evil “out there” -- not the evil “in here”.  But if God were to step in and get rid of all evil, he would also have to get rid of us.  It’s in here as well as out there.  God allows evil to continue because there is also the potential of repentance.  As I Peter 3:9 declares: “God is not slow about His promise of the second coming as some count slowness, but puts up with you, not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance.”

       This brings us then to the ultimate will of God.  The ultimate will of God consists of those things that are going to happen because God has decreed that they will happen -- no matter what it takes.  The theological term is predestination.

       It is God’s ultimate will that we dwell in happiness with Him.  That will happen even if it costs the death of His Son.  It is God’s ultimate will, as the Bible declares, that, “the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and of His Christ.”  This is going to happen because God has decreed it.  It is God’s ultimate will that “all who call upon the name of the Lord be saved.”  That is our security.  It is God’s will that “at the name of Jesus every knee bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father.”  That train is coming and there is no way that it can be derailed.

       In trying to defeat God’s ultimate will, people are like little children playing beside a tiny stream that runs down a mountainside to join a river in the valley below.  Very little children can divert a stream and get fun out of damming it up with stones and earth.  But not one of them ever succeeds in preventing the water from reaching the river at last. 

       In relationship to God, we are very little children.  We may divert and hinder His purposes.  But we never finally defeat them.  And frequently God uses our mistakes and sins to carve out yet another channel to the river of His purpose.  God’s will must finally be done,  “On earth as it is in heaven.”

       This brings us to the final question for this morning: What then is the purpose of prayer, if God’s ultimate will is going to be done anyway?

       We find an answer to this question in the thirty eighth chapter of Isaiah.  Hezekiah has been a good king and God has been kind to him.  One day Isaiah the prophet brings Hezekiah a message from God: “Thus says Yahweh, set your house in order for you are going to die.”

       When Hezekiah hears this word from God he does not set his house in order, but turns his face to the wall and begins to pray.  He reminds God of the good years of his reign, the things he has done as king for the advancement of the people, and how he has walked before God in truth and uprightness of heart.  He weeps and asks God to be merciful and give him more time.  God then sends Isaiah with a message: “I have heard your prayer, I have seen your tears; behold, I will add another fifteen years to your life.”

        Does this mean that God’s ultimate will was not done?  Does it mean that Hezekiah took control by his prayer?  No.  Hezekiah still died.  But within the circumstances of the moment, God could bring about His purpose this way or that way.  Hezekiah asked God: “Do it this way, no the other way” and God changed His will -- not His ultimate will or His intentional will but His circumstantial will.

       Within the circumstances of most moments there are any number of tracks that God can follow to the fulfillment of His purpose.  In prayer, God gives us a say in the choice of which path He takes.  Prayer changes things.  If that is not true, our intercessory prayer is pointless.

       It may well be that it was God’s will -- given the circumstances of my parent’s accident -- that my father should die.  It would certainly have a saved a lot of pain.  But it was my will, and the will of hundreds of others who prayed, that my father should live.  And he lived another twenty years -- despite the fact that at one point the doctors gave him only a five percent chance of living through surgery.

       You see, God deals with us in our prayers as a loving, living, thinking, knowing father.  God did not set things to running before the foundation of the world and go off fishing.  God’s plan is not an inexorable, ironclad rule that cannot be broken.  That is fatalism and fatalism is not Christian.  God’s plan is the plan of a wise and loving and almighty Father who is big enough to encompass all our freedom and still see that things come out according to His holy will.  God is big enough to create the heavens and the earth, to create us as free moral agents, to maintain our freedom, answer our prayers and still carry out His purpose.

*illustration adapted from Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason Ministries.