Pastor's Blog

Thursday, August 24, 2006

The Will of God: Explaining the Unexplainable

I know I promised to begin discussing a framework for Godly decision-making, but I need to take a brief side-trip first. If you’ve been following this series, you’re probably at a frustrating point right now. “What happened to the wonderful plan?” you may ask. “If there’s no wonderful plan for my life, what’s the point?” Well, I’m not trying to say that God doesn’t have a wonderful plan for your life. What I’m trying to say is that He generally does not reveal it to us ahead of time. The “wonderful plan” is His Sovereign Will for creation. Therein lies the difficulty; understanding the sovereignty of God has been one of the great challenges for Christian thinkers across the centuries. A disagreement over the nature of the sovereignty of God is at the heart of the primary doctrinal division within Protestantism, that being the division between Calvinists and Arminians.

I do not presume to resolve that centuries-old debate with my feeble efforts, nor do I intend to address the issue of predestination and divine election in this series. If you are interested in those questions, I encourage you to click through to The Schooley Files. Keith is in the midst of a wonderful series on that topic that I highly recommend. That being said, there is no way to discuss the will of God without addressing the topic of God’s sovereignty. Suffice it to say that I consider myself a moderate Arminian; I believe wholeheartedly in the sovereignty of God, and I believe that God has created man with a free will. In this blog entry, I will attempt to explain how I believe these two facts interact with each other.

God’s sovereignty is an undeniable assertion of scripture. That is, He is the controlling, sustaining power over all creation. How God exercises His sovereignty is the question that vexes us. Scripture is not explicit, so it is clearly not necessary for us to fully understand it. We are, however, allowed to wonder and make assumptions. Clearly, scripture tells us we have the ability and responsibility to make decisions. Therefore we are free to make decisions. How is that possible if God is sovereign? The answer is, God has created mankind with the ability to make choices. Is it possible for God to control or pre-program every decision we make? Certainly. Does He choose to do so? I don’t believe so. Some would say I’m putting limits on God’s sovereignty, I don’t see it that way. In fact, I believe it gives MORE glory to God to imagine that He can accomplish His sovereign plan through and in spite of our choices, rather than by controlling them.

I don’t believe that God exercises His Sovereign Will over every decision we make. Crest or Close-Up? Paper or plastic? Chocolate or vanilla? I don’t know of anyone who prays seeking “God’s will” for such decisions, or even expects God to care. Even if you believe in a Personal Will of God for your life, you live your life making decisions about what it does and does not cover. Generally, those decisions are based on how worried we are about the impact of our decision. We want God to relieve us of any responsibility if things don’t work out the way we hope. That very idea is contrary to God’s character. He wants us to make decisions, both good and bad, and learn from them. No matter what decision we make, His Sovereign Will is accomplished in our lives. I love the way A.W. Tozer expresses this:

Except for those things that are specifically commanded or forbidden, it is God's will that we be free to exercise our own intelligent choice. The shepherd will lead the sheep but he does not wish to decide which tuft of grass the sheep shall nibble each moment of the day. In almost everything touching our common life on earth God is pleased when we are pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our Maker's praise without anxiety. God's choice for us may not be one but any one of a score of possible choices. The man or woman who is wholly and joyously surrendered to Christ cannot make a wrong choice. Any choice will be the right one.

~A.W. Tozer, The Set of the Sail, chapter 21

That brings us back to the question at hand: How do we make “our own intelligent choice?” Has God left us completely on our own without any guidance at all? Absolutely not! His Word gives us guidelines for godly decision-making and that’s what I’ll begin to outline next. I promise.

The rest of the series:

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Defining our Terms
Part 3: A Wonderful Plan?
Part 4: The Decision-making of the Apostles

God's Will

Thursday, August 24, 2006 - 10:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Comments [7]

Friday, August 25, 2006 9:18:57 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Thanks for the plug; too bad I'm better at the theoretical than the practical.

On the issue of God's sovereignty and human free will, I find an image helpful: fish in a river. The fish can swim wherever they want to (although they're constrained by the banks), but the river is going to get to where God chose for it to go. They can swim against it or flow with it, but they can't change its ultimate destination.

On the larger issue: I understand God's Moral Will to be simply the laws of right and wrong that derive from His character and which He commands us to obey. I understand His Sovereign Will as simply the fact that nothing can occur that He does not allow, and He does not allow anything that will alter the overall ends for which He created the world.

I agree that God does not micromanage every detail of our lives; if He did, and that's what His Sovereign Will meant, then there would be no question of "missing" His will for us. Not fulfilling His will would be, by definition, impossible. The concept of "missing" His will comes into play when we do allow for the possibility of our own free choice.

Where you lose me is where you write, "We want God to relieve us of any responsibility if things don't work out the way we hope." It seems to me that fear (regarding the future) or regret (regarding the past) is precisely why people are concerned with trying to discern and follow God's "Personal Will." I don't see avoiding responsibility as an issue.

It seems to me that Scripture is replete with people whom God called into service of one kind or another, and who handled that responsibility well or badly: Moses, Samson, King Saul, David, John the Baptist, Peter, Judas, Paul. All made mistakes; some of them bad enough to delay or disqualify them for the service they had been called into.

I agree with you that, in general, God is interested in us doing the best we can with whatever situation we're in, and not in us finding a situation that corresponds with His "Personal Will." Still, it seems to me also that it is possible for God to have plans for a person that are more specific than just "live a moral life," and that we may fulfill or fail to fulfill those plans.

A person (call him Icarus) makes educational and career decisions based on feeling that God wants him to do something (and, to be fair, on his own interests as well); then, what was thought to be the goal never works out. It's hard not to come to the conclusion either that that person was either mistaken about the initial feeling of guidance, or that he somehow messed up in the pursuit of that goal. I know that either way, the person's responsibility now is to follow God's moral will in the situation he finds himself in. But it's hard not to be troubled by the thought of what might have been--or, perhaps, what never should have been attempted.

Keith Schooley

Friday, August 25, 2006 9:19:33 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

“I understand God's Moral Will to be simply the laws of right and wrong that derive from His character and which He commands us to obey.”

I’ll be addressing this in my next post, but I believe God’s Moral Will covers more that the laws of right and wrong. For example, I believe Jesus’ parable of the talents would fall under the category of God’s Moral Will. Not using our talents to the fullest is not necessarily sin, but it is a violation of God’s commands for us.

“It seems to me that Scripture is replete with people whom God called into service of one kind or another, and who handled that responsibility well or badly: Moses, Samson, King Saul, David, John the Baptist, Peter, Judas, Paul. All made mistakes; some of them bad enough to delay or disqualify them for the service they had been called into.”

True enough, but I think in most of the cases you list (Moses, Samson, Saul, David, Judas, and perhaps even Paul and Peter) their problems came through violating God’s Moral Will.

One of the problems I have with a Personal Will is this: If there is a Personal Will that we’re supposed to find and follow, how do we know when we’ve found it or not? Do we judge by the criteria of human success? Paul is a great example, which I’ll use again later in the series. Was he missing God’s Personal Will when he was beaten or thrown in jail? Clearly not. Even when God explicitly gave him instructions via a vision (Acts 16), he ended up beaten and imprisoned. Granted, he was miraculously set free, but the fact remains that things didn’t turn out well from a human standpoint. Jeremiah is an even better example. I can’t imagine any of the heroes of the faith saying that their life turned out just how they planned.

Pastor Bob

Tuesday, August 29, 2006 9:20:28 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

This is shaping up to be a good series, I'll be gladly following it! I found the following book to be of tremendous help when I first encountered the "center of God's will" theology:

Friesen, Garry, and Maxson, J. Robin. Decision Making and the Will of God: A Biblical Alternative to the Traditional View. Portland, Oregon: Multnomah (1980).

Available here:

http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0880700211/

So many people have been torn up over this, and the scripture is so clear about how we are to be shaped spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and so forth. God has revealed what he wants us to know about his will, and it's only by allowing our minds to be transformed that we begin to make truly wise decisions (Romans 12:1-3). If we train our minds to think on good things (Philippians 4) we become better able to make good decisions for a well-disciplined mind will be far less susceptible to the chaos of a lack of wisdom. Meditating on the Word, meditating on God, absorbing all that Jesus did and taught, allows the Holy Spirit to play the role in our lives that Jesus promised his disciples before he left (John 14), that the Comforter would remind us of all that Christ taught.

The Spirit helps drive us toward wisdom and a focus on Christ. His role is not to be an oracle on our minute decisions, his role is transformative, formational, and empowering.

At least that's how I see it, so far.

Good work here. Keep it up.

Rich
BlogRodent

Rich Tatum

Tuesday, August 29, 2006 9:20:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Thanks for the encouragement, Rich. As I mentioned in the first post of the series, Friesen & Maxson's book was a major influence on my thinking in this area. I'm glad to hear you found it helpful, too.

Pastor Bob

Saturday, September 02, 2006 12:14:15 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Pastor Bob, Much appreciate your thoughts. And a great Tozer quote. It reminds me of Augustine when he said something like: "Love, and do what you want." Even though I believe God is concerned with all of the intimate details of our lives, I do think we can get too hung up with that. We ought to bring the "little" things to God. But we must also acknowledge the mystery of God in what life may bring our way. Certainly a cross in our following of Jesus now. I just don't see knowing God's will and the pursuit of that, as a guarantee that bad things won't happen. Just thinking here. And I'm confident we're on the same page. Thanks!

Ted Gossard

Saturday, September 02, 2006 12:17:29 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

...I do want to add to my last thought, though, that God will work in all things for our good, for those of us who love him. And we will begin to see his glory in this life. As well his goodness and mercy following us, all our days. We need to remember these things in the midst of these days of our humiliation as Jesus' Body here on earth.

Ted Gossard

Saturday, September 02, 2006 9:46:57 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Great thoughts, Ted. Thanks for joining the discussion.