God’s Will – A Mystery

God’s Will – A Mystery.

“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may obey the words of His teachings.” (Deuteronomy 29:29).

MYSTERY: (Greek, Musterion); a sacred secret hidden in the heart of God until the appointed time of revelation; a truth that can only be known by divine disclosure; spiritual insights into God’s way of thinking and planning; hidden truths revealed by God that are beyond human intellect and reason; divine knowledge that can only be understood through the Holy Spirit; God’s thoughts and plans revealed to believers and hidden to doubters and unbelievers.

God’s Will, Beyond our Understanding. “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His decisions! And how mysterious are His ways, His methods, and His paths! For who has known the mind of the Lord, who has understood His thoughts, or who has ever been His counselor? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. For all things originate with Him and come from Him; all things live through Him, and all things center in and end in Him. To Him be glory forever! Amen. That’s the truth.” (Romans 11:33-36).

A Foundational Truth to Consider. God’s will is based on His character, and so His will shall always reflect His essence and divine identity. His will is always going to be a revelation of His authentic Being, and it will not compromise His nature. To be in the center of God’s will then, we need to live in the center of who God is, what His character is through His Holy Spirit with Jesus. God’s character determines the substance of His will. His ultimate intentions and plans will unfailingly line up with His character. It appears from Scripture that God’s will is mercy. God’s bottom-line will is mercy. What God wants for the world to experience is His mercy and goodness, and His desire is to demonstrate the essence of His character.

“A person should consider us in this way: as servants of Christ and as stewards of the mysteries of God. Think of us as Messiah’s official underlings and as those who are entrusted with the mysteries of God.” (1 Corinthians 4:1).

SERVANTS: (Greek, “hyperetas”); literally the under-rower, the lowly person pulling the oars on the lower deck of the ship; the underlings; the subordinates who have special orders. A servant of Christ is one who is content to decrease while Christ increases, who considers it a privilege to serve Jesus in a way that is hidden, humble, and full of trust in God’s purposes.

STEWARDS: (Greek, “oikonomos”); literally the manager of a household responsible to dispense what is needed; the custodian in a home given the responsibility to carefully distribute the necessities when needed; managers; caretakers; trustees, or those entrusted with important responsibilities from the owner of the house. In this context, to responsibly take care of the revelations of God and disperse the knowledge of God’s mysteries in a way that would honor the owner’s wishes; to carefully explain the revealed secrets of God’s in a responsible way; to guard the sanctity of what God has decided to reveal. A competent and faithful steward would be one who “holds the mystery of the Faith with a pure conscience.” (1 Timothy 3:9), since we are also called to be “stewards of God’s grace.” (Ephesians 3:2).  So if God has anything to do with it, these stewards of God’s mysteries must “speak the truth in love.” (Ephesians 4:15).

Describing God’s Will. Accepting the fact that God’s thoughts are as unreachable as the furthest star in the galaxy, and that His level of understanding is as far from us as the distance from one end of the universe to the other end, we can try to describe God’s will this way: His will is His heart’s desire for every creature to become what that creature was created to be, to reach God’s purpose and destiny for that person; God’s will is what He wants to happen; God’s will is His pure and perfect intention for everything under the sun; His will always remain what is best for all of humanity; His will includes all of mankind’s actions and attitudes that are in line with His character and purpose; His will is that which brings pleasure and joy to His heart; God’s will springs from His character and is an expression of who He is by nature. According to many biblical scholars, God has three wills: His Intentional Will, which is what He prefers according to His designs and plans for the world. The whole world is full of God’s mercy (Ps. 119:64), and God intends that his creatures reflect and live into that mercy with each other. But His intentions could be thwarted in the short-term, because of His… Permissive Will: His will honors each person’s free will, since we are all made in His image; for the short-term, His permissive will allows each of us to stray from His preference or His intention, refusing to eliminate the freedom of mankind to make their own choices in life. However, God has an Ultimate Will for the long-term, a perfect will that is irresistible, that God has had in mind since the creation of the world, and God is determined that His ultimate will shall prevail. Much of God’s ultimate will is a secret at this point, known only to Him. God in His wisdom enjoys a unified plan that we are not privy to, and life in this world is moving towards the ending He has determined.

One possible theory on God’s mysterious will in the world. Imagine that world history, with all its momentous events, national tragedies and unforeseen twists and turns that seemed random, with all its natural disasters and unpredictable conflicts, with all the glories and beauties of civilizations come and gone, all the bright lights of saints and heroes and the dark shadows of villains and devils, all the world’s great masterpieces in art, music, literature and technology, and with all the personal choices of love and hate, destined for victory or defeat… imagine that all of that is a mind-boggling, complex, multi-layered, impossible-to-understand cosmic Play by the Divine Playwright, God Himself. Our Playwright is the only One who could possibly have the Big Picture in mind, the only One who has a unified vision of the world, and He has written the ultimate ending to the Play. He is determined to have the Play be resolved at the conclusion according to His plan for the Play. The ending of the play is non-negotiable by others who might have different ideas, but the conclusion will reflect without question the deep desires of the Playwright. He will not compromise his creative genius, since He is filled with wisdom and understanding and knows exactly where everything is eventually headed and how it all fits together. His ultimate plan for the Play can be called God’s Will, as can be the fact that the Playwright has in mind the main themes in each Act of the Play. Each Act contains a theme or two that is determined by Him, but each scene in each Act is being written by the likes of us, we who are mixed bags of God’s image and fallen nature. The Playwright has given humanity a lot of freedom to write some of our own script, and He will honor our freedom by not eliminating free human will. God has actually invited us to cooperate in a draft of the Play. Each of us writes a lot of the action scenes and even some of the secondary plot development, but if the Playwright sees any of His main themes drifting away from His main purpose, He has a few ways of responding: the Playwright can simply delete the scene and ask for a re-write; He can intervene and force a few important changes in the script; He could personally do a rewrite Himself; He can redeem the unfortunate scene by taking the part of the scene that didn’t fit into His grand scheme of things, and turning it into a part that fits, taking the objectionable part in hand and arranging things so something good and beautiful can emerge. God can redeem any part of a wayward script and have good come out of the bad. One way or another, God’s ultimate Will is going to be successfully fulfilled, and the play will without any doubt be resolved according to the desires of the Playwright. Nature and humanity all have a part to play in the writing of the script, but it is God alone who will determine the main direction of the plot line, the final character development, and the glorious conclusion at the end. The Playwright is God, and of course He knows best. It’s our job to understand as much as we can about the Playwright so we can cooperate with His plot. We can only see the play from our limited view. Only the Playwright has the Big Picture in mind, from beginning to end. The Playwright has ultimate sovereignty, but at the same time permits people to make their own mistakes and lets nature take its course.

Will God Get What He Wants? Eventually, His will shall be completely accomplished. Temporarily, though, it seems that He allows His will to be thwarted. Many have posed this question, and of course, we don’t really know the answer to this question. This remains a mystery, a secret part of His will. It’s clear that God in the end wants everyone to be saved. “God is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). He does not desire that anyone would perish. “Our God and Savior, who desires all mankind to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4). God is the lover of mankind, and ”takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.” (Ezekiel 33:11). There is a lot in Scripture about hell and judgment, much of it proclaimed by Jesus Himself. Will God get what He wants, everyone saved, in the very, very, very end of the End? After continually rejecting the mercy of God, it may take some of the more stubborn souls a long time to finally accept Him. How much weight does God finally give our finite, imperfect free wills? Will he really allow our weak, ignorant wills to frustrate His plans and then we foolishly sentence ourselves to eternal death? How far will God take this free will idea in terms of final decisions? We just don’t know the answer to this mystery. There is an interesting little parable in Matthew 13:47-50, the Parable of the Fishing Net. The fishing net is thrown wide and deep, and it catches any number of kinds of fish. Jesus has the angels coming at the end and helping Him judge these fish, some good and some not good. In many ways this is a tragic story. Jesus seems clear and unequivocal that there will be a final judgment, a separation unto what at least seems like an eternity. The “good fish” though should not feel especially smug or self-righteous or judgmental against what they consider the “bad fish.” We are assured it won’t get all sorted out till the end. Spread the net and pray for mercy for others and for yourself in the separation process. It’s hard to miss that the angels seemed intent and eternally tough in their display of divine justice. Somehow, Lord, may your judgment throne be a mercy seat. “So let us come boldly to the throne of grace. There we will receive His mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most.” (Hebrews 4:16). Let’s pray that verse for everyone, even the “bad fish.” Maybe somehow, after the angels are done sorting things out, Jesus, who has the Last Word, will say, “Father, forgive them, for they didn’t know what they were doing.” Maybe, somehow, the Lord will give the bad fish a final opportunity to flop into paradise. Maybe, after what seems an eternity, the Lord’s will of mercy wins out. I would like to think and hope that, even in His moral universe in which there is accountability, even with that in mind, God will eventually get what He wants.

“We are only on the outer fringes of Your works! How faint the whisper we hear of You! I am unworthy – How can I reply to You? I put my hand over my mouth. Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” (Job 26:14, 40:4, 42:36).

1. The best place to start and then continue with God is to acknowledge that He is God, and we are not. We need to humbly know our place in creation, as Isaiah quotes Yahweh in Isaiah 55:8-9: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, My plans and intentions are not yours. I don’t think the way you think, says the Lord. The way you work is not the way I work, and your ways are not My ways. For as the heavens soar eternally high above the earth, so do My ways surpass your ways.”
2. The deep humility of St. Paul is inspiring as he quotes from Isaiah 40: “We cannot wrap our minds around God’s wisdom and knowledge! Its depths can never be measured! We cannot understand His judgments or explain the mysterious ways that He works! For, ‘Who can fathom the mind of the Lord? Who can claim to be His counselor?” (Romans 11:33-34).
3. So it seems rather arrogant, or at least foolish, to delude ourselves into thinking that we can pretend to know the full knowledge of God’s thoughts on every matter in the faith… To stubbornly insist on our understanding of how God ultimately works; to self-righteously assume any of us can definitively know how God’s mind operates on eternal matters; to place unquestioning trust in our own fallible understanding.

In any discussion of God’s will, of course, we shouldn’t forget, “whatever the Lord pleases to do, He does.” (Ps. 135:6), and “Our God is in heaven; He does whatever He pleases.” (Ps. 115:3).