Knowing God’s
will and Decisions – Judges 6:14
Open your Bible to Judges 6. Judges 6 is the episode of Gideon which is
the favorite story of many people and it’s used to teach many different doctrines
some which are in the text, some of which are not in the text. This is the fourth cycle of disobedience and
deliverance that we see in the book of Judges.
We’ve studied Othniel, we’ve studied Ehud, we saw the deliverance of
Shamgar, we saw the judgeship of Deborah, and Gideon is next. Gideon is not presented to us as a man of
particularly stout spiritual stature.
We find him in the opening verses hiding away from the enemies of Israel
who are described as the Midianites and the Amalekites who are coming in on an
annual basis, sweeping through the land, down through the valley of Shephelah,
which is a north south access valley that runs through the central part of
Israel and it’s an extremely productive area and as they come through there
they are just stealing all the crops, raiding all the storehouses and basically
leaving everybody with hardly enough to live on for the next year, until the
next harvest comes in. So that the
people have been run from their homes, they’re hiding in the hills, Gideon is
hiding out hoping to thresh out some wheat, just enough to maintain and keep
body and soul together for the coming year.
It’s in that context that the angel of
Yahweh, that is the preincarnate Jesus Christ, appears to Gideon. This is a time of tremendous depression in
the land, economic recession, and the angel of the Lord appears to Gideon and
begins to instruct him. And in verse 12
which is about where we stopped the last time, “The angel of the LORD appeared to him
and said to him, “The LORD is with you, O valiant warrior.” Now there is a hint of prophecy there but also a hint of
sarcasm. Some people have trouble with
the fact that the Lord is sarcastic, but the Lord has a tremendous sense of
humor. He has a lot better sense of
humor than many Christians do and sometimes He tries to make His points simply
through the use of humor. You can
really make some great points through humor as opposed to hitting somebody over
the head with the truth sometimes and so the Lord is very relaxed and He just
kind of chuckles a little bit looking at Gideon hiding out there and calls him
a valiant warrior. Of course, that got
Gideon’s attention, why are You calling me this and what do You want me to do?
So Gideon responds and we see that he
has a lack of understanding. He does
not have historical perspicacity, he has very little doctrine in his soul and
because of that he doesn’t understand the dynamics of his situation. I’m pointing this out because too often we
want to paint these judges as if they are spiritual giants, and the point that
I continue to make through this study is that they are not spiritual
giants. In fact, they are products of
their culture and the culture in Israel during this time is increasingly
influenced by the pagan thinking of the Canaanite culture surrounding them and
that’s because they failed to obey God’s command to annihilate the Canaanites,
man, woman and child, the command seems harsh to us but the purpose was in the
plan of God to remove the negative influence of the negative concepts of the
Canaanites as well as to bring discipline on a nation, a group of people that
had been in continuous rebellion against God and had a culture that was steeped
deeply in demonism.
They failed to obey God, they
compromised and as a result they were continuously plagued and defeated by the
thinking…see, the military defeats, the economic defeats were the consequence
of spiritual defeats. The ultimate
issues in life are always spiritual, they are always theological, they may have
various sociological, psychological, economic and political ramifications and
there may be those influences as secondary influences but the primary causes in
history are always spiritual. How a people responds to the truth of God is the
determinative, causative factor in history. Everything else is secondary;
everything else is symptomatic as opposed to the root problem. And that is the problem in Israel, is that
they are so apostate that even someone like Gideon does not know much about
doctrine.
Notice Gideon’s response sin verse 13, “Then Gideon said to him, “O my lord, if
the LORD is with us, why
then has all this happened to us?” See,
he doesn’t understand the Torah, he doesn’t understand the concepts in
Leviticus 26 that explain that if Israel gets into idolatry God is going to
take them through five successive stages of divine discipline, so he doesn’t
understand the five cycles of discipline, he doesn’t understand anything about
God’s covenant relationship with Israel and so he can’t understand, he can’t
properly interpret the events around him.
See, doctrine is what gives us the objectivity to properly interpret our
historical surroundings. Just as today
in our culture we can evaluate what is going on only from an objective
framework of doctrine. If you’re living
in a culture and all you have is relative standards that are part of that
culture, you cannot look at that culture objectively. That’s why you have, with the rise of relativism and
postmodernism in America today you have people coming up with all kinds of
solutions and all kinds of analysis as to what the problems are. Only when you can stand above and outside of
the culture, from a position of absolutes, so that you have a basis, a basis of
evaluation for the culture, can you honestly and accurately look at the
culture.
It also applies to our own lives. The only way we can look at our own lives is
from an external position of objective absolutes and that’s provided for us in
the Scripture. The sad thing is that so
many of us get so immersed in subjectivity that even when the Word of God
honestly reflects who and what we are we don’t see it. We think oh, that applies to somebody
else. It’s very rare to find too many
people who want to be objective about themselves because eventually that may
call upon us to change. Well, that’s
what the Christian life is all about; it’s changing from a pagan thought form
and man operating on his sin nature to someone operating under the filling of
the Holy Spirit whose character is transformed into the character of Jesus
Christ. That’s the whole process of
Romans 12:2. But the only way you can
understand what’s happening around you, what’s happening in your life, why things
are happening the way they are in our lives, in our marriages, in our families,
with our children, is to have that storehouse of doctrine in the soul which
gives us the objective evaluation system to evaluate what is going on.
Gideon lacked that which shows that
there wasn’t much doctrine in his soul.
He says, “Why did this happen to us? And where are all His miracles
which our fathers told us about,” sounds very contemporary, doesn’t it? People in the modern church today are so
enamored with the (quote) “supernatural” that rather than understanding that in
history God did certain things 2,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago, that that’s
just as valid as if it happened right before our eyes today. But what has happened under the influence of
cosmic thinking, the paganism if our day, since the enlightenment and the
influence of philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Hegel, Kierkegaard, is that we
have lost the concept of objectivity and absolutes. Once you do that it destroys history; history is no longer the
objective record of what happened, it is simply subjective impressions and so
you can change history and interpret it any way you want to for whatever fits
the current standard.
So history is no longer important so
miracles that happened in history are just somehow pushed off, that happened
two thousand years ago, I have to have the same thing happen in my life today
or it really isn’t valid. Notice the
arrogance that underlies that kind of thinking, and yet that is exactly what we
see among many Christians today who are constantly seeking for God to touch
them or for God to perform some miracle, or for signs and wonders or all of the
different movements like that that have come along in the 20th
century. It’s a rejection of Scripture
and it reflects an ignorance of doctrine, it reflects negative volition, it
does not reflect positive volition. So
often I’ve heard people say well, we just want a fresh movement of the Holy
Spirit in our congregation, we want God to do something special. Well God has done something, He’s saved
people, He’s regenerated those who have trusted in Christ as their Savior and
that’s the greatest miracle of all time, that God has taken spiritually dead
people and has regenerated them and put His Holy Spirit within them. And yet rather than recognizing that they
look for something of far less significance because they just don’t know any
doctrine. So they reject doctrine and
look for something that tickles their ears, something that entertains them and
something that stimulates them and gets them excited.
So this is what’s going on here, Gideon
has lost all historical perspective and he’s focusing on if God did miracles in
the past why doesn’t he do some miracle to save us right now. And he goes back and he’s crying, he’s
whining, he says if the Lord brought us out of Egypt but now the Lord has abandoned
and given us into the hands of the Midians.
He’s whining and crying, he’s full of self-pity all because he doesn’t
have any doctrine and he’s lost all objectivity. Well, the Lord is gracious to us even in our rebelliousness, even
in our stupidity, even in our misunderstanding of doctrine the Lord continues
to meet us where we are and that’s one of the greatest messages of the entire
book of Judges is that these men are recorded as examples of faith in Hebrews
11; they are not great giants, they are not on the level of an Abraham at times
or Moses at times or the Apostle Paul or the Apostle John at times. But they are men who are deeply flawed, men
who know very little doctrine and men who are in their thinking are overwhelmed
with a lot of false pagan concepts. But
nevertheless God does not say to us you have to come up to a certain level of
doctrinal understanding, theological orthodoxy, you have to get your life
straight before I’m going to deal with you, God continuously meets us in
grace. He deals with us not on the
basis of who and what we are but on the basis of who He is and what Christ did
on the cross. And so despite the fact
that Gideon is ignorant of doctrine, is operating on subjectivity, self-pity
and self-absorption, God still comes to him in grace and gives him a commission
in verse 14.
Judges 6:14, “The LORD looked at him
and said, ‘Go in this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand of Midian.
Have I not sent you?’” Now what comes
up, if you’re not familiar with the story, is that Gideon is going to question
this command, do you really want me to do this? Eventually he’s going to put God to the test and he’s going to
say I want a little confirmation to make sure this is what you want me to do
and I’m going to put a fleece out before the door and in the morning when I
wake up if the ground is wet and the fleece is dry then I’ll know that this is
what you want me to do. And of course
the next morning he got up and the ground was wet with dew and the fleece was
dry. And he said well, maybe that is
what God wants me to do but maybe it isn’t so we’ll try another test. So he came up with the second test, Lord,
I’ll put the fleece out and in the morning if the fleece is heavy with due and
the ground is dry then I’ll know that’s what You want me to do. And over the years many people have come
along to this episode with Gideon and they have used this as a sermon basis for
teaching the will of God, that somehow God leads and directs by putting out the
fleece, by testing God. And see, that’s
not how you know the will of God.
We started last time with the doctrine
of the will of God, how we know the will of God, how we can understand the will
of God in our own lives and we need to review the first couple of points and
continue with that, but the point is the will of God is known by Gideon because
God specifically propositionally informed him of what He wanted in Judges
6:14. What was happening with the
fleece was Gideon’s attempt to avoid the will of God, not to find out the will
of God. Gideon doesn’t really like what
God wants him to do and so he’s trying somehow to justify disobedience but God
won’t let him squirm out from under it.
So we have to realize that fundamentally
when we come to the question of how do we know the will of God for our lives,
it starts and almost ends with know the Scriptures and do what the Scriptures
say to do. For most of us, when we come
to the question of the will of God we’re in some sort of life crisis, major
decision, usually related to something on the order of marriage, career, where
to live, major decisions such as buying a home, where to go to college, what
kind of a job to do, what do I do now, that sort of thing. And in many of those cases God may or may
not have a specific will. Sometimes He
does, sometimes He does not and we will look at that as we go through the
doctrine.
Let’s begin the doctrine of the will of
God. Point number one: the term, “will
of God” relates to three aspects of divine volition in relation to His
creation. Often people think in terms
of subjectivity as soon as they hear the term “will of God.” They think what is the will of God for my
life. This occurs because people tend
to be subjective; we’re all that way.
We have that tendency from arrogance in our sin nature to think in terms
of our own experience before we ever think of anything else. However, if we’re going to understand the
will of God we have to start with objectivity first and that means we start
with the will of God in the person of God in relationship to His divine
essence. So the first category of the
will of God is God’s sovereign volition with regard to His creation, where He
brings to pass what He wills and what He has decreed. This is God’s sovereign volition with regard to His creation where
He brings to pass what He wills and what He has decreed.
God’s sovereign volition relates to the
doctrine of divine decrees. That means
that at some time in eternity past when God the Father was planning, God the
Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, were in essence planning human
history, God decided to give creatures free will, volition. As a result of that, God knew that some
would choose disobedience and some would choose obedience and so in terms of
God’s sovereign will He includes aspects that are contradictory to His moral
will. So God’s sovereign will also
includes what we call God’s permissive will.
He allows creatures to make bad decisions. Always remember this, that when you make bad decisions or wrong
decisions that they will limit your future options. Most of the time, especially those who are young don’t realize
that, they think well, I’ll have time to recover, but there are some decisions
you make and you may not think it’s a very significant decision at that
particular moment and it may not be but little things can happen that have
consequences that go on for the rest of your life.
So God’s will includes those negative
aspects; that’s part of His sovereign will.
As I said, it’s also called His permissive will and it includes the acts
of sinful creatures which God permits to take place for a temporary period in
order to demonstrate principles about His nature, about His character, about
His person, and to illustrate key principles in the drama of human history in
the angelic conflict with otherwise would not be known. So that is God’s sovereign volition. We could diagram it this way: the circle
represents God’s sovereign will; in that sovereign will He includes the evil
that creatures choose to do as well as the God. The sovereign will of God includes all that actually occurs in
history; not what might be, not what could be, not the potential but God’s
sovereign will includes all that actually occurs in human history. The only way we can know what God’s
sovereign will is, is after the fact.
You can’t know ahead of time what God’s sovereign will is because God’s
sovereign includes the wrong decisions, bad decisions, sinful actions of His
creatures. So we don’t know what God’s
sovereign will is in relationship to tomorrow.
We know what His moral will is, which we’ll get to, but we don’t know
what His sovereign will is, what will actually take place. The only way we can know that is after the
fact.
So when we ask the question, how do I know
the will of God, we’re not talking about the sovereign will of God; this is
also called the secret will of God by theologians. You can’t know it; it’s what’s decreed, not what is revealed. So this is the sovereign will of God, the
first category of God’s volition in relation to His creatures.
The second category is God’s moral
will. Sometimes this is called God’s
revealed will. These are the
imperatives and prohibitions of Scripture, the “thou shalts” and the “thou
shalt nots.” God’s moral will is
sometimes also called His revealed will, what God says for us to do. Sometimes you’ll find it called God’s
desired will, what God desires for us to do. But for our purposes we’re just
going to call it God’s revealed will.
And the only way we know God’s revealed will is through the Scripture.
That’s the only place today that there is any form of special revelation.
Remember there are two categories of
revelation. There is general
revelation, which is the testimony or the witness of God’s creation, “the
heavens declare the glory of God.” But
the way the heavens declare the glory of God is through an illustration of His
grandeur by what He has created; there are no words, there are no specifics,
it’s not propositional. That means
there’s no verbal statements, it’s called nonverbal revelation. That’s general revelation.
Special revelation is propositional or
verbal revelation; it’s what God has specifically said. Now some of God’s special revelation is
included in the Scriptures. The Bible is
all special revelation. We refer to it
as verbal plenary revelation; every word is inspired. That’s what we mean by
verbal revelation; every word is breathed out by God. The word “inspiration” comes from 2 Timothy 3:16, the Greek word theopneustos, which means God
breathed. The first part of that
compound word is from God, the second is wind or breath, pneuma, and so it means the breath of God, God breathes out, He
exhales the information in the Scriptures into the mind of the writer of
Scripture and the writer of Scripture then inhales that from God and exhales
that through the writing of the Scripture.
That’s one category of special revelation.
But God revealed other things
specifically to prophets in the Old Testament and to the apostles, to John on
the Isle of Patmos that are not included in the canon. That is also special revelation but that was
not deemed necessary by God to be revealed to the Church Age. So God’s moral will is simply His revealed
will, what He has said to do in the Scriptures. That’s the only thing we can truly know for sure, what God says
to do; all the things, to pray without ceasing, flee fornication, husbands,
love your wives; wives be submissive to your husbands, fathers, raise up your
children and admonition of the Lord.
You ask the question, what’s God’s will for my life? It’s real clear in those passages what we
are to do and what we are to avoid.
That is the revealed will of God.
And then the third category of God’s
volition toward His creatures is God’s overriding will, thus God’s decreed will
includes the existence of sin and evil, but his desired will or His moral will
does not include sin or evil. Now we
might desire at times to fulfill certain aspects of God’s plan. For example, David desired to build a
temple, a house for God, a house of worship for God in Jerusalem but God said
no, He overrode that desire. He didn’t
say it was an illegitimate desire or it was a wrong desire, in no way did He
condemn David for having that desire or wanting to bring about that plan. But God said I have another plan and I
override you. So in terms of any kind
of evaluation David would get praise for that desire. But God overrode that. I
think another way that you can think about it is there are things in our lives
that we would like to do. They are good
things, they are in conformity to the Word of God, they have to do with
ministry perhaps, they have to do with supporting missionaries or the local
church or whatever it might be, and yet God just doesn’t give us the time, the talent
or the financial resources to do that.
I think that as we have that desire as part of our spiritual growth, as
part of the production of God the Holy Spirit, then I think that we will be
rewarded for that. That’s part of the spiritual life but God overrides it and
says no, I don’t want you to win the lottery and give that money to the Preston
City Bible Church because then they won’t learn other tests that I have for
them to learn, so you’ll never win the lottery; that’s called the overriding
will of God.
So those are the three categories of
God’s will. We have sovereign will
which is His secret will, what He has decreed. We have God’s moral will, which
is His revealed will. And then we have
God’s overriding will, when we want to do one thing and God overrides us. He doesn’t mess with our volition; He just
doesn’t allow us to bring something to completion. Another example or a negative example would be Jonah. God gave Jonah a responsibility and said
Jonah, I want you to go to Nineveh. And
Jonah exercised his volition independent of God and said no, I don’t want to go
to Nineveh, I am going to go elsewhere, I hate the Assyrians, you know they are
the worst people in the world and they’ve been our enemy for years and I am not
going to go there. See, he exercised
his volition; God did not reach down and tweak his volition from negative to
positive to do what God wanted him to do.
God used circumstances to do that but when Jonah eventually made the
decision to go to Nineveh he did it out of his own free choice. He decided that was better than slopping
around in the belly of a great fish. So
God overrode Jonah’s negative volition by sending a great fish to give him a little
transoceanic voyage. Those are the
three categories.
Now what are some key verses to
understand these principles? Key verses
for the sovereign will of God: Daniel
4:35, “And all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, but He,”
that is God, “does according to His will” that’s His sovereign will, “in the
host of heaven” that’s the angels, “and among the inhabitants of the earth,”
that’s mankind, “and no one can ward off His hand, or say to Him, ‘What hast
thou done?’” There’s no higher
authority over God, He does what He deems best in human history and works all
things after the counsel of His will.
God’s will is overriding. He is
in control of His creation therefore we need not fear what man can do to
destroy the earth, to destroy creation because we know that Jesus Christ
controls history and works all things after the counsel of His will.
Proverbs 21:1, “The king’s heart is like
channels of water in the hand of the LORD, He turns it wherever He wishes.” This shows us that God influences human
history and influences mankind but He does it without violating their volition
in relationship to the gospel. See,
sometimes we get the idea that God doesn’t move our volition in certain
directions. The key factors in the
angelic conflict are our volition in relationship to salvation and our volition
in relationship to the spiritual life.
But other than that, especially if we’re operating negatively, God can
move our volition to do certain things and this is clear from the way the
prophets talked. It doesn’t mean that
it’s not our decision but God brings forces to bear, either externally or
internally, to move us in certain directions, and He does this even to the
king, so that no matter how mighty or how powerful a monarch might be or an
executive might be, God still controls human history and brings things to pass
that He has decreed.
Revelation 4:1, “After these things I
looked, and, behold, a door standing open in heaven, and the first voice which
I had heard, like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me, said, Come up here,
and I will show you what must take place after these things.” The only way that God can accurately tell
what is going to happen in history is if God has control over it. This does not mean that our volition is
somehow hindered. In the omniscience of
God, God knows all the possible, all the potential, both the actual and the
possible. But in His foreknowledge He
determines from His omniscience what will actually take place and based on His
understanding of the free actions of His creatures. So He determines it not in opposition to but in accord with the
free acts of His creatures. This is why
one of the first decrees in the counsel of decrees is that God determined that
in human history God’s sovereignty would work in conjunction with human volition. This is a key principle that we cannot
forget. But when God says “I will show
you what must take place” God in His sovereignty must have control over human
history to bring those things about, otherwise He could not prophecy it with
accuracy.
Now one of the interesting and alarming
things that has happened in recent years, and I’m talking about developments in
the last ten or fifteen years, is that there are a group of evangelical
scholars, and I use the word loosely, who are beginning to teach that God
really does not know all the knowable, that God really does not control things,
that He’s constantly reshaping His plan in accord with human volition. Oops, so and so just decided to do this, I’d
better modify My plan. Now obviously
God, within His plan has flexibility.
That’s clear from the fact that when God created the animal kingdom in
Genesis 1 all the animals were created as herbivores, they were graminivorous,
they all ate grass, man was a vegetarian and all the animals ate grass, there
were no carnivores, and the serpent walked upright. Yet within the DNA of all of the animal kingdom God included
enough flexibility to handle the chaos that was going to come as a result of
sin. So that meant when Adam sinned and
there was a judgment or curse on the animal kingdom and now you have the
development of carnivores, which means that they have their dental structure
changed, their gastrointestinal system changed, certain other aspects of their
physiological makeup changed in order to move from being a docile tame
grass-eating tiger or lion or tyrannosaurus, they became something much more
vicious and their bodies changed as a result of that.
Now God includes within His plan
flexibility; it’s not so rigid that there’s not room for flexibility where God
can certainly have a plan that flexes within a certain framework of human
decision. But God is not up there just
constantly reshaping His plan to fit whatever His creatures decide to do. And the sad thing is that in almost every
major seminary today, including Dallas Seminary from what I understand from at
least one faculty member, that there is at least one, probably three faculty
members of Dallas Seminary who are teaching this heretical view on the
omniscience of God. The sad things is
there’s nobody that has the theological guts to fire them. And it’s clearly in opposition to their
doctrinal statement. But this is the
state that we’re in today and we all are influenced by postmodernism so men in
this camp are saying we don’t reject omniscience, we just believe in limited
omniscience, and so they play word games in order to avoid the consequences of
what they teach. But it’s clear that
God controls history and works things after the counsel of His degree, yet
without negating the free actions, the responsible decisions of His creatures.
Ephesians 1:11, “Also we have obtained
an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose, who works all
things after the counsel of His will.”
This is the sovereign will of God.
Proverbs 16:33, “The lot is cast into
the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”
Romans 9:19, “You will say to me then,
“Why does God still find fault? For who
resists His will?” This is always the
objection that is raised, well if God controls everything then why do I need to
make any decision because He made it for me, and that misunderstands the other
part of the issue in human history and that is that God has decreed things but
God has also revealed responsible decisions man is to make and He has decreed
that His sovereignty works in conjunction with human freedom in human
history. So God does not force anybody
to make a decision for or against Christ and He doesn’t force anybody to make a
decision, positive volition towards living the spiritual life. We can’t resist His sovereign will; we don’t
know what that is. But we can and are responsible for carrying out His revealed
will in our lives.
Point number three: The third point; the
specifics of God’s decreed will are secret, unrevealed, and unknown. This is
God’s sovereign will. The specifics of
God’s decreed or sovereign will are secret, unrevealed and unknown. They cannot be known until after the
fact. Human history, once transpired,
is the outworking of God’s ultimate decree.
So we know that that was God’s sovereign will for something to take
place. For example, with our recent
election episode we know what God’s will was after the fact but there were many
times there when we did not know what the sovereign will would be. That just tells us that He is working out history,
putting leaders in place. Whenever you
see things happen, like when the wall came down in Berlin and the Soviet Union
broke up and then you see other things happen in the Middle East where kings
die, for example in this last year King Hussein of Jordan died. Obviously when things of that magnitude
happen God is moving history along, He’s moving the major pieces on the chess
board, as it were, to align thigns for the eventual fulfillment of prophecy in
Daniel and Revelation. So we only know
God’s decreed will once it transpires.
Point number four: We can only know the specifics of God’s
revealed or moral; since we can’t know the specifics of the decreed will, we
can only know the specifics of His revealed or moral will. When you ask the question, what is God’s
will for my life, the only way you can answer that is by looking at the
objective propositions of Scripture, the mandates of Scripture, the teaching of
Scripture, the prohibitions and the commands of the New Testament and Old
Testament. That’s why doctrine has to
fill up our souls; only on the basis of having that doctrine completely
saturating our soul can we then make decisions on a day to day basis that are
in alignment with His will, and that’s what’s called “wisdom” in Scripture. That’s why you have books like Proverbs,
that’s wisdom literature. And that is
not talking about absolutes in Scripture but it’s talking about the wise
application of principles in every day decisions in life. And what you have is from a storehouse of
doctrine, of epignosis in the soul,
then you’re able from that storehouse of doctrine to make chokmah, that’s the Hebrew word for wisdom, you’re able to make chokmah decisions and therefore live out
your life before God in a manner that glorifies Him, because there are many
decisions we make in life that are not necessarily issues that relate to God’s
moral or revealed will. We make all
kinds of decisions during the day that don’t involve a moral decision or moral
crisis, that don’t involve the spiritual issue but we have to make wise
decisions as opposed to foolish decisions.
Romans 2:18 states, “And know His will,”
now if we said earlier that we can’t know His decreed will, then if this were
talking about His decreed will it would be a meaningless passage, but in Romans
2:18 we are commanded to “know His will,” that is what He has revealed, “and
approve,” this shows a result of that, then by knowing His will we can then
“approve the things that are essential, being instructed out of the law.” Now this is a crucial passage to
understand. … [tape turns] “…His will
and approve the things that are essential.”
Now “essential” is not a good versus bad concept. It’s not an absolute evil versus an absolute
good concept. There are many things in
life that we can do that are morally acceptable, that are good. There are all kinds of activities that we
can engage in in life that are fun and enjoyable and they’re wonderful
things. But Scriptures give us commands
like Ephesians 5:17 to “redeem the time.”
We only have X amount of time on the earth. So many hours, so many days are given to us, how are we going to
use the time, how are we going to use the money, how are we going to use the
spiritual resources that God has given us.
There are some things that we can do, if
we spend a lot of time on them they will ultimately distract us from doctrine,
they will take our attention away from the ultimate and essential realities of
the spiritual life. And as a result of
that, over a period of time it can end up having devastating consequences in
our life. So we have to know His will,
which means we have to make doctrine a priority, which means we have to make
attendance in Bible class and listening to tapes a priority in our life; we
have to plan it and we have to make sure that we take it in, otherwise one day
we wake up and we don’t know anything and we won’t be able to make wise
decisions. Sometimes I have friends
that I speak with and they say how come my life is such a mess and basically
because you avoided doctrine for years and you made hundreds of tiny bad
decisions and they’ve had a cumulative effect and now you’re making immoral
decisions and carnal decisions and you’re out of fellowship all the time and
you’re life is a mess, but it started off with a lot of seemingly innocent
decisions because instead of knowing the will so that you would focus on
priorities and choose non-distractive things, focus on the essentials, then you
end up doing things that are less than essential but end up becoming a
distraction and a problem. So we have
to know His will, that is our priority in the spiritual life, is to know the
doctrines of Scripture.
1 Thessalonians 5:18, for example, “In
everything give thanks, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” So when we ask a question, usually in a
crisis, what’s God’s will for my life, well part of God’s will for your life is
to be indeed grateful for the crisis.
Gratitude is a barometer of your own spiritual maturity. When we whine and complain and get involved
in self-pity as Gideon is in the midst of a crisis, then we’re operating on our
sin nature and we’re not focusing on God’s plan and God’s purposes for our
life. And it’s only by having a divine
perspective that we can have a gratitude in the spiritual life and that only
comes from spiritual growth and using the stress busters so that we build
spiritual strength in our soul.
1 Thessalonians 4:3, “For this is the
will of God, your sanctification, that is that you abstain from sexual
immorality.” Not just one form but all
forms; “for this is the will of God,” so it’s specifically stated what the will
of God is in terms of sexual purity.
2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be bound
together with unbelievers,” so this relates to the will of God in terms of
marriage and let me suggest that this further relates to the will of God in
terms of dating for those of you who are not married. And for you parents, you need to be drilling this into your kids,
that you don’t date unbelievers, you don’t get involved socially with
unbelievers because the first thing you know you’re out with some unbeliever
you find is attractive, you find that you enjoy being with, they have a great
personality, you have a lot of fun together, and all of a sudden spiritual
priorities are no longer at the forefront for your life. 1 Corinthians 16 says that bad company
corrupts good morals. And what happens
is a believer is usually dragged down and the next thing you know you’ve fallen
head over heels in love with some unbeliever and you’re walking down the aisle
and you are a child of the kingdom and they’re a child of darkness and you’ve
got major problems in life because your ultimate realities aren’t the same and
it will always end up in compromise and in devastation. If you want to guarantee misery for your
kids, then you just let them choose their friends without paying attention to
whether or not they’re saved.
I always thank the Lord, I didn’t at the
time, but I always thank the Lord that my parents made this a priority when I
was growing up and I remember by the time I was about 12 or 13 that if I was
going to start getting involved in a close friendship with somebody my parents
would always say well, are they a believer?
I don’t know. Well, you’d better
find out. So if you’re going to
maintain the friendship you have to start witnessing a little bit, find out
who’s a believer and who’s not, and then all the way up through college if I’d
come home and say well I had a date Friday night, well who was it, were they a
believer. I always knew that was coming. So if you practice that from an early age,
parents, then your kids are going to know that when they come home they’re
going to get drilled with that question so became a priority in my pre-dating
investigation because I just didn’t want to go through the hassle with my
parents if I was going out with somebody who wasn’t a believer. It will always end up in tragic
consequences.
That is the will of God in relation to
marriage, is not to marry an unbeliever.
But if you are a believer and you are married to an unbeliever, Paul
clearly mentions in 1 Corinthians that you are to stay together unless that
unbeliever kicks you out. So just
because you wake up one day and you’re a believer and you realize you made a
mistake, it wasn’t God’s will for you to marry the unbeliever, well it is God’s
will for you to stay married to them unless they kick you out. You’ve just chosen a difficult path; bad
decisions limit future options.
Point number five: therefore God’s
sovereign will includes His revealed will.
God’s sovereign will includes His revealed will but His revealed will,
that is “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not,” clearly is not always His
decree. Now I’ve confused you. His sovereign will includes all that is,
both good and evil so a subcategory of His sovereign will is His revealed will
which is when He says “thou shalt not” but we do, when He says don’t we do, and
so His sovereign will includes the doing even though His revealed will did
not. So we can graph that like this:
the sovereign will includes evil, good and all that is. Then there’s the revealed will which
includes all that has been spoken by the prophets, the Holy Spirit and
Scripture. There is an overlap. What happens in that overlap area His
sovereign will clearly includes His revealed will. But there are aspects of His revealed will, when God said “thou
shalt not lie,” and you lie, you are operating in His sovereign will, even
though that part of His revealed will was not included in His sovereign
will. So there’s an overlap; not all of
His revealed will is included in His sovereign will. God clearly reveals certain things to Israel to do; they fail to
do it, so they were taken out of the line and disciplined so that portion of
His revealed will, such as the acceptance of Christ as Messiah at the First
Advent, was not included within His sovereign will. Nevertheless, His mandate to accept Jesus as Messiah was still
legitimate and real and they’re held accountable for disobedience.
Reviewing the point, therefore God’s
sovereign will includes His revealed will but His revealed will, that is, the
“thou shalt’s” and the “thou shalt not’s” are clearly not always His decree,
His sovereign will. When the creature
does what God has prohibited, then His revealed will is outside His decreed
will.
Point six: Usually we become concerned
about the will of God in the midst of some momentous crisis decision. The younger you are the more this involves
you. Those of you who have a few great
hairs you don’t have too many of these crisis decisions left in your life;
you’ve made your mistakes or you’ve made good decisions, one way or the other,
but it’s usually the younger ones that have these major crisis come up. I don’t get too many questions about the
will of God from older people. When you get into your 60s and 70s maybe the
question is well, what’s the will of God, should I invest in this or that, how
should I handle my retirement plan but aside from that you’ve already made all
your major decisions in life.
So usually we become concerned about the
will of God in the midst of some momentous decision, however God’s will affects
every decision we make to some degree.
It’s not just a matter of big decisions. It’s a matter of every decision, we are to bring every single
decision under the light of God’s Word, whether or not its human viewpoint or
divine viewpoint, what does the Scripture say, how does the Scripture impact
the way I make decisions in life.
Point number seven; if a man is to do all
things to the glory of God then even the most minute decisions demands
attention to some degree. I’m not
talking about whether or not to wear a blue suit or a gray suit today; you see,
if you take this to its logical conclusion you end up in absurdities; I’m not
talking about getting up in the morning and saying well, am I going to have
bacon and eggs for breakfast this morning and then take a shower or am I going
to take a shower and then have bacon and eggs.
Those are not the kinds of decisions that we’re talking about here. We’re talking about more momentous
decisions, but everything involves doing something to the glory of God so that
means that you need to get up in the morning and say yes, indeed, I do need to
take a shower just so that I don’t offend anybody today with my body odor, that
means I need to take a shower, put on clean clothes when I come to church
because I don’t want to have a zone around me where nobody sits. We’ve had that happen once or twice so every
now and then I have to give the hygiene speech and make sure people understand
that yes indeed, you have to pay attention to hygiene. That glorifies God. It does not glorify God to walk around
looking trashy, dirty and smelly. So
even the most minute decision involves something ultimately related to the
glory of God and we always have to give it our best as believers because it
reflects upon God. That is why I firmly
believe that in all the decisions we make in relationship to the ministry of
the church that we do our best, that we need to emphasize excellence in
everything that we do. Now that doesn’t
mean we’re necessarily going to do it at the same level as some other group or
some other church. That’s not what I
mean by excellence but that we can do something that clearly is something we
can be proud of and not something where we might hang our heads in a little bit
of shame or embarrassment just because it ought to be done or some other church
does it and not do it well. So if we can’t
do it well we ought not do it. I don’t
think it’s God’s will for us to do something just for the sake of doing
it. I think we ought to do it and do it
well or not do it at all.
So to review the point, point seven, if
man is to do all things to the glory of God then even the most minute decision
demands attention, but not every decision necessarily involves either (a) a
moral issue, or (b) a specific will of God in relation to geographical or
operational will. So we recognize that
clearly a lot of decisions we make aren’t moral and they don’t involve a
specific geographical or operational will factor.
Point eight; since we can only know the
specifics of God’s revealed or moral will before the fact, questions about the
will of God relate only to revealed information. When I say well, is it God’s will for me to go to work for this
company or that company, go to this college or that college, marry that woman
or this woman, whatever it might be, we have to realize God is not going to
reveal the answer to us. We can’t put
out the fleece and expect God to tell us what to do. God has given us Scripture to clearly specify what to do in the
moral issues. But on the other issues
it has to come from a pool of doctrine that’s in our soul that gives us wisdom
to make the right decision. It ultimately
comes from what’s going in the soul related to doctrine. This is the point in Proverbs 3:5-6, “Trust
in the LORD with all your heart,” that is every aspect of your thinking, “and
do not lean on your own understanding,” that is human viewpoint; you have to
have a mind that is saturated with divine viewpoint and doctrine. “In all your ways acknowledge Him,” this is
positive volition here in the believer who is growing and advancing in the
spiritual life and the result is given in the last phrase, “and He will make
your paths straight.”
That means that even if you somehow make
a wrong decision, not out of disobedience but just out of some sort of mistake
or if you just missed the boat, God straightens things out, so we don’t have to
worry that if I make a choice to go in one direction and God really wants me to
go in another direction that God’s going to let me screw things up. God will make your paths straight and He
will work things out and shut doors when necessary. Sometimes God allows us to make bad decisions and to go somewhere
and He’s going to turn it around and use it, Romans 8:28, “All things work
together for good to those who love God,” so the growing believer is going to
still learn something in that situation.
The Word of God or the plan of God clearly includes a certain amount of
flexibility, but if God does want you in Nineveh and you head for Tarshish, for
whatever reason, guess where you’re going to end up? You’ll still end up in Nineveh.
And that’s what this is saying, God will make your paths straight.
That’s the first eight points, we have
about six more to go and we are out of time so we’ll have to come back and
continue to understand the principles of God’s specific will next time.