Doctrine of the Will of God – Judges 6:14
Open
your Bibles to Judges 6. As we continue
our study in Judges we have come to the judgeship of Gideon. Gideon is perhaps the most extensive study of
any of the judges in this book, and there are many lessons to draw from the
life of Gideon and it is also a pivotal time in this period of spiritual
apostasy and political anarchy in the nation Israel. There are also many personal lessons that we can draw from a
study of the life of Gideon, one of which is that before Gideon can advance in
God’s plan for him, in terms of being a deliverer, a judge, from the oppression
of the Midianites there are three areas of doctrine that Gideon has to get
straight. Remember all doctrine, if it
is truly biblical doctrine, has application.
Now you may not understand the application right now, you might think it
just seems academic, but nevertheless, all doctrine is eventually applicable in
some way.
Now
Gideon’s problem is that he reflects the pagan culture out of which he has
come. The Israelites have been
apostate, he seems to be a young man and they have been apostate for a number
of years and so he reflects in his life, in his thinking, in his response to
God the fact that he doesn’t understand the basic principles of the spiritual
life in the Old Testament. He has
limited faith because he has limited doctrine.
It doesn’t matter how strongly you want to believe something, faith is
always directed toward an object and if that object is not informed by the Word
of God, then you cannot exercise Biblical faith because there is very little
doctrine in Gideon’s soul; he has no doctrinal orientation, there is no real
object for his faith so he is spiritually weak. We would say he is a baby believer but he’s more than that, he’s
been in apostasy.
And
this raises one of the more interesting questions in a study of Gideon is why
in the world does God call a man that is spiritually immature, a man that is
apostate, a man that doesn’t understand
the basic principles about the will and the plan of God. What we’re going to see as we continue our
study in Judges 6 is that before Gideon can get to the point of being a
deliverer, he has to understand some things about being in fellowship with God
and what that entails, he has to understand some things about some grace
orientation because he doesn’t have a clue, and he has to understand some
things about the will of God and that entails doctrinal orientation, so we can
see from that that in terms of what we call the basic problem solving devices
and the basic stress busters, which are the spiritual skills necessary to
master, to advance in the spiritual life, Gideon is lacking. So God has to take him through a crash
course in spiritual growth before God is going to use him in the battle in the
next chapter. So as part of his
training he has to understand and orient to the will and the plan of God for
his life, and that’s part of doctrinal orientation.
So
as we have pursued our study and come down to the section, the paragraph from
verse 11 to verse 18, in the midst of that the angel of the Lord, who is the
preincarnate Second Person of the Trinity, has appeared to Gideon and has told
him that the Lord is with him, and then in verse 14 says, “Go in this your strength and deliver Israel from the hand
of Midian.” So here he gets the divine
commission which is God’s plan for his life and God’s will for his life and
God’s will for his life at that point. And we will see that Gideon has somewhat
of a difficult time orienting to that.
He doesn’t really want to accept the commission, he tries to get out
from under it and weasel away, and that’s typical of both paganism and
immaturity.
So that brought us to the doctrine of the will of God which we are
still studying, because so many folks have problems when it comes to
understanding the will of God. I heard
a classic example yesterday, it involved a pastor of a local church, but this
individual was pasturing a church and the church had been looking at a building
plan, a building program for some time and the congregation had met, they had
raised about 90% of the money necessary to fund the project so it wasn’t a
matter of going into debt or lack of money or anything like that, and all of a
sudden the pastor stood up in the congregation and said well, it’s not God’s
will for us to do this so we’re not going to do it. And that was a violation of the authority in the church, which
was the constitution, which gave a certain amount of responsibility to the
congregation on physical real property issues.
It was based on a fuzzy, as he explains; he says the Holy Spirit isn’t
leading me.
Folks, that’s how most Christians operate, it’s called
subjectivity and mysticism; it permeated and infected evangelicalism as a
result of some of our pietistic heritage, going back a couple of centuries and
that is not how the Bible says the Holy Spirit leads you. I had one professor in seminary who used to
say when somebody can distinguish an inner movement of the Holy Spirit from
just having a bad taste of digestive problems then we might be able to discuss
this, but you see, there’s no objectivity there, there’s no criteria there,
there’s no way to validate whether or not something really is the will of God
other than I just feel like it is, and so many people make decisions in life
that way. They find someone they’re
attracted to and so they think that because they feel so wonderful and ecstatic
and have such a good time with this person that it must be God’s will for them
to get married, or they travel somewhere and they’re impressed with the beauty
of a place, or some friends, and they have a wonderful time there, it must be
God’s will for me to move there. Whatever
it might be, people so often make decisions moved by their emotions and then
they label that the leading of the Holy Spirit and call it the will of God and
then the first time they have difficulty or problems God gets blamed for
it. It’s a very subtle way we have of
avoiding personal responsibility for our own decision making. It’s sad but in evangelicalism and in Bible
churches so often the teaching on the subject of the will of God and decision
making is fuzzy and promotes subjectivity and emotionalism.
The leading of the Holy Spirit is not a leading of impressionism;
it is not simply that oh, I feel this way, because we all can have all kinds of
feelings and impressions and make decisions on the spur of the moment because
it seems good at the time or we have liver-quiver or whatever we want to call
it, but labeling that in the Spirit of God is not what we find in the Scripture
and is not what the Scriptures talk about in terms of the leading of the
Spirit. So we have to go over this
again and again in order to make sure everybody understands it, so let’s review
briefly what we have covered so far on the doctrine of the will of God.
First of all, the term “will of God” relates to three aspects of
divine volition in relation to God’s creation.
The first is God’s sovereign volition, His sovereign will. That’s the first category of the will of
God, His sovereign will, where He brings to pass what He wills and what He has
decreed. God’s sovereign will is also called
His secret will and we do not know what it is; it includes His permissive will,
it includes evil as well as good. We
can chart it out this way, that the sovereign will is defined by this
circle. Inside the circle we include
evil, good and all that comes to pass, all that is. The only way we can really know what God’s sovereign will is is
by taking a look at history. We know it only after the fact.
God’s moral will is the second category. This is sometimes called His revealed will to man; his revealed
will. This refers to the revelation of
God’s will in the Scripture, making it clear to us what He wants us to do and
what He wants us to avoid; it includes all of the mandates and prohibitions of
Scripture as related to the pertinent dispensation. So for the Church Age that does not mean we are under the Law but
it means we are under the mandates of the higher law of the New Testament, the
law of love, and under the mandates and prohibitions of the New Testament. That is God’s moral will; it includes what
we ought to do and the moral will of God does not always fit the sovereign will
of God.
The third category is God’s overriding will; we may decide to do
something and God may override our decision.
God may override our decision; for example, David wanted to build a
temple and God said no, that’s not my will for your life, so David had the will
and God honored him and praised him for having that desire but it was not God’s
plan for him to bring it to completion.
There are several passages that support the sovereign will of God:
Daniel 4:35; Proverbs 21:1, “the king’s heart is like channels of water in the
hands of the LORD, He turns it wherever He wishes,” showing that God controls
history. Jesus Christ controls history
and God brings about His plan.
Revelation 4:1; Ephesians 1:11; Proverbs 16:33 and Romans 9:19 all emphasize
the sovereign will of God.
There is in human history no contradiction or conflict between the
sovereign will of God and human volition.
See, that’s one of the important and unique teachings of Christianity
and the Bible, is that man has volition.
That means that he is responsible and accountable for his
decisions. And Scripture also teaches
that God controls history so what we infer from that is that God has decreed
that in human history His sovereignty coexists with human volition. What happens is people tend to push those
two to emphasize one over the other. If
you emphasize the sovereign will of God of human volition then you’re going to
end up saying nothing’s my fault, it’s all determined by God and you end up in
some sort of fatalism. What’s happened
in the 20th century, since God has been removed from the picture we
are more and more seeing a non-theistic or an atheistic determinism control
people: it’s genetic, it’s in my DNA, I am programmed by biology and by nature
to be what I am and to be an alcoholic, or to be a drug addict, or to be
obsessive compulsive, or to be abusive, or to be homosexual or whatever it
might be and whereas the Scripture says that all of us have certain trends in
one direction or another from our sin nature or from genetics or DNA, we might
have certain trends, nevertheless, we’re all responsible for those actions,
because the sin nature is housed in the cell structure of the body and so we
all may have certain trends but nevertheless we’re responsible to control the
sin nature. That’s part of what
maturity is to some level, is control of the sin nature and that’s why it’s
part of the parent’s responsibility to exercise a little corporal discipline on
their children, is to start teaching them what it means to control their sin
nature. You can always tell when
there’s a parent who doesn’t believe in discipline because they’re wonderful
sweet little child is always running around with no control of their sin
nature. So it’s a parent’s
responsibility from day one to start teaching that child to control their sin
nature just out of good manners to everybody that has to put up with the
child. But that’s everyone’s
responsibility. So man is responsible,
the Scripture says, for the decisions he makes despite the fact that there may
be other influences at work. The issue
is volition; the issue is not environment or nature.
The third point in the will of God: the specifics of God’s decreed
will are secret and unrevealed and unknown.
We don’t know what God has decreed until after the fact. So when we ask the question, how do we know
God’s will we’re not talking about this category of God’s will.
Point number four: this means that we can only know the specifics
of God’s revealed and moral will. We
can only know what God has articulated to us; we can only know what God has
stated to us in the Scriptures and since God is no longer revealing Himself in
terms of special revelation to man today, then we cannot know the moral or
revealed will of God other than what is in the Scripture. That is our basis of authority. Passages on this are Romans 2:18; 1
Thessalonians 5:18, “In everything give thanks,” therefore gratitude is a gauge
of our spiritual growth, “In everything give thanks for this is God’s will for
you in Christ Jesus.” 1 Thessalonians
4:3, “This is the will of God, your sanctification, that you abstain from
sexual immorality.” 2 Corinthians 6:14
states that it’s not God’s will for believers to marry unbelievers. So there are clear statements in Scripture as
to God’s will and we need to be more concerned about living inside the realm of
what God has revealed rather than worrying so much about secondary issues
perhaps.
Point five; therefore God’s sovereign will includes His revealed will
but His revealed will clearly is not always the same, it’s not synonymous with
His decree. We can chart this out by
using our circle for the sovereign will of God and then overlapping it is the
revealed will of God and our responsibility is to live inside the circle of
God’s revealed will, which is tantamount to living inside what we call the
right circle, it used to be the bottom circle, living in fellowship with God,
walking by means of God the Holy Spirit, because whenever we sin we are
instantly ejected from fellowship with God, from the bottom circle or right
circle as we have it in the diagram we’re familiar with, and when we’re out of
fellowship we are outside the moral will of God because we’re operating on the
sin nature and therefore we’re converting the outside pressure of adversity
into the inside pressure of stress in the soul and we are outside of the
revealed will even though we are still in the sovereign will of God. The only way to recover and get back into
the revealed will of God is to use 1 John 1:9, to confess our sins and then
we’re instantly forgiven and filled with the Holy Spirit and we can begin to
grow and advance in terms of God’s will.
God has revealed His will through the prophets, through the Holy Spirit,
through the Apostles and their writings in the Scripture. There is no extra canonical revelation of
God’s will any more in human history.
Point number six; 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. So the
only way we can learn that is to operate in fellowship with the Lord and
operate on what we do know about the will of God in terms of the mandates of
Scripture.
Point number seven; if a man is to do all things to the glory of
God, then even the most minute decision we make demands some level of
attention, though not every decision involves a moral issue or a specific will
of God in relation to geographical will or operational will. For example, you might have a decision as to
what to do with some extra cash, whether to spend it, whether to invest it, or
whether to put it in the bank and let if just accrue interest. The issue there is not necessarily moral,
certainly you can spend it on something that might be considered wrong or
immoral or irresponsible, something sinful but excluding that what you do with
that cash is not necessarily a moral issue or a specific will of God issue in
terms of the Scripture.
It calls upon wisdom and that’s what Scripture talks about in
Proverbs and what’s called the wisdom literature in the Old Testament. Wisdom literature goes beyond simple
application of doctrine. The doctrine
that is in our soul is called epignosis
doctrine which is applicational doctrine in the New Testament. In the Old Testament the word was wisdom, chokmah, and wisdom goes beyond simply
applicational knowledge to being able to take that which is stored in your soul
and apply it to given situations so that you make decisions in life that
glorify God. Now the concept of chokmah goes back in Hebrew to the idea
of having skill at something. That’s
why it’s more than just simply taking a specific statement, don’t do this or do
this, but it’s taking the whole realm of doctrine and then being able to apply
that in a nonspecifically addressed area to make a skillful decision that
produces something in life that is beautiful and attractive. One of the first uses of the word chokmah in the Old Testament refers to
the work of Bezalel and Oholiab and their work on building all of the
artifacts, all of the articles in the furniture in the tabernacle. And it says that the Holy Spirit filled
them, it was a temporary filling designed to give them this special level of
wisdom and skill in craftsmanship. They
were goldsmiths, silversmiths, jewelers, and God the Holy Spirit gave them a
skill in what they were producing so that what the produced was beautiful, was
attractive, and brought glory to God.
By application, when it comes to decision making in the believer’s
life that relates to a non-moral issue or an issue that is not specifically
addressed in Scripture, the frame of reference for decision making is
wisdom. We look at a decision, perhaps
we go through various processes whereby we get counsel from experts in the
field, from more mature believers, perhaps, who have some greater life’s
experience that we can learn from, so that we can make a wise decision. There is, perhaps, a spectrum of right
decisions there.
I often relate this in terms of exercises that are often conducted
in the military in terms of testing and preparation, called field training
exercises, and frequently what will happen, especially if you’re in the army
and you’re in a situation, I’m sure it occurs with the navy as well, you have a
problem, and the commander is given a situation and he has to go through a
certain course of action and he has to arrive at a certain goal. Now there may be a hundred different ways in
which you can face the problem, solve the problem, and achieve the mission. Maybe fifty of those are doomed to failure;
maybe another forty of those would produce a mediocre solution or a solution
where the cost of life would be unacceptable or would be too great, and maybe
ten options would produce, let’s say a successful to an extremely successful
outcome. Now of these ten options none
of those would necessarily be more right or less right than the others. Some work out better than the others, some
may be affected by other factors in life, or there may be a number of wrong
decisions, a number of decisions that really are what the Bible would classify
as foolish decisions, they don’t really produce anything of artistic value in
terms of glorifying God, they don’t produce a life of skill and beauty in terms
of Bible doctrine, but then there are ten different options that all would
produce spiritual growth, all are the result of spiritual growth, and all bring
glory to God.
The trouble is that many of us want God’s will in every area to be
black and white; we want one thing to be the will of God and everything else
not to be the will of God. But
sometimes God does not have a specific A, B, or C for us to choose from. There may be many different options and the
issue is as much how we go about the procedure of making that decision. This is what happens in leadership testing,
in field training exercises, is one of the things that’s graded would be how
the commander and the troops go about the process of completing the mission. It’s not just which option they choose but
how they go about the procedure because there are, let’s say for illustration
purposes, let’s say there are three options that would all produce an extremely
successful completion of the mission.
Let’s say they choose one of them, so they’re extremely successful but
in the process they might make some mistakes.
Maybe
they hit on that decision by dumb luck; maybe they did it well demonstrating
excellent principles of leadership. So
the evaluation is not always on the decision or course of action ultimately chosen,
but on how we went about that decision.
In the spiritual life sometimes what God is testing us in a decision is
not always making the right decision but the test focuses on how we go about
making the decision. The procedure is
as important as the final result.
This
is why, when we come to point 8, since we can only know the specifics of God’s
revealed or moral will before God, questions about the will of God relate only
to revealed information. Since God is
no longer involved in giving direct revelation, He still guides and directs but
indirectly; maybe through circumstances, maybe through friends, we have to be
careful there because too often we can get introspective and just because
certain circumstances seem to go a certain way you don’t want to become guilty
of making decisions just based on circumstances. Proverbs 3:5-6 states the principle, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart,”
that’s your thinking, that means understanding doctrine and operating on the
faith rest drill to apply it, “do not lean on your own understanding,” that
means rejecting human viewpoint, “in all your ways acknowledge Him,” that is
authority orientation to God, and what’s the result, “He makes your paths
straight.” You can look back, maybe,
and not realize how the decisions were going and He straightened them out even
though you started to go down the wrong path or you started to make the wrong
decision or maybe you did make the wrong decision and then in His overriding
will He prevented you from bringing the wrong decision to completion.
It’s
not a guessing game. I think this is
something that a lot of people get caught up in is thinking how do I know God’s
will, does He want me to do that and does He want me to do that and they become introspective and self-absorbed and
immediately they’re operating on arrogance rather than trusting God, looking at
a situation, evaluating all the evidence, taking responsibility for the
decision, and putting it in the hands of the Lord so that the Lord will
necessarily guide and direct and bring things to be the way that He wants them
to. If God wants you some place or if
He does not want you some place and you are walking in fellowship by means of
God the Holy Spirit and applying doctrine you won’t end up where He doesn’t
want you and you will end up where He wants you, even though in the process you
might think oh, this is the way to go or that’s the way to go, God will close
that door and get you right back where He wants you. So we don’t have to worry about those consequences, making the
wrong decision as long as we are walking by means of the Spirit, applying the
Word of God.
Point
number nine; this is where we stopped last time. Often it is taught that aside from the precepts of Scripture,
aside from the clear statements of Scripture, the absolutes, God has a specific
will for our lives in every decision. I
might add that phrase, “has a specific will for our lives in every
decision.” Sometimes that has been
taught in the past as living in the center of God’s will. Usually it’s expressed in terms of the
geographical will or the operational will of God but it is expressed in a way
that suggests that there is always in every decision a geographical will or an
operational will. That would mean that
if you’re living in Norwich and God’s geographical will is for you to live in
Preston then there’s no way, if you’re outside the geographical will of God for
you to ever even be in fellowship, because you’re out of God’s geographical
will. Well, that’s taking it to its
extreme, absurdity, but that’s where that kind of teaching goes. Now God may want us, at some particular time
to be in a specific geographical location, but if we’re walking by means of the
Spirit, applying doctrine, operating in fellowship, then we will end up in a
geographical location where God wants us, even if at first we may misread the
signs or make a bad decision and go in the wrong direction.
God’s
not really playing a guessing game with us.
You now the old shell game where somebody hides a pea under a walnut
shell and you’ve got two or three of them out on the table and mix them up and
say okay, guess where the pea is. God’s
not doing that with His will for our lives; God is not playing some kind of a
divine fatalistic game saying okay, I’m going to make My will difficult for you
to find, and now you have to guess what it is.
No, God is going to make it clear to us and even if we make a bad
decision, if we’re still walking in fellowship He’s going to make our path
straight, He will work it out. So we don’t
have to be consumed, self-absorbed with those decisions.
Let’s
look at a couple of examples from Scripture.
Jonah is one that comes to mind, Jonah 1:1-2, we have direct revelation,
“The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, [2] Arise, go to
Nineveh,” Nineveh is a geographical location so here we have the geographical
will of God, “and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before
Me.” Here we have the operational will
of God. But you see, God has revealed
it clearly to Jonah. Now up to this
point, as far as we know, God has not had a specific geographic will for Jonah,
other than he is a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel. Whether he lived in Samaria or whether he
moved up north into the territory of Dan, or whether he moved over and lived
along the coast was not an issue as long as when God gave him a revelation, a
decree to the king or to the people, he did so. So that’s why I’m saying there is not always a specific
geographical will, but at times there is and when there is God makes the
clear. Often He does it through
circumstances that perhaps close every other opportunity so that we’re left
with only one particular option.
I
remember a time when I was in college, a time when you’re young and you’re often
consumed with questions about the will of God and I had worked for about four
summers at a Christian ministry and was tired of it and wanted to do something
different and was about to graduate from college and though well, I’m going to
go on a study tour of Europe this summer.
So I had the money together and I was ready to go, signed up for the
trip and it needed 20 people to sign up for the trip to go. But the job that I had had for several years
was one that needed some technical expertise in backpacking and mountain
climbing and white water rafting and things like that and there weren’t too
many people around who could take on that responsibility and there wasn’t
anybody. But nevertheless, I just
wanted to go to Europe that summer.
Well, I think the deadline for the trip was like May 20th; on
May 19th there was only one person who had signed up to go on that
trip and put their money there, and at that point, since it was a summer camp
ministry, there was a desperate cry that they needed someone to fulfill my job
and they wanted me back, so I had decided well, it doesn’t look like that
Europe trip is going to make it so I’ll go do the other ministry instead. So I did that, and the next day 20 people
signed up to go to Europe. It sort
reminds us of Jonah.
So
it’s not so much a shell game as it is God’s sovereign will does override our
will and He puts us where He wants us when there is a specific geographical
will and we know it clearly. And if you
don’t know it clearly then it’s not an issue at that time. Now it was for Jonah, and Jonah was to go to
Nineveh, but Jonah decided he did not want the geographical or the operational
will of God because Jonah hated the Assyrians, they were the ethnic enemy of Israel,
he hated them, he thought that they were barbaric, they were some of the most
wicked and cruel people of all of history.
In fact, when the Assyrians did invade the northern kingdom of Israel
and destroyed it, and then they swung south into Judah to destroy Judah God
miraculously delivered Judah and destroyed the Assyrian army outside the walls
of Jerusalem but before they got there, when they surrounded the walls of
Lachish in Judah, it was a tremendous siege there and a record was made on the
walls of Nineveh later, but when they finally captured Lachish, they took their
captives and they would play games with them and they would see which one could
live the longest after they peeled all of the skin off their bodies. They were extremely cruel, they loved
cruelty, they probably made the cruelties of the Nazis pale in comparison. They were some of the most wicked people of
all times and Jonah hated them and he did not want to see any of those people
in heaven at all.
Now
we all can sympathize with that at times, we know certain people that we really
know if they’re ever saved it’s by an extra special measure of grace and some
of us at times hope that maybe nobody will witness to them because heaven is
just too good, but that’s not the will of God.
So Jonah decides to avoid this, he’s going to foreshadow the words of
Horace Greeley and head west. So he
hops on a boat to Tarshish, which is the ancient name for the area we now call
Spain. So he is going 180 degrees in
the opposite direction and he decides to flee from the presence of the Lord. See, carnality makes you irrational; how can
you flee from an omnipresent God. You
can’t. But in carnality we think that
somehow we’re going to fool God so he heads off, he goes down to Joppa, modern
Haifa, and hops a ship to Tarshish and we all know the story of how they ran
into storms as God is going to exercise His overriding will and bring it about
so that Jonah either dies or goes back to Nineveh.
And
Jonah is thrown off the ship; God has prepared a great fish, not a while but a great
fish to swallow Jonah. See, God is
going do what is necessary to bring us to the point of confession and obedience
to Him, or it’s going to cost us our life.
He doesn’t make that decision for us, He certainly didn’t force Jonah to
go to Nineveh against his will, but He brought to bear the right amount of
pressure in the circumstances so that Jonah, of his own volition decided that
it was better to go to Nineveh. So God
does have a specific individual will at times, maybe many times in our lives
and God makes that clear to us.
Another
example is in Acts 10:17. We read in
10:17, “Now while Peter was greatly perplexed in mind as to what the vision
which he had seen might be,” once again we have direct revelation from God. God
revealed at that time to Peter that there was a major shift in terms of clean
and unclean animals. The vision was
that Peter saw a huge tablecloth being lowered from heaven and on that
tablecloth were all manners of delicacies to eat, both clean and unclean as
defined by the Mosaic Law. He saw
lobster, shrimp and crabmeat, good old fried catfish, and he looked at is and
he said Lord, I can’t eat any of that, especially that roast pork, it smells
good, I can’t eat it, it’s not clean.
So in his self-righteous attitude he rejected it. Three times the Lord had to do that, that
shows repetition, God’s going to make His will clear, and the tablecloth was
lowered and God said what I have made clean is clean. Now Peter is puzzling over just exactly what that means.
Just
as a side note you will always find somebody in life who comes up with some
biblically based diet. You know,
everybody is talking about diets now, we just had the turn of the year,
everybody has put on a couple of pounds over Christmas and we have all the New
Year’s resolutions and it seems like every year or two somebody comes up with a
Biblically based diet, going back to the Mosaic Law and saying this is really a
healthy diet, that’s why God gave the dietary stipulations to Israel because
they really didn’t know how to properly prepare pork or some of the other food,
so God made those restrictions in order that they would be healthier. That’s hogwash; I’m telling you, it’s
shameful how so many Christians are suckers for everything, they’re just like
Gideon, they’re so biblically ignorant that they’re no good. We’ll see that in Gideon, he’s so ignorant
of what Leviticus says that he doesn’t really understand what the angel of the
Lord is trying to communicate to him.
You
see, all of a sudden God gives Peter a vision, and in that vision all that
unclean food is now made clean. Now did
He teach him about hygiene? No. Did He teach him how to properly cook
pork? No. Were there some new technological advances that somehow made
these foods healthier than they had been in the past? No. The issue was it’s
now the Church Age, the Mosaic Law was for Israel and the foods that were clean
versus unclean were to teach spiritual principles. Almost all, I haven’t studied every single one of them out but
I’ve studied about 95% of them and as far as I can tell, unclean animals were
animals that associated with carrion; they were scavengers, lobsters, shrimp,
they’re all scavengers, where they touch dead things.
It
rendered you ceremonially unclean under the Mosaic Law to touch a dead person
because that was a reminder of spiritual death, separation from God, and so God
said if you touch anything that is unclean or anything that is dead you cannot
enter into the temple or tabernacle for seven days and then you must bring a
sacrifice because He’s teaching a principle that spiritual death separates
people from God and there must be a sacrifice to solve the problem of
separation from God. So all that is
designed to teach a spiritual principle and it doesn’t have anything to do with
a healthy diet or losing a few pounds after we’ve indulged at Christmas. So don’t let anybody fool you about the
purpose of the Old Testament diet; it is dispensational, it does not have
anything to do with health.
So
Peter has this vision and he is confused as to what it means; God hasn’t made
the interpretation clear yet, He has simply given him the new revelation. Once again I want to emphasize, just like
Jonah there’s specific revelation here about God’s will. And just after God has made the revelation
to Peter, someone comes, a group of men from the Gentile, Cornelius who was a
Roman centurion, come to his house and knock on the door looking for him.
In
Acts 10:19 we read, “And while Peter was reflecting on the vision, the Spirit
said to him, Behold, three men are looking for you.” Notice, there is direct revelation. Once again I remind you of the point that I have made a couple of
times, when God does something in history…now we live in an age when everybody
today wants to make religion of subjectivity and a matter of impressions. We live in an age that’s dominated by
mystical thought and we come out of a conservative Christian tradition that has
been influenced, to some degree, by subjectivity and impressions and subtle
forms of mysticism. Whenever God does
something in private in the Scripture, subjectively in the Scripture, there is
always objective external confirming evidence to support it. It’s never simply a matter of subjective
impression. God always acts objectively
in history to confirm whatever He does subjectively. So that means that if you wake up in the middle of the night and
think oh, God wants me to do X, Y or Z then maybe you ought to think about it a
while and see if there’s something that confirms that and there’s objective
confirmation of that somewhere along the line.
So
“the Spirit said to him, “three men are looking for you. [20] Arise, go downstairs, and accompany
them without misgivings; for I have sent them Myself.” So Peter is sent to the Gentiles and he
there witnesses to Cornelius and his household and they are saved and it’s at
that point that the new church and the leadership of the new church begins to
realize that God is truly doing a new work in the Church Age, there is not
going to be a distinction between Jew and Gentile. So there’s another example of God’s directive will, God’s
revealed geographical will for Peter.
They it didn’t involve going to another country or another state or
another city, it involved going to a different house, to Cornelius’ residence.
Another
example of God’s operational will is in Acts 13:1 and this takes place at a
church in Antioch which is where believers were first called Christians. “Now there were at Antioch, in the church
that was there, prophets and teachers:” this is in the very early stages of the
apostolic age, probably around 40 AD, not too long after the cross, five, six
or seven years, there is “Barnabas, and Simeon who was called Niger, and Lucius
of Cyrene, and Manaen who had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and
Saul.” This isn’t long after Saul’s
conversion.
Acts
13:2, “And while they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit
said,” and here again is direct revelation, “Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul
for the work to which I have called them.”
Now notice, in all of these examples from Acts we are in the transition
period of the early church, there is no canon of the New Testament at this time
at all, none of the books in the New Testament have been written and God the Holy
Spirit was still giving direct revelation.
So they are told to set apart Barnabas and Saul for their mission to
take the gospel to the Gentiles.
At
most, if you go through the Scriptures I don’t think you can find more than 30
or 40 cases where God gives direct geographical or operational will type of
direction to individuals. Most of the
time the issue is taking what you know and applying it and producing wise
decisions that glorify God. And one
example that we had that I think is fascinating is how God used an unbeliever
to accomplish his will and the unbeliever was not aware or consciously aware of
how God was using it, and that’s in the case of Cyrus, prophesied by Isaiah
that God’s anointed, he’s called “anointed” which simply means appointed one,
it doesn’t necessarily have super spiritual implications, that God had
appointed one to bring the Jews, the decree that the Jews would return to the
land after the Babylonian captivity.
Cyrus did that; he was not aware that he was performing the will of God,
he had not been informed by the prophets that a couple hundred years ago that
God prophesied that you would send us back to our homeland, it was just his
policy; he did it of his own will, his own responsibility and that’s a nice
example of the principle in Proverbs 21:1 that “the king’s heart is like
channels of water in the hand of the Lord, He turns it wherever He
wishes.” That does not mean that God
does it in a way that destroys the individual’s responsibility or volition, but
we see, especially, that’s one example with Cyrus, especially in that case, of
how the sovereign will of God coexists with human volition. Cyrus made that decision of his own
volition, his own responsibility but nevertheless it was the sovereign will of
God.
Point
number ten, knowing God’s will, therefore, is based on the grace learning
spiral. We have covered the grace
learning spiral and that is the principle that learning the Word of God is not
based on human talents, human education, or human IQ. God gives the gift of pastor-teacher to communicate doctrine.
When the believer is filled with the Holy Spirit, God the Holy Spirit is the
One who makes doctrine understandable.
Now this is an important word here, “understandable.” It doesn’t mean that God the Holy Spirit
understands it for us. Neither does it
mean that if I’m filled with the Spirit that I’m automatically going to
understand everything that the pastor teaches.
It is understandable, that’s a concept called potentiality. You can understand it because it’s not based
on your IQ, your education, but if you’re only a spiritual baby you might not
quite grasp it yet. You might not
understand it until you’ve heard it a hundred times. There are still things that I don’t grasp or understand; they are
understandable because the Holy Spirit is teaching me but sometimes I have to
learn a few more things before I’ll finally be able to put it all together, and
that’s true for every one of us in the growth process. So the Holy Spirit makes it understandable
and we know that from passages like 1 Corinthians 2:12-14 which teaches that
the natural man, or the soulish man, “cannot understand the things of the
Spirit of God because they are foolishness to him.” The unbeliever cannot understand doctrine at all. The only way they can understand the gospel
is if the Holy Spirit functions as a substitute for their human spirit and
makes the gospel understandable to them.
So
the Holy Spirit and the filling of the Holy Spirit we can understand the Word
of God and at that point, once we understand it it becomes gnosis, academic knowledge.
Just because you can repeat it back to me in the way I say it doesn’t
mean you understand it. I’ve seen many
believers in my time who can pass all kinds of tests on doctrine and then when
you sit down across the table with a cup of coffee and discuss it and hit it
from different arenas it becomes clear that they have learned by rote memory a
principle, they just heard it stated so many times that they can repeat it back
to you with the right vocabulary, but they don’t have a clue what it
means. The same thing happens with
seminary students; they go sit in class week after week and take notes and then
they come to their midterm and they regurgitate what they heard in class, but
that doesn’t mean they’ve come to understand it yet, to truly comprehend the
meaning of what they’ve heard. It’s
more than simply being able to take notes, write them down and regurgitate the
verbiage back to somebody. You have to
be able to think about it a little bit, understanding takes a little mental
sweat in order to understand it. So
once you understand it it becomes gnosis. That’s why I say sometimes we look across
the church after five or six years and somebody disappears and they end up in
some weird cult or in apostasy and we say what ever happened to them. The thing is, they fooled everybody because
they were good mimics; they were able to regurgitate a lot of the stuff they
heard and they talked the talk but they never understood what it was to begin
with, and it’s got to be understood before you can believe it.
That’s
the next stage; you have to believe it before the Holy Spirit then transfers it
into our thinking. Now there are two
arenas of thinking. The inner arena,
what the Bible calls the heart or the kardia. The out arena of thinking is what the Bible
calls the nous, and once it goes into
the nous as gnosis you have to believe it before God the Holy Spirit is going
to convert it into epignosis which is
full knowledge, applicational knowledge, which dominates the center point of
our thinking. Now things break down at
two points. First of all, a lot of
believers don’t ever take the time to really understand or think about, which
is what the Old Testament calls meditation, not the idea that so many people
have today which comes out of eastern mysticism that meditation is just a
contemplating nothing, emptying your mind.
That is very popular, comes across in a lot of different techniques that
are taught today, self-improvement techniques, there are a lot of different
concepts like that are really brought over from other religions and then given
some new pseudo scientific name and made to sound like it’s something new. But in the Bible meditation is thinking about
the Word, not just writing notes but going home and thinking about it, reading
the words.
I
am amazed sometimes at the fact that there are Christians who don’t believe the
Bible. I’ve heard people say well, you
know, I’m afraid I might get confused. Think
about it; if you’re afraid you might get confused, don’t get out of bed in the
morning; don’t read the paper, certainly don’t fill out your tax form, my
goodness. We might all get confused;
just because there are certain technicalities and a lot of things in the Bible
that are clarified by understanding Greek or Hebrew doesn’t mean that you can’t
learn some things from the Scripture.
Many times when I give you Scriptures, now that we’re using this new
approach I’m able to put those verses up on the board, but how many times have
you heard teaching where you’re told the principle and then just given the
references? The reason it’s done that
way is so you will go home and read those verses because we are to read the
Word of God, we are to be reminded of what God has done in history.
It’s
only when believers are regularly reading the Word of God that they begin to,
perhaps put together what’s happened historically, understand who people are in
the Scripture, understand who Daniel is, understand who Nebuchadnezzar is,
understand who Deborah and Barak are, understand who Ish-bosheth is, and if you
read your Bible then those names will not be obscure to you. And then when the pastor refers to them
you’ll have a frame of reference and be able to comprehend. See one of the problems today is that people
are biblically illiterate and we need to fight that by being aware of what the
Bible says. And as we read the Bible
underline promises, then go back and memorize the promises. The faith rest drill, which is a basic skill
in the Christian life starts with mixing faith with the promises of God. But if you don’t know any promises in your
soul then how can you claim them when you get into a testing situation or get
into any kind of adversity. You’re not
going to have time to run home and dig into your files and pull out your notes
and then look up a verse and say okay, which verse could I go read and apply
now; it doesn’t work that way. We need to memorize Scripture so that the Word
of God saturates our soul.
So
we have to go through this process and we have to think about the Word and
that’s how we understand it as gnosis,
and then when we believe it and trust in it then God the Holy Spirit converts
that into epignosis which is
applicational knowledge and then we have another decision to make, we have to
decide to apply it when the opportunity arises. So it’s not just a matter of making a decision to come to Bible
class, it’s not just a matter of making a decision to think about what we have
studied, it’s not just a matter of trying to decide whether or not we believe
it but when we get out into everyday life we have to make decisions to apply
it. The Christian life is more than
just learning a lot of nice things about the Bible, building doctrinal notebooks,
but it’s about going out into everyday life, in our marriages, in our families,
in the work place, and putting into practice what we learn. That’s the hard
part, it’s not hard just to accumulate a lot of notes, that’s a lot of fun
sometimes and if you have an intellectual bent then it’s fun and you enjoy
it. But the hard part is going out and
putting it into practice.
So
God gives us His will and He gives us the means to learn it so that we’re not
restricted by our environment; it’s not a matter of our educational background,
it’s not a matter of our human IQ because God the Holy Spirit is the One who
ultimately makes it understandable to us.
Colossians 4:12, we read, “Epaphras, who is one of your number, a bondslave
for Jesus Christ, sends you his greetings, always laboring earnestly for you in
his prayers, that you may stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of
God.” So we can know with confidence
that we are in the will of God.
Romans
12:2 states, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your mind,” that is the process of the grace learning spiral, it
ends up renewal, renovating our thinking, for the purpose of demonstration,
“that you may prove,” that you may demonstrate in life “what the will of God is,”
that’s application is. First you have
to transform your thinking, then you have to put it into practice and that
demonstrates that “the will of God is good and acceptable and perfect,” and
that’s what we call glorifying God. So
it ends up in application.
Ephesians
5:17 says, “So then, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the
Lord is.” Ephesians 5:18 says that the will of the Lord is to be filled by
means of the Spirit, so that’s the starting point. Ephesians 6:6, “Not by way
of eyeservice,” in other words, not just on the surface, not just as overt
actions, “as men pleasers, but as slaves of Christ,” that is somebody who is
completely subordinate to the authority of Christ in their life, “doing the
will of God from the kardia,” from epignosis, “doing the will of God from
the heart.” It starts with
understanding and then believing it is epignosis.
Proverbs
3:5-6, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart,” that is with your thinking, the
inner most thinking part of the soul, “and do not lean on your own
understanding. [6] In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths
straight.”
Psalm
32:8, “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go,” God takes
on that responsibility, He is the One who teaches us, “I will counsel you with
My eye upon you.”
Point
eleven in the will of God, as we learn doctrine and the Holy Spirit stores the
doctrine in our soul, which we call retention, He is the One who stores it,
then in decision making the Holy Spirit is involved in retrieving the
information for application. As we
learn doctrine the Holy Spirit stores it in our soul, He is the One who puts it
there, repetition is necessary. God
uses… not only performs the end but He also instructs us on the means, so there
has to be teaching again and again, and then in decision making He’s involved,
the Holy Spirit is involved in retrieving the information for application,
recall, He brings it back to our mind so that we can put it into application.
Point
number twelve, along with the specific doctrine for specific situations there
is also doctrine which produces…let’s reword that, doctrine also produces
wisdom. There are many decisions that
involve wisdom procedures; wisdom comes only from maturity, growth, that takes
place under the ministry of God the Holy Spirit. So from this storehouse of
doctrine in our souls we then develop the ability to discern and to recognize
when some decisions involve a distinct geographic or operational will from God
and when they don’t. Because we have
wisdom we avoid subjectivity in the decision making process and we don’t get up
in front of a congregation and say well, God has, the Holy Spirit has caused me
to think this isn’t His will and avoid all authority situations and go against
every structure established to guide and direct us in decision making. I’m not saying that that pastor was wrong;
I’m just saying that the will of God doesn’t operate apart from those kinds of
authority structures. I mean if I stood
up and said okay, all of a sudden I think God wants us to do X, Y or Z, and
that was opposite to what the congregation had decided or what the deacons had
voted on and I did not go back through that process to rectify the decision
then I would be completely out of line.
God is not going to lead us in ways that violate the authority
structures that are established. That’s not God’s will for us to violate those
authority structures, whatever they may be.
Point
thirteen; the geographical will of God relates to operating in a specific
location and we’ll come back and look at specificities of the will of God and
wrap this study on the will of God up next time.