Seeking God's Will

    As the mid-west experiences record flooding, I recall the time four years ago when my own house was flooded. A culvert became blocked, sending the local creek down my road and through my home. While my children waited safely upstairs, the downstairs swam with a foot of brown water. Within three hours, the water receded leaving our possessions churned in muddy disarray.

     Thankfully, we had a host of friends and well-wishers descend on our home over the weeks that followed. The walls were cut at two feet, sprayed with bleach and dried with fans. Mounds of sodden carpets, toys, books, and keepsakes were hauled, first outside, and then to the local dump. I remain very grateful for their help and company during that tumultuous time.

     Several times over the course of the clean-up, people offered me their sympathies. Often they expressed themselves in simple terms of regret, but occasionally they offered me what they thought passed for a kind of spiritual comfort.

            “All things work for good in God’s will. This will turn out for the best.”

            “God allowed the flood to happen. Eventually, you’ll see His greater plan.”

While I appreciate the sympathetic impulse that motivated these theological consolations, I was deeply unsatisfied with the picture of God’s will they presented. Either God was a cruel schoolmaster imparting a difficult lesson. Or God was a negligent parent who turned aside at the very moment that we could have most used God’s help and agency. It occurred to me that these statements hung on a very particular interpretation of the term “will” as it applies to God.

     Traditionally, God’s will is taken to mean God’s intention or God’s design. That is, we define “will” in legislative terms: God demonstrates God’s authority by decreeing the fulfillment of X, Y, and Z. In this case, when events impact us negatively, when “bad” things happen, we are left trying to reconcile our insistence on God’s omnipotence with our belief in God’s goodness. However, this tension might be decreased by reshaping our notion of “will.”

     Heading into Easter, I think of Jesus’ prayer the night he was arrested. Luke records Jesus’ words this way: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine.” (22:42, NJB) What is notable in the text is that the first “will” in “if you are willing” is most in keeping with our traditional interpretation of God’s will. It connotes purpose and intention. However, the second “will” in “let your will be done” is different. The word here suggests desire or pleasure, particularly God’s purpose to bless humanity through Christ. While we tend to read this phrase as a solemn acceptance of the crucifixion (i.e. legislatively), it is more accurately an expression of Jesus’ determination to see God’s character demonstrated through his own thoughts and actions.  It is a notion of will that places an emphasis on God’s incarnate presence rather than God’s legislative power.

     The night my home flooded there was little I could do as parent to intervene on my children’s behalf. I couldn’t hold back the water. I couldn’t stop the storm. But I could sit with them in the candlelight, listening to their fears, reassuring them of my love. While it is not my intention to suggest that God is a parent similarly powerless, I think it might be healthy to reevaluate our idea of God’s will to emphasize God’s abiding, loving presence over God’s legislative power. In this way, God’s sovereignty is more a function of God’s omnipresence than God’s omnipotence.

     This shift also asks us to look at the cross in a slightly different manner. If Jesus was appealing to God’s abiding presence in the garden, then God’s abandonment of Jesus on the cross is that much more poignant. Perhaps this, as much as anything, was the substitutionary sacrifice that Jesus accomplished: he endured the absence of God so that we might never endure a moment without God’s presence.

Comments

[Mystic Tourist]

I do not look to the bible for guidance or think that it tells us about God. It is a book written by men about men. The men then claim the false authority that it is Gods' word. It is dishonest.

I believe the story. That Jesus discovered our divine nature and lived accordingly.

We can not possibly be abandoned by God and Jesus was not. We just overstate our importance. When bad things happen we have the opportunity to make the best of it and be a good example. In this way we create a sensibility for what is best and God is always with us.

[Bryne Lewis Allport]

MT, I think we agree more than we disagree. In the article, I don't make any claims about the Bible's divine authority. I did reference the biblical account of the story of Jesus's arrest and crucifixion. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark both include the suggestion, in Jesus's cry of "My God, why have you forsaken me?", that Jesus was momentarily abandoned by God while dying on the cross. It's really more a matter of Christian tradition than a claim of biblical factuality.

Regardless, the thrust of the article remains redescribing God's sovereignty in terms of God's universal presence as opposed to God's legislative power. Choosing to seek out and/or demonstrate God's character through adversity is the best we can make out of the worst circumstances. This is a point I think we agree on.

[Mystic Tourist]

Thank you Bryne. We are in agreement.

[Christian Vendor Space]

When there is something bad happened to us, we usually ask why did God allow it to happen. But deep inside me, I also asked how many times did God prevent this from happening.
How many times did God save us and our love ones? We don't know, all we know is when he did not.