What if the Lord isn’t willing?

I want you to stop and consider something for a moment.

Reflect on today and recall what happened to you, the things you did, and the experiences you had. If it’s early for you right now, substitute yesterday for today and do the same thing.

All done? Now let me ask you: would any of that have happened had God not willed that it would?

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I’d wager that the vast majority of us, whether Christian or not, believe we’re mostly in control of what goes on in our lives. We call the shots, make the decisions, and determine the outcomes we experience.   

But James warns us this is an arrogant way to live because it omits the fact there’s a sovereign God who’s behind everything we see and don’t see. James says: “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that’” (James 4:13–15).

Re-read that last verse and ask yourself, what does James mean when he says, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that?” What happens if the Lord isn’t willing?

I suppose James could just be making a general, high-level statement about us not forgetting about including the idea of God in whatever we plan or do. Perhaps he’s just reminding us about something that Paul said: “whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).

Maybe. But as you read through Scripture, you see this “Lord willing” statement add up to something more.

For example, Paul told the Ephesian Christians, “I will come back if it is God’s will” (Acts 18:21); he told those in Rome, “now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you” (Rom. 1:10); he told the Corinthians, “I will come to you very soon, if the Lord is willing” (1 Cor. 4:19); he promised the believers in Corinth to spend some time with them “if the Lord permits” (1 Cor. 16:7). The writer of Hebrews told his audience the same thing: “And this we will do, if God permits” (Hebrews 6:3).

Statements like this about God’s sovereignty litter the pages of the Bible, with some going down to the smallest of details. Just one example is Jesus saying: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father” (Matt. 10:29).

And if a sparrow doesn’t die outside of “the will of your Father,” what about all the things that happened to you today or yesterday? How would they escape God’s will?

Such a thing sure raises a lot of questions. For instance, how do we account for all the awful things that go on every day that would seem to be contrary to the will of a good and loving God? And how do we reconcile statements made about salvation and God desiring “all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), “not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9) with “the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matt. 7:14)?

If the Lord is willing that they find “it,” then why don’t they?

The wills of God

Theologians who have drilled into these questions tell us about the different “wills” of God that include His sovereign and moral will, efficient and permissive will, secret and revealed will, will of decree and will of command, decretive will and preceptive will, will of sign and will of good pleasure.

That’s a lot of “wills.”

The big question about all of them revolves around whether God’s will is determinative or merely preferential. Philosophical theology professor Fritz Guy has argued the case for the latter, saying God’s will is more “delighting more than deciding” and “apart from a predestinarian presupposition, it becomes apparent that God’s ‘will’ is always to be understood in terms of intention and desire.”    

This, however, runs contrary to how Scripture declares God’s sovereignty, the definition of which means a “supreme and independent power or authority,” “His absolute right to do all things according to his own good pleasure,” with the Greek term for it being dynastes that signifies “one who is in a position to command others”. For example, the psalmist says: “Whatever the Lord pleases, He does, in Heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps” (Ps. 135:6).

The stakes are high if this isn’t true. As R. C. Sproul points out: “If there is any part of creation outside of God’s sovereignty, then God is simply not sovereign. If God is not sovereign, then God is not God. If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God’s sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.”

This ruffles some people’s feathers who say such a thing smacks of divine determinism, the view that all events (including human actions) are somehow inevitable or necessitated and so reduces human beings to being merely God’s hand puppets. Few, though, hold that position with most understanding there is a blending of divine sovereignty with human self-determination. For example, you see both when Peter tells his early-church-days audience, “this Man [Jesus], delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death” (Acts 2:23).  

Fine, but how do we go about solving puzzles like God desiring all to be saved, but only a few actually finding salvation? In his essay, “Are there two wills in God?”, John Piper explains it like this:

“There are two possibilities as far as I can see. One is that there is a power in the universe greater than God’s which is frustrating him by overruling what he wills … The other possibility is that God wills not to save all, even though he is willing to save all, because there is something else that he wills more, which would be lost if He exerted His sovereign power to save all … The difference between Calvinists and Arminians lies not in whether there are two wills in God, but in what they say this higher commitment is. What does God will more than saving all? The answer given by Arminians is that human self-determination and the possible resulting love relationship with God are more valuable than saving all people by sovereign, efficacious grace. The answer given by Calvinists is that the greater value is the manifestation of the full range of God’s glory in wrath and mercy (Romans 9:22-23) and the humbling of man so that he enjoys giving all credit to God for His salvation (1 Corinthians 1:29).”

Whichever side of the fence you fall on this particular matter, you’ll still feel the weight of tension between these kinds of biblical paradoxes. Between statements where God tells Pharaoh “Let my people go!” and at the same time reading “The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.”

And that’s OK. There’s mystery surrounding God’s sovereignty that we should expect not to unravel, even down to wondering how everything that happened to us today was what God willed.

What we do know about God’s sovereignty is that it practically 1. Provides assurance that He is in complete control, which supplies trust in His care for us; 2. Delivers confidence in every circumstance; 3. Reminds us to rely solely and ultimately on Him and not ourselves, and so it keeps us humble.

All good things, don’t you agree? It’s like Charles Spurgeon said: “There is no attribute of God more comforting to His children than the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty … It is God upon His throne whom we trust.”

So, what do you say — is everything that happens to you today God’s will or not?