What Do We Mean by God’s Will?

God sustains the universe even though bad things sometimes happen.  Instead of ordering everything to happen by decree, he shows us his perfect will – what he desires to see happen – and permits people to respond by doing good or evil by their own free will.  These are all facets of God’s “will.”

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Christians often talk about God’s will.  They seek God’s will.  They want to align their actions with God’s will.  This is appropriate, because God calls us to be one with him and to allow him to lead us in every aspect of our lives.

Christians also describe some things as happening because of God’s will.  They do this because they want to honor God’s sovereignty.  If God did not actively sustain the universe, it would not continue to exist.  His decision to keep this world in existence allows bad things as well as good things to happen.

In an earlier article, I explored why it is problematic to say that the bad things that happen are God’s will.  That phrasing makes it sound like God makes bad things happen that would not have happened unless he decreed it.  That would contradict the core Christian teaching that God is a loving God who seeks only good for all of his creation.  It also appears to nullify another core teaching: that God has given humans free will.  (See God Loves All People and Never Wills Evil Even Though He Allows It for some of the biblical texts that support these great truths.)

We can avoid confusion by being more precise in talking about “God’s will.”

What do we mean by God’s will?

There is a difference between allowing something to happen, desiring that it happen, and causing it to happen.  If we want to avoid attributing evil to God, we need to separate out these realities.  Here are some of the different things people may be referring to when they talk about God’s will:

• God’s sustaining will is what keeps the universe running through good and evil.  God does not like everything that happens in our universe.  He wishes that many things would be done differently.  Nevertheless, he sustains it in existence day after day, presumably because by allowing it to keep running a greater good can be achieved than if he extinguished it.

• God’s permissive will is a more focused aspect of God’s sustaining will.  God permits people to act according to the free will he has endowed us with.  God  allows us to make choices, even though he could stop our bad choices by an exercise of his will.  This allows us to choose good actions like helping a neighbor, bad actions like attacking someone we don’t like, and indifferent actions like whether to eat out and which restaurant to go to.  If God only allowed us to make good choices, we would not have free will.  Without free will, we could not strive for the growth and spiritual maturation that comes with being able to choose to follow God or not, to love others or not, to embrace all we were meant to be or not.

• God’s decreed will is what God directly commands or forces to happen regardless of the choices or cooperation of humans.  God mostly does not do this in our everyday lives – he mostly lets us be as good or as bad as we choose to be.

• God’s perfect will is what God desires to have happen.  God has shown us how to live and how to follow him – what perfection looks like – in the teachings of the Bible, in the example of Jesus, and in the witness of wise people who have followed him throughout the ages.

People will understand us better if we are clear about what we mean when we talk about God’s will.

We need to be careful about the language we use to describe God’s will

Here is an example of why the language we use in talking about God’s will matters:

Imagine a child in your community is in a terrible car accident and dies.  In a casual but compassionate conversation about the tragedy, a Christian says, “It was God’s will.”

If a person who does not know the love of God hears that, or even if another Christian hears that, what are they going to think she means?

Many people would interpret that to mean that God made it happen – that it was God’s desire and decree that this child should die in this accident.  And many would recoil at the conclusion that the Christian God did something evil.

If we stop a moment to consider the different forms of God’s “will,” we know that God sustained the universe and permitted individuals to act, even though he knew the result would be that this child would die.  But did he decree it or desire that it happen?  Was it part of his perfect will?  Or did he just permit it?

Much of what we call bad or evil in this world is a misuse of free will by humans.  Did one of the drivers choose to drive drunk or distracted?  Did an adult fail to check that the child was properly restrained in the car?  Was someone driving too fast?  Were the brakes or other car parts faulty due to human error or negligence?

Many of the other things we call “bad” in this world are merely the outworking of the laws of nature.  Did God single out this child for an early death?  Or what this a simple case of the laws of physics?

We don’t need to have the answers to all these questions to recognize that “It was God’s will” is too simplistic a statement.

Jesus did not accept simple claims that God causes the bad things that happen to us

In the Gospel of John, when Jesus’s disciples ask him whether a man was born blind because of his own sin or his parents’ sin, they are asking if God caused the man’s blindness as a punishment for sin.  Jesus rejects the premise, saying, “Neither he nor his parents sinned” (John 9:3).  To attribute the man’s blindness to God is to mischaracterize God.

In Luke 13:1-5, Jesus rejects an attempt to say that God punishes people by inflicting tragedies upon them.  He says that the Galileans who were massacred by the Roman government were not killed as a punishment for their sins.  And when a tower fell on some people and killed them, it was not God acting in response to their sinfulness.  We can understand this.  The massacre was caused by the evil use of human free will and the tower’s collapse was probably a result of the physical laws of nature (possibly aided by poorly applied human free will if the tower was constructed in a negligent manner).

Rather than attributing these events to God’s will or any other cause, Jesus points out that everyone who does not “repent” will also eventually die (Luke 13:5; the Greek word metanoia means to change one’s mind, thinking, or purpose).  Jesus is implying that we should not be surprised that bad things happen in our imperfect world, but that we need to adopt his way of thinking in order to live forever.

In allowing evil, God also allows free acts of good

Jesus did not use words like God’s sustaining, permissive, decreed, or perfect will.  But we can see the concepts in the ways he interacted with people.  He allowed people to follow him or turn away from him.  He told stories of people making the free choice to do good or evil.

If God decreed that only the good could happen, the world would be a sterile place of robotic perfection, devoid of true love, because love is only love if involves a free decision to give priority to the needs and wants of another.

God sustaining and permissive will allows beautiful, wonderful, truly great things to happen, not just evil things.

There is more to the story

The story of God’s will does not end here.  There is more to be considered, because God does not disengage when bad things happen.  God is always moving forward to the next step: What will happen next, after bad things happen?

That is the subject of the next article in this series.