Thursday, June 10, 2010

What do you mean by "God's will?" Part 1

I remember conversations after 911 about whether or not it was "God's will" that the planes flew into the towers.  If I take a sovereignty tack and say that nothing happens outside of God's control, that for those called according to His purpose He works all things out for their good, then there's an argument to be made for it being His will.  That said, the murder of over 3,000 people doesn't intuitively make sense to me to be defined as "God's will."  Don't get me wrong, my intuition cannot be relied on for truth as I am still sinful and must account for the effect of the fall in all my judgments, while at the same time the Holy Spirit speaks to me through my "conscience" which communicates my intuitions to me....My point is this, how can murder (or any other sin for that matter) be God's will?

Where I want to go with this is to better define what we mean by God's will.  The first kind of "will" I want to look at is found in the following verses:  Psalm 40:8, Nehemiah 9:24, Nehemiah 9:37, Psalm 30:5, Psalm 51:18, Proverbs 11:1, Proverbs 15:8.  Each of these verses has the Hebrew word "ratson", the root of which is "ratsah".  Guess how the Hebrew word is translated in each of the verses (I'm using the ESV).  In order, its translated as follows in each verse:  will, would, please, favor, pleasure, delight, acceptable.  In short if we're talking about God's will as that which pleases Him, those actions in which He delights and finds acceptable, then we can easily say that 911 (please fill in your "how could God allow this" event that has more personal meaning to you) was not God's will because it was not pleasing to Him, was not looked upon with His favor, did not delight Him and certainly did not please Him.

 So if I'm going to look at His will as that which pleases or delights Him then I can't necessarily say that everything is His will.  That said, aren't there things that He wants happen that do happen as a direct result of what He desires, like when He created the earth?  More to come....

1 comment:

  1. Gods will is to do his will in our Christian lives and that is found in the Bible, as far as why he allows things like a kids skinned knee or our loved ones to die or tragedies to happen thats his will also if you are close to him these things come a tad bit easier but we still have heart ache and pain just the same we must lean harder on Jesus thats what he wants from us to have faith , His will is greater than our human understanding but we should be content with the wisdom he gives us or pray for wisdom to understand , I could go on forever.... about this

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