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The Will of God-2
(Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:21-37, 23:37-39)
When I was the pastor of the Bethany United Methodist
Church, Lexington, NC, our UMM put on what they called a
Poor Man’s Supper the second Tuesday night of each month,
September through May. We usually cleared @ $1,000 each
meal. Tuesday mornings I visited the guys in the church kitchen
and helped them as they prepared the Poor Man’s Supper for the
evening. Once, as I hurried into the church kitchen late, I
overheard a theological debate.
My opinion was asked.
Well, I do not do very well broadsided by an important
question, a criticism, or a complaint. I need time to think before
I speak. I wish I would learn to say: I’ll get back to you with an
answer. Let me think about it. I wish I had not given a kneejerk opinion to what was asked of me that morning. The debate
went something like this: I’m not spending money on expensive
blood pressure medication any longer, because when my time
comes to die, I’ll die. I can’t do a thing to prolong my life.
When it is ‘God’s will for me to die,’ I’ll die, with or without the
medication. Ain’t that right preacher?
Whoever it was who said those things and asked my
opinion, had better be glad that Nurse Sue was not around to
hear it. Sue Epley, RN, was on staff at the church as our Parish
Nurse. She would have put them straight in a New York Minute
about the importance of taking their blood pressure medication,
and she would have chided me for how I answered—Ain’t that
right preacher?
My response was something along the lines of: Yeah, I
guess that’s right.
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Wrong!
After thinking about it a few days I wish I had said: I
believe that God may have preordained the number of years we
are to live on the face of this earth, but whether we make it to
that number of years depends on us as well as God. If we do not
take care of ourselves—if we smoke too much, drink to much,
put ourselves in dangerous circumstances, do not take
medication for a known health condition prescribed by a
physician, etc., then we may not live out the years God had
planned for us. Also, other people have a say-so in how long we
might live, too. A drunk driver or a deranged shooter might cut
our lives short.
You see, there is this thing called free will. Just because
God preordained it, does not mean that it is going to happen.
God has given us responsibility for our lives, too, and for the
lives of others. We do not want to take responsibility for our
lives and the lives of others, so we create a god who wills
everything that happens. We have no say-so. It is all ‘God’s
will’ or the Devil’s fault—everything that happens. That is
thoroughgoing Calvinism and Fundamentalism, and both are a
crock of hooey. The Bible says that we are ‘not to tempt the
Lord our God’ (Deuteronomy 6:16). By not taking your blood
pressure medication, you may be ‘tempting the Lord your God’
who has given us modern medicine to work out ‘God’s will’ that
you might live all the years God preordained for you. That’s
what I wish I had said (and I did in a sermon a few months later
recalling the incident). (Nurse Sue made me. She found out
about my knee-jerk response).
A few Sundays ago I introduced a series of sermons on the
will of God. I said that it is helpful to think of the will of God in
three parts: God’s intentional will, God’s circumstantial will,
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and God’s ultimate will. Together the three parts make up a
holistic understanding of the will of God, like the three parts of
the Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—make up the
wholeness of God. Now, hold in your mind these three
distinctive views of the will of God. Harmonize them when you
consider the will of God, but for clarity, hold them separate.
Let us turn our attention once more to God’s intentional
will. To do that, we must dissociate from the phrase the will of
God all that is evil and unpleasant and unhappy. Because the
intentional ‘will of God’ means what God intended in the first
place—the way God pours God’s self out in goodness, and we
are to respond in the affirmative—like the way a loving parent
strives to pour out goodness on their child. The trouble is, the
child does not respond to the loving parent in the affirmative—
the child does not respond to the will of the parent. So it is with
God and humanity.
What kind of god would God be, if, by God’s own
intention, not through circumstances brought into life by
ignorance, superstition, and sin; but by God’s own intention
pours misery undeserved, and unhappiness, disappointment and
frustration, bereavement, calamity, and ill health on God’s
beloved children, and then asks us to look up through our tears
and say: It is God’s will? That is not the God Jesus fleshed out.
We simply must break away with the idea that
everything that happens in life (good or bad) is the will of
God in the sense of God’s ‘intention!’
Now, as stated earlier, the intentional ‘will of God’ can be
frustrated by our wills not in harmony with God’s will (but only
temporarily). And you may argue that people get a lot of
comfort from supposing that their tragedies are the will of God.
One can bear a tragedy if it is God’s will. But I still maintain
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that the opposite is truer—such a view robs people of comfort in
times of trouble because it paints a distorted picture of God. I
have seen this especially in children in times of tragedy who
want to believe in a loving God who would never will tragedy.
Admittedly, there is a time when things can be said, and
there is a time when they cannot be said, however true it may be.
If you are standing in the presence of some great tragedy, there
is very little you can say about the will of God—at that
moment—because when tragedy strikes, people react instead of
think. Tragedy is not the time to try to clarify the will of God as
I am doing in this series of sermons. But tragedy is not the time
to blurt out; it is the will of God, either. He or she who hides
behind a false concept of God, will, in the hour of real need, be
left as comfortless as atheism would leave them.
There have been times of tragedy when a searching soul
has entered into dialogue with me concerning God’s will as I am
presenting it in this sermon series, and it has helped; for as Jesus
said, only the truth will set us free.
One might say that it is all very well and good to keep the
phrase the will of God for the lovely, joyous, healthy, beneficial
things that happen to people; but surely some of the greatest
qualities in people are made through suffering, and therefore is
not that suffering the will of God? For example, look at how the
untimely death of a child has brought courage to its parents. I
would agree, under God’s circumstantial will (which we’ll
explore in detail next time) that good things come from
suffering; but can you follow the argument to the conclusion that
it was the will of God for the baby to die so that the parents
might have courage? The baby’s death did not make courage.
It revealed the courage that was there all the time. It gave it a
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tremendous opportunity for self-expression—the good that God
wills and always brings out of the bad.
Evil is never the creative of good, though the circumstances
of evil have often been an occasion for the expression of good.
Consider the cross of Christ again. Jesus’ cruel murder on the
cross was not a very pretty or good thing, or God’s intentional
will. But under the circumstances, look at what God did with
that ugly episode of humanity at its worse. A way was provided
for the sins of the world to be forgiven—your sins and mine.
Also, if we say that the suffering caused by evil is essential
because of the qualities brought about by the suffering brought
about by evil, then we must assume that God needs evil to
produce good—that God could not produce such a thing as
courage unless an evil demanded it—that when Jesus healed
someone, he was defying the will of God by doing it, in that he
was removing something essential to the growth of the soul. I
repeat that evil does not make good qualities. It reveals them
and gives them exercise; but there is always the possibility—and
surely this is the intentional will of God—that those same good
qualities may be revealed and exercised and manifested in our
lives as a response to goodness—God’s goodness in our lives
that comes from knowing God through Jesus—every day, not
just when tragedy strikes.
Within this context, hear again the words of Jesus as he
weeps over Jerusalem: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which kills the
prophets, and stones them that are sent to her! How often would
I had gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her
chicks under her wings, and you would not! Now your house is
left to you desolate (Matthew 23:37). Note the words you would
not. They imply, you might have done. This is human free will
to choose.
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Look at another passage. Jesus said, if you had known in
this day…the things, which belong to peace! But now they are
hid from your eyes (Luke 19:42). The implication is that they
might have known—could have chosen to know.
Our readings from Deuteronomy and Matthew this morning
are about choosing. The Hebrew Children are on the verge of
entering the Promised Land and God is reminding them that they
have a choice to make: See, I have set before you this day life
and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the
commandments of the Lord your God…then you shall live…and
the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are
entering to possess…but if you do not, but bow down to other
gods…you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land…Why
is God having this conversation with them? They have the
power to choose, and the choice is up to them, not God.
In our readings from Matthew this morning, Jesus is
reminding us that we have a choice on how we will live out
what comes from our hearts concerning relationships with
others: anger that leads to murder; reconciliation issues
resolved before true worship; lust that leads to adultery; oaths;
retaliation; love for enemies. Jesus reminds us that we have a
choice about how we deal with our darker side, and we can
choose reconciliation with our neighbor or not. Christianity is
not so much right belief as it is right living—how we treat
one another.
The grand qualities in human nature are not given birth by
evil. God creates them, and they do not depend for their origin
on evil, for they can be evoked (brought about) by a response to
the good.
Let us be very careful about how we use the phrase the will
of God.
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Next time I will fit tragedy and distress into the framework
of our thoughts about the will of God by explaining God’s
circumstantial will. In the meantime, keep before you what I
have said about God’s intentional will. And when you see
God’s glory reflected in God’s lovely earth, in nature around us,
so full of God’s beauty, in scripture, poem and song, in music
and great classics of literature, in the face of a child, or an
elderly person, in the lives of good people, in the happiness of
home and family, in the happiness of a healthy church-family, in
the health of mind and body; then looking up to God in heaven,
say: Thy will be done. Let us so dedicate ourselves to carry out
this will of God in our world in Jesus name. Amen.
Charles Lee Hutchens, D. Min.
Bethany United Methodist Church
Lexington, N.C.
October 24, 2004
Preached again at Main Street United Methodist Church, Reidsville, NC,
September 16, 2007.
Preached again at Bethlehem United Methodist Church, Climax, NC, 2-16-2014.
Source: Leslie D. Weatherhead’s book, The Will Of God, Copyright 1944 by Whitmore & Stone.