Does God Decree Events He Doesn’t Want to Happen?
00:00:00.000 | Well, we begin the new week on the podcast going into a deep theological question, but
00:00:08.280 | hang with us for a moment.
00:00:10.140 | The question is this, if God has two wills, a will of decree and a will of desire, does
00:00:18.100 | God ever decree something to happen that he does not desire to have happen?
00:00:24.560 | And if so, wouldn't he have a divided mind?
00:00:29.320 | Now before you skip this episode, give us a chance to explain more about it because
00:00:33.120 | it's a sharp question from a listener named Ethan.
00:00:35.560 | Pastor John, hello and thank you for taking my question.
00:00:38.880 | When reading through and discussing the themes at the outset of Desiring God, your book,
00:00:43.560 | along with does God desire all to be saved, a perplexing theological question comes to
00:00:47.840 | mind.
00:00:49.040 | If God indeed has two wills, one of desire and one of decree, which are both biblically
00:00:54.920 | affirmed, how then does his will of decree overrule, in a sense, his will of desire?
00:01:02.720 | If God's sovereignty is the foundation of his happiness, as in chapter one of your book
00:01:07.220 | Desiring God says, then it seems as if the two wills idea is somewhat insufficient in
00:01:12.760 | addressing texts such as 1 Timothy 2, 3-4.
00:01:16.680 | In other words, if God's sovereignty is the foundation of his happiness, how is it possible
00:01:22.120 | for his will of decree to act independent of his will of desire?
00:01:27.880 | Well let me see if I can help the listeners get into the discussion here, because this
00:01:33.720 | is probably landing on them with "huh?"
00:01:40.440 | Ethan is referring to an article I wrote, "Are There Two Wills in God?"
00:01:46.000 | And what I was trying to do is show that sometimes the Bible treats the will of God as his absolute
00:01:55.840 | sovereign decree by which he plans everything and sees to it that everything he plans comes
00:02:05.840 | to pass.
00:02:08.280 | And sometimes the Bible treats the will of God as something that he commands, but which
00:02:16.700 | in fact does not always come to pass.
00:02:21.000 | Let me give an example.
00:02:23.480 | In the Ten Commandments, it is clear that God commands, "Thou shalt not murder."
00:02:32.920 | So it's right to say God's will is that human beings not murder each other.
00:02:41.480 | And yet we know from Acts 4, verse 27-28, that Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentile
00:02:50.400 | soldiers and the peoples of Israel on Good Friday did, quote—this is what the Bible
00:02:58.160 | says—they did whatever your hand, God, and your plan—that is, your will—had predestined
00:03:06.760 | to take place.
00:03:07.760 | Now what's that?
00:03:09.400 | Well, namely, they murdered Jesus.
00:03:12.640 | So in another sense, it was God's will that his Son die at the hands of murderous, sinning
00:03:22.840 | people.
00:03:24.080 | God willed the murder of his Son.
00:03:27.600 | It's written through the Old Testament.
00:03:30.320 | It's written in the New Testament.
00:03:32.880 | The death of Jesus at the hand of sinning murderers was the will of God.
00:03:39.240 | So even though the Ten Commandments says, "Thou shalt not murder."
00:03:43.800 | So when I speak of two wills in God, I'm simply describing what I find in Scripture.
00:03:49.440 | And of course, hundreds of theologians before me in the centuries of church history have
00:03:54.840 | seen the same thing, and I'm simply using the language that has been developed to describe
00:04:00.680 | these two wills.
00:04:02.080 | We can call them the will of command and the will of decree—that would be one way.
00:04:07.720 | Or we could call them the revealed will of God and the sovereign will of God.
00:04:15.720 | These terms simply refer to the fact that sometimes the will of God—the phrase "will
00:04:23.080 | of God"—refers to the sovereign plan of God that always comes to pass, and sometimes
00:04:29.400 | the phrase "will of God" refers to what he commands, which does not always come to
00:04:34.880 | pass.
00:04:35.880 | Now, Ethan is simply making explicit the fact that sometimes the Bible talks about God desiring
00:04:43.680 | something that in fact he does not decree to happen.
00:04:49.360 | For example, he refers to 1 Timothy 2.4.
00:04:53.720 | This is a very famous text.
00:04:56.800 | God desires all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
00:05:04.760 | And yet, just a few chapters later in 2 Timothy 2.24 and 25, Paul says this, "The Lord's
00:05:14.200 | servant should be correcting his opponents with gentleness.
00:05:20.200 | God may perhaps grant them to repent, leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may
00:05:28.200 | come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to
00:05:32.200 | do his will."
00:05:33.800 | So if we put those two texts together, 1 Timothy 2.4 and 2 Timothy 2.25, what we see is that
00:05:44.160 | on the one hand, God desires all people to repent and come to a knowledge of the truth
00:05:51.600 | and be saved, and on the other hand, he may or may not grant them to repent and come to
00:05:58.800 | a knowledge of the truth and be saved.
00:06:01.400 | And of course, this is not the only passage where we're told that all human beings are
00:06:07.600 | dead and helpless in their trespasses and sins, and only God can deliver them.
00:06:14.560 | So Ethan asks two questions that he's troubled about.
00:06:19.240 | One, does God's will of decree overrule, in a sense, his will of desire?
00:06:26.840 | And two, he asks, if God's sovereignty is the foundation of his happiness, how is it
00:06:35.720 | possible for his will of decree to act independent of his will of desire?
00:06:44.000 | Now, the answer to the first question is this.
00:06:47.640 | It's not helpful to speak of God's will of decree overruling his desire, because that
00:06:55.800 | implies a conflict or tension in God.
00:07:01.120 | And to be sure, the view that I am describing has been mocked as a kind of divine schizophrenia.
00:07:09.080 | I think it's better to say that God's sovereign will or his will of decree incorporates—not
00:07:16.760 | overrules—incorporates, includes his desires, even the ones that do not result in action.
00:07:26.160 | He wills this, just like he wills what does come to pass.
00:07:32.040 | We are always prone to drag God down to the level of our own experience, since we can
00:07:39.120 | only imagine ourselves being continually frustrated in such a situation.
00:07:44.360 | But in the mysterious infiniteness of God's complexity, that's not the case.
00:07:51.840 | He's not frustrated.
00:07:53.800 | I'm not sure what Ethan's second question means.
00:07:58.280 | Here it is again.
00:07:59.600 | If God's sovereignty is the foundation of his happiness, how is it possible for his
00:08:07.440 | will of decree to act independent of his will of desire?
00:08:15.920 | My response is, these two wills are not—never are—independent.
00:08:23.480 | In the one unified, perfect counsel of God's wisdom, it is wise to God—it is wise—that
00:08:34.800 | we both desire something to happen, and will it not to happen.
00:08:42.200 | Both of those exist harmoniously, not independently, perfect integration, perfect harmony in God's
00:08:51.920 | mysterious, perfect, infinitely complex counsel.
00:08:58.040 | There's no idea here of independence of one will from the other.
00:09:02.560 | So let me close with just an example, because Scripture here is so much more important than
00:09:07.200 | my effort to put it together.
00:09:09.040 | One more verse that to me is provocative and pastorally incredibly helpful.
00:09:15.960 | It's Lamentations 3.32 and 33.
00:09:19.160 | Jeremiah is talking, and he's describing the sufferings of Jerusalem under siege, horrible
00:09:26.960 | suffering.
00:09:28.320 | And this is what he says, "Though the Lord cause grief," so mark that, "Though the Lord
00:09:35.720 | cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love."
00:09:43.600 | And here's the amazing statement, verse 33, "For he does not afflict us from his heart,
00:09:53.840 | or grieve the children of men."
00:09:57.160 | In other words, God is causing the grief, and it is not coming from his heart.
00:10:06.360 | Very, very interesting.
00:10:08.360 | God decrees that certain things happen, which in some sense are not from his heart, that
00:10:14.680 | is, not his desire, which is a picture of the same divine dynamics as 1 Timothy 2.4.
00:10:26.100 | He desires all to be saved, even though no one deserves to be saved, and yet in his freedom
00:10:35.000 | and wisdom he does not decree for all to be saved.
00:10:40.960 | The sovereign will of God and the will of God's command, the decree and the desire,
00:10:49.640 | are in perfect harmony in the high counsels of God.
00:10:54.640 | Neither is independent, neither is overruled.
00:10:58.760 | This is just part of the mystery of what it means to be a sovereign and a loving God.
00:11:07.440 | That is a fascinating passage indeed.
00:11:09.320 | Again, that was Lamentations 3:32-33, if you want to look that up.
00:11:14.240 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for rooting your understanding of God's sovereignty
00:11:17.800 | back time and time and time again into the text of Scripture.
00:11:22.720 | So helpful.
00:11:23.880 | There's no other way we can speak on these things with any authority at all apart from
00:11:28.680 | Scripture.
00:11:29.680 | So thank you for your model.
00:11:30.680 | And thank you for listening and thank you for struggling along to make sense of this
00:11:33.680 | question.
00:11:34.680 | I hope the answer was helpful.
00:11:36.080 | You may need to listen to this episode a couple of times, and there's never any shame in that.
00:11:40.960 | So thank you for listening and making this podcast a part of your week.
00:11:44.160 | Three times a week we publish and you can subscribe to our audio feeds and search our
00:11:48.040 | past episodes in our archive.
00:11:49.400 | Even reach us by email with a question of your own all through our online home at DesiringGod.org.
00:11:53.840 | Well, for a lot of us, Pastor John, you are a model and a very compelling example of a
00:12:01.800 | man who prays daily and who prays corporately in his local church.
00:12:07.680 | So how do you structure your prayer life and how have you done it over the years?
00:12:11.480 | That's the question on the docket for you next time we meet on Wednesday.
00:12:15.360 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, Pastor John, and I will see you then.
00:12:18.400 | Bye.
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