God’s Will in 3-D

Yesterday’s Old Testament reading raised some interesting questions for me about the will of God. God’s prophet, Elijah, gets in trouble with Israel’s King Ahab because Elijah told Ahab there wouldn’t be any rain for the next few years. In order to protect Elijah, God sends Elijah outside of Israel to stay with a widow who, with her son, is about to prepare their last meal. They have no more food. Elijah tells her that if she feeds him first, her jar of flour and jug of oil will never be empty until the rain comes again.

What I find interesting is that God had said to Elijah: “I have commanded a widow in that place to supply you with food.” Well, someone apparently forgot to tell the widow. When Elijah shows up, she seems completely surprised. Instead of being able to reference a prior telegram from God, Elijah has to bribe her to get a meal.

So what does it mean that God “commanded” the widow to help Elijah? How is it a command if the message never got to her?

Fortunately, the widow’s jar and jug never did go empty, and so Elijah’s presence in the widow’s household was quite a boon to her; that is, until one day her son became ill and died. The woman is understandably upset and says to Elijah, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?”

Elijah tells the widow, “Give me your son,” and then takes the son into his own room and places him on his bed. Elijah cries out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought tragedy also upon this widow I am staying with, by causing her son to die?” Without waiting for an answer, Elijah stretches himself out on top of the boy three times and cries to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to him!” We’re told that the Lord heard Elijah’s cry and that the boy’s life returned to him.

Close call.

So, again, what does it mean that God commanded the widow to do something she never heard him commanding her to do; and was Elijah right when he suggested that God “caused” the widow’s son to die?

Like I said, all this raises some interesting questions about the will of God, questions I sense a lot of us wrestle with. Over the last few months I’ve  been doing quite a bit of thinking about the will of God, especially as it relates to sickness and healing, but also to all the tragedy and suffering in our world. It’s been helpful for me to start to think about the will of God in 3-D, i.e. to see it as three-dimensional, or at least three-dimensional, and not the flat, mechanical, linear thing Christians sometimes make it out to be.

The first dimension of God’s will could be described as Sovereign Will. Put simply, there is nothing that happens without God either causing it or allowing it. In other words, nothing gets by God. So if something happens, God’s “decision” must have had something to do with it. He may not want it. The decision may break his own heart, but for reasons too deep and complex for us to grasp, he decides to either allow or inflict pain (for ancient people, there was no difference between the two), as well as to bring blessing or to allow blessing, often whether or not the victim or recipient deserves it. It’s not that God is capricious. He is good and just and loving. In fact, he is entirely trustworthy. He loves the individual as much as he loves the world, but he also loves the world as much as he loves the individual, which means that he has to take many things into consideration as he oversees all of history and the whole universe — including the freedom that love requires. While he is just, his justice takes the long view, and is applied not only to our present circumstances, but to our whole story, a story that extends to all of eternity.

Which transitions us into the second dimension of God’s will: his Ultimate or Purposeful Will. It’s because God’s will isn’t just sovereign but purposeful that we can say to ourselves at any time, “The story isn’t over yet.” Most of the time God’s will isn’t so much trying to pay us back as to pay us forward. Our present difficulties are “resourcing” us for what’s ahead. God is using all things to eventually bring about a future that exceeds anything we can imagine.

It’s natural to assume that our present circumstances are our “just desserts” (the thing we deserve) for past actions. It’s like the widow said to Elijah after her son died, “Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” It is this orientation to the past that the disciples were stuck in when they asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus’ response is instructive: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” The disciples wanted to focus on the cause, while Jesus focused on the purpose. Jesus doesn’t deny his Father’s sovereignty, i.e that the buck ultimately stops with God. But instead of focusing on the man’s supposed past sins (or God’s supposed cruelty), Jesus directs his disciples’ focus to God’s ultimate desire and purpose, which is the restoration of all things. That’s God’s work. That’s what God is ultimately about.

God doesn’t just rule over this world, he is guiding it in a particular direction. He intends to heal it and restore it. When Tim Vink led our healing conference last June, he stated that God’s will is always to heal. We can say unequivocally that this is always God’s ultimate will. That’s what he wants. That’s what he’s moving everything towards. It may not always happen right away. In other words, it may not be his sovereign will for this particular moment. We also know that what God ultimately wants for us isn’t going to completely happen before Jesus returns. In the meantime, God promises to use everything that happens now, even the tragic things, even the evil things, to gradually move the world in the direction of healing and restoration. Even crosses become resurrections. This is the basis for our Christian hope. Things are headed somewhere, and it is ultimately toward a good end.

Part of that good end is making all of us like Jesus. Instead of punishing us for our character, most of the time God is causing or allowing things to develop our character. Again, the cause may be less important than the purpose.

The third dimension of God’s will is his Active Will. God’s will doesn’t just make decisions (i.e. his Sovereign Will) — decisions that are informed by his plans for the future (i.e. his Ultimate Will). God and his will are also actively and constantly engaging with our lives. God is continually interacting with our human choices and actions, as well as with the “spontaneous” activities of his creation, to accomplish his ultimate purposes. God both honors our freedom and works with it. He also involves us in the carrying out of his will. For example, his active will issues commands and commandments that require our obedience. And when we don’t obey, he interacts with our disobedience — judging, correcting, forgiving, circumventing, turning evil to good, making sure that ultimately his kingdom will come and his ultimate will will eventually be done on earth as in heaven. God is no absentee landlord. Ours is a hands-on God.

So that’s how I am coming to understand God’s will. It’s not that God has three separate wills. He only has one will, but it’s three-dimensional. I don’t know if it helps you to think about God’s will in this way, but it’s been useful for me. Let me know what you think.

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