The Will of God Part 2

The Will of God: Divine Decree and Prescriptive Will

We continue in our study begun this morning in the will of God, this evening in Isaiah chapter 55. Isaiah chapter 55. Before we look to God's words and consider once again the subject of God's will,.

Let us ask him to bless our time together.

Our gracious Heavenly Father, in these few moments here at the end of this Lord's Day,.

We would ask that once again you would meet with us,.

That you would lift up our hearts and our minds,.

That what we would study this evening would cause us to know you better and to be better servants of yours in this coming week. We pray in Christ's name.

We began this morning looking at the subject of the will of God, and we especially were seeking to enter into and struggle with a difficult topic, and that is the relationship of what we see in Scripture regarding two aspects of God's will.

Aspects that are introduced to us by the fact that God is completely unlike we are. God is eternal. God is the creator of all things. Everything that exists does so at his will and for his purpose, and that is not something that any one of us can say of ourselves by any stretch of the imagination.

And so we are sensitive to the fact that when we speak of our will, our desires, our wishes, that we speak as mere creatures. And the tendency is for us to transfer our ways of speech and thought onto God.

We cannot avoid doing so, but we must as best we can seek to minimize that and to limit that and to filter that through the lens of the Word of God itself, which raises our contemplation, raises our thinking about God beyond anything that we could manage for ourselves.

And so we consider the fact that there are clear texts of Scripture that speak of God's divine decree, that he accomplishes all of his will, that he has created this universe to a particular end that glorifies him.

We even heard the pagan king Nebuchadnezzar give testimony to the fact that there is nothing that can thwart the purpose of God, that he accomplishes all his holy will not only amongst the hosts of heaven, but he also does so amongst the inhabitants of earth.

No one can ward off his hand or ask him, why have you acted in this way? Why have you done this? We saw that there are so many texts. We didn't even begin to enumerate them, but we especially in this congregation well know Psalm 135, 6 and verses like that.

They clearly teach that God has an absolute sovereignty over all of his creation. And as the psalmist says in Psalm 33, while men's plans will be frustrated, God's plans will always be established. But on the other hand, we also recognize that there are texts that clearly indicate that God, for example, sends prophets to Israel.

He is gracious toward them. His hand is outstretched to them. There are the many places in the prophets where you have God calling to a stiff-necked and rebellious people, calling them to come to him.

And so we discuss the prescriptive will of God, that will of God that is revealed in his law, that will of God that is all we can be held accountable to because we are finite time-bound creatures. We cannot see the future.

We do not have a grasp of God's decree as it unfolds in the future. We can see his decree in the past because it's what forms the very fabric of time. And so we can see what God decreed in the past, but we don't know what that decree is in the future.

The only light that we are given is God's prescriptive will. And we mention the fact that that prescriptive will found in his law, found in his word, which tells us how we are to live, what we are to strive for, that we are to strive to proclaim his truth, that we are to strive to apply that to our lives.

God's will for us is our sanctification, that we are to be made more and more like Christ. That that prescriptive will reflects God's holy character. It reflects his very being. And so that prescriptive will says that all men everywhere should repent.

And so we proclaim that. Now at the same time, we recognize that the Bible also says that true saving repentance is the work of the Spirit of God. That to submit to the law of God requires you to be a spiritual man.

It requires the work of the Spirit of God, the act of regeneration. The true saving faith is a gift that comes from God. We see these things. And so we don't just take one part of the word of God and throw something else out.

We have to interpret all of it as a consistent whole. And when we do so then, we see that there is the prescriptive will that all men everywhere repent. And so we can say that God desires the repentance of all men.

But at the same time, we have to recognize that that doesn't mean that God has willed to fulfill all that his prescriptive will would say is his desire. And this is where God's different than you and I are.

We only have one aspect to our desire, to our will, because we are time-bound creatures. We are not omnipotent. We are not omniscient. We have desires for the future. But whether they will be fulfilled, well, it's all in the hand of God.

But God is the creator of all things, including all events in time. And so we recognize, for example, that it was God's intention that Judas be the son of perdition. And that there was a particular office, a particular function that Judas had to fulfill because the greatest act by which God has glorified himself, the greatest act that was determined from time immemorial was in the incarnation that aimed toward fulfillment of the cross of Calvary itself.

And so there was one who had to function in the way that he functioned to bring about the betrayal of Christ into the hands of his enemies. And so we can, on the one hand, speak of this general prescriptive will, but we must recognize that it wasn't God's will that Joseph's brothers repent before he was sold into slavery because God wanted to save many people alive in a particular way that would resound to his glory.

And there are so many events. The whole situation with Cyrus the king and the releasing of the children of Israel. We think of Esther. I mean, almost any story in the Old Testament we can think of. When we think of its outcome, we recognize that there were certain things that could happen and certain things that could not.

And certainly when we look at the subject of the crucifixion of Christ, we look at all those people that were involved. We think of the characters of the Pharisees. And there were different kinds of Pharisees.

And there were more and less hypocritical Pharisees. And yet they all had to come together. They had to function in a particular way.

You had crazy Herod.

You had Pilate, the evil man who was more concerned about his political future than anything else. You had the Roman soldiers that didn't really care less one way or the other.

They just did what they were told.

You had all these people coming together to bring about at the exact time God intended, because certainly we know how many times in the Gospel of John in particular, the hour has not yet come, the hour has not yet come, the hour has come.

And this all comes together.

And we cannot escape the reality that there is a divine decree. Call it a secret will if you wish. It is something that God does not reveal to us except in providence, in the outworking of it in time.

And we can say on the one hand, it's God's prescriptive will that no one would ever murder the Son of God. I mean, that's a given, is it not? And yet, it was His decree that by the very death of the Son of God, He would bring about His own glorification.

Now, some people, they get, to be quite honest with you, a little squeamish. They get a little squeamish about the extent of God's sovereign decree. And so, what they prefer to refer to rather than a sovereign decree that actually determines events in time.

Now, it determines those events through the use of means. And it, as we said this morning, doesn't mean that, you know, on the morning that Herod got up and that day he would be meeting with Jesus prior to His crucifixion, that Herod was just a wonderful man and he loved God and he loved to do what was right.

And then all of a sudden, God said, well, I need someone to be involved in the crucifixion. And so, I'm going to turn Herod into a nasty man and I'm going to put a big divine gun to his back.

No.

The reality is that God had been restraining the madness of Herod for a long time. God had been holding him back from being everything he could be. Same thing with Pilate. Same thing with the Pharisees.

Same thing with the Roman soldiers. There is the restraining hand of God. We are talking about every single one of these individuals were under His wrath and He could have brought them out of existence at any moment justly.

But He does not for His own purposes. And so, we emphasize the fact that when God uses means, it's not like He has to instill into the means some kind of horrible impulse to do something they wouldn't do otherwise.

But there are some people that get, well, just a little squeamish about some of the extent to which the Word of God goes in describing God's sovereignty. And so, they want to talk about God's permissive will.

Now, if all you mean by that is that God permits certain men to act in certain ways in certain situations under His divine decree, well, okay, fine. I mean, you could say that God permitted Pilate to do what he did.

But the problem is, when we talk about permission in that way, it almost sounds like, well, God permitted it, but it could have been otherwise. God permitted it, but maybe Pilate might not have wanted to cooperate.

And so, God would have had to find another way around the situation. Bring somebody else into the situation or something like that. If at any point the certainty of God's decree becomes questionable, becomes malleable in the hands of the philosophers, that's when we have to say, no, now you've gone beyond what the Bible clearly teaches.

I normally don't read you long quotes, but this one seemed to be rather appropriate, and I think it would be helpful in regards to this idea. From other passages in which God has said to draw or bend Satan himself and all the reprobate to his will, a more difficult question arises.

For the carnal mind can scarcely comprehend how, when acting by their means, he contracts no taint from their impurity, nay, how in a common operation he is exempt from all guilt and can justly condemn his own ministers.

Hence, a distinction has been invented between doing and permitting, because to many it seemed altogether inexplicable how Satan and all the wicked are so under the hand and authority of God that he directs their malice to whatever end he pleases and employs their iniquity to execute his judgments.

The modesty of those who are thus alarmed at the appearance of absurdity might perhaps be excused. Did they not endeavor to vindicate the justice of God from every semblance of stigma by defending an untruth?

It seems absurd that man should be blinded by the will and command of God and yet be forthwith punished for his blindness. Hence, recourse is had to the evasion that this is done only by the permission and not also by the will of God.

He himself, however, openly declaring that he does this repudiates the evasion, that men do nothing save the secret instigation of God and do not discuss and deliberate on anything but what he has previously decreed with himself and brings to pass by his secret direction is proved by numberless clear passages of scripture.

What we formally quoted from the Psalms, the effect that he does whatever pleases him, that would be Psalm 135, 6, certainly extends to all the actions of men. If God is the arbiter of peace and war, as is there said, and that without any exception, who will venture to say that men are born along at random with a blind impulse while he is unconscious or quiescent?

But the matter will be made clearer by special examples. From the first chapter of Job we learn that Satan appears in the presence of God to receive his orders, just as do the angels who obey spontaneously.

The manner and the end are different, but still the fact is that he cannot attempt anything without the will of God. But though afterwards his power to afflict the saints seems to be only a bare permission, yet as the sentence is true, the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.

As it pleads the Lord, so it has been done. We infer that God was the author of that trial of which Satan and wicked robbers were merely the instruments. Satan's aim is to drive the saints to madness by despair.

The Sabians cruelly and wickedly make a sudden incursion to rob another of his goods. Job acknowledges that he was deprived of all his property and brought to poverty because such was the pleasure of God.

Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of his judgments. God wills that the perfidious Ahab should be deceived. The devil offers his agency for that purpose and is sent with a definite command to be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.

2 Kings 22 .20. If the blinding and infatuation of Ahab is a judgment from God, the fiction of bare permission is at an end for it would be ridiculous for a judge only to permit and not also to decree what he wishes to be done at the very time that he commits the execution of it to his ministers.

The Jews' purpose to destroy Christ. Pilate and the soldiers indulge them in their fury. Yet the disciples confess in solemn prayer that all the wicked did nothing but what the hand and counsel of God had decreed.

Acts 4 .28.

Just as Peter had previously said in his discourse that Christ was delivered to death by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.

Acts 2 .23.

In other words, that God, to whom all things are known from the beginning, had determined what the Jews had executed. He repeats the same thing elsewhere. Those things which God before had showed by the mouth of all of his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he has so fulfilled.

Acts 4 .18.

And it continues on from there to give many, many other examples of this. And so we can understand why someone might be concerned and might want to try to find a way around this, but we must allow the word of God to speak with clarity to these issues.

Holding Scripture Together Without Fatalism or Denial

So how do we put them together?

There have been those, there are those to this very day who cannot find a balancing point. They can't. They cannot remain balanced. There are those who go off on one side and dive head first into fatalism.

Well, whatever will be, will be. Que sera, sera. And then there are others who say, I simply cannot and will not worship a God like that that you have revealed to me here. Well, I want a God that thinks and acts like me.

And so I'm just not going to believe that God is sovereign over all things. And that's just not the God I worship.

I won't worship such a God.

We want to have balance. We don't want to fall off on either side. We want to allow all of God's word to speak to us and we want to be balanced. We want to be able to be those who are passionate in our proclamation.

And there are some that become so ethereal in their thoughts, so philosophical in their speculations, that they cannot be passionate in their proclamation. I mentioned this morning a text that seems to me to put all of this together.

It's Isaiah chapter 55. The book of Isaiah speaks so much of the sovereignty of God. And God has, in Isaiah 40 -48, brought the false gods to trial and He's demonstrated that He's in charge of the future.

He's in charge of the past. All these strong statements about God's absolute sovereignty and decree, it's right there. And yet, you have Isaiah 55, which some have described as the gospel of John and Isaiah.

Let's listen to what it says. It's not a long chapter. Oh, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. And you who have no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.

Why do you spend money for what is not bread and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me and eat what is good and delight yourself in abundance. Incline your ear and come to me. Listen that you may live and I will make an everlasting covenant with you according to the faithful mercies shown to David.

Behold, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. Behold, you will call a nation you do not know and a nation which knows you not will run to you because the Lord your God, even the Holy One of Israel, for He has glorified you.

Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake His way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to the Lord and He will have compassion on him and to our God for He will abundantly pardon.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, declares the Lord, for the heavens are higher than the earth. So are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there without watering the earth.

And making a bear and sprout.

And furnishing seed the sower and bread the eater, so will my word be which goes forth from my mouth. It will not return to me empty without accomplishing what I desire and without succeeding the matter for which I sent it.

For you will go out with joy and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills will break forth and the shouts of joy before you and all the trees of the field will clap their hands. Instead of the thorn bush, the cypress will come up.

Instead of the nettle, the myrtle will come up and it will be a memorial to the Lord, an everlasting sign which will not be cut off.". Here is a beautiful section of Scripture and it has been used many, many times in very evangelistic contexts.

Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. And you who have no money, come buy and eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and without cost. There's no limitation to the proclamation of this Gospel. There's no evidence that Isaiah goes, well, I would like to lay out the Gospel for all of you.

I'd like to lay out this call that God has to come to the waters. There's everyone who thirsts, but you see, I can only proclaim that to the elect. And so I'm going to ask you to come up here and I'm going to have an interview with each one of you.

And I'm going to inspect your fruit. I'm going to see if there's some signs that I can discern that maybe God's dealing with your heart. And you, those that I see, I'm going to take you over here and I'll talk to you, but the rest, I have nothing for you.

There's no evidence of that. There is a promiscuity in the proclamation here. Let it go out to everyone. God has not told us who the elect are. God has not revealed to us how we can look into the hearts of men.

And though we may try, most of the time that we try, we fail. And so, just as God's prescriptive will is that we are to preach to all men everywhere, you are to repent. We are not given any warrant to try to look for signs and limit the proclamation.

We proclaim the Gospel to everyone. Did you notice how many times in this text, though, there was a delimiter? Not on the one proclaiming the message, but on God who was going to make the covenants and who was going to respond.

It's right there.

It's amazing how obvious it is and how many people miss it. Who's it addressed to? Everyone who what? Thirst. Everyone who? Hunger. What's one of the biggest difficulties we face in evangelism in Western culture today?

Yeah, right here in our own country, but oh, I get to travel a good bit.

I go down to Australia.

And I talk to the people down there, the minister in Australia. You know what they say to me?

These days, it's one at a time.

The ground is so hard. There's such a secularism. People are just so satisfied with their little lives and gathering some little things around them.

They don't seem to have any sense of eternity.

They don't seem to have any sense of their own mortality. They don't seem to have any sense of the coming judgment. They seem insensible to these things. In other words, they're not thirsty. They're not hungry.

And when the call goes out, it seems you're casting seed.

Where does that seed land?

Sometimes it lands on the hardened soil. And we know hardened soil in Arizona. I mean, you might want to plant something, but you've got to get a chisel to just break through the surface.

To get it down there someplace.

It's hard.

Everyone who thirsts come to the waters. You who have no money come by and eat. Why do you spend money for what is not bread? Your wages for what does not satisfy? And yet, there are so many people. That's all they want to do.

And you can talk to them until you're blue in the face, but you and I both know unless the Spirit of God breaks up that ground, unless the Spirit of God helps them understand what thirst is, what hunger is, what real satisfaction is,.

They just look at us like,.

What's wrong with you people? Why do you spend your time doing the things you're doing? Man, there's so much you could do on a Sunday, you know. They just don't understand. They seem absolutely senseless.

Even as death approaches.

Isn't it amazing?

Even as their body ages.

And the aches and pains come and the stuff stops working.

That used to work just fine.

Those are signs that God has given to us saying, you're not going to live forever.

And they're just senseless.

We proclaim the message to everyone,.

But we recognize.

Not everyone is going to incline their ear and listen. Not everyone is going to listen that you may live. Because we know when God says in verse 3, listen that you may live and I will make an everlasting covenant with you.

Do you hear that word listen? When I read it, did it remind you of something?

Remember John 6?

There's a description. There's a description. Right after Jesus says in John 6 .44,.

He says,.

No one can come to Me.

That was back in 6 .67.

No one can come to Me as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit.

I will reason with the last day.

No one has the ability. All the Father gives me. That's how it started. But then we have this inability in John 6 .44. No one can come to Me unless something first happens. Unless the Father who sent Me draws them and I will raise them up on the last day.

And then verse 45 gives a description of what the drawing of the Father to the Son is all about. And it describes the one who's drawn.

As the one who hears, listens,.

And learns from the Father.

Why do you not hear, Jesus asks elsewhere in John, because you don't belong to God. Listen, incline your ear, and come to Me. Who can come to Me? The one the Father has given to Me. Listen that you may live and I will make an everlasting covenant with you.

That new covenant. That covenant where He writes His law upon the heart. You see, God has chosen to use you and I.

To cast the seed. To proclaim the message.

And we spread that seed indiscriminately. And we love doing it. We love it because we love God. We love the message and we know there is someone who cast that seed and it sprang up in our hearts. And so we can have love for others.

We want to see them come to know true life, but we don't pretend to be fruit inspectors. We don't pretend to have an ability to do something God doesn't give us to do. And we know sometimes that seed is cast and it lands on ground and the ground's not happy.

How dare you? I am offended!

If you love God,.

You love His Gospel, and you love to proclaim it to others because He's commanded you to do it. And you love the fact that He used that very same means to bring you into His presence. And so with unfeigned passion, you proclaim the truth.

Jesus Christ is Lord. The wages of sin is death. But there is a way to peace with God. Give ear. Listen. There's life for those who will turn and hear and God will make an everlasting covenant with you according to faithful mercy shown to David.

The text goes on to talk about how His Word will always accomplish what He intends it to accomplish. But our thoughts are not His thoughts. Our ways are not His ways. His ways and His thoughts are above us.

And so here, isn't it interesting, even in the midst of those texts where you have the promiscuous proclamation,.

Everyone who thirsts,.

God so loves the world.

Consistent revelation.

That God is still the focus of what He Himself is doing. It's not about us.

It's about God. It's about what He's done.

Even in John 3 .16 that everyone believing might have eternal life. The text doesn't just stop there. It talks about those that don't believe.

The wrath of God abides upon.

And here, even in the midst of everyone who thirsts, come! Every reformed person should be able to say with passion, there has never been a single person who has turned in faith and repentance to Jesus Christ, but has found Him to be a perfect and powerful Savior.

Because that's true.

We just allow the rest of the Bible to speak. We recognize the desperate situation.

That man finds himself in.

He is a slave to sin. And before anyone can satiate their thirst and their hunger, chains have to be removed.

Spiritual life has to be given.

Grace has to operate and to reduce those things to some kind of peanut butter prevenient grace. God's just trying equally with everybody. He fails a lot, but He tries hard. It doesn't glorify God. It actually doesn't solve any of the problems.

People think it does.

It only solves them on a very surface level.

So what do we see?

We see that God's Word speaks to us.

Of God's prescriptive will.

It's in His law. He commands men everywhere to repent. He commands men everywhere to obey His law. To act as His creatures. Do not lie. Do not steal. Do not kill. Honor your father and your mother. He commands us to do these things.

And if we would but do them, we would experience life.

But we don't.

In fact, we love our sin.

And so thanks be, there is a secret will. There is the decree of God whereby He glorifies Himself. He accomplishes exactly what He seeks to accomplish all to the praise of His glorious grace. This is the apostle Paul put it in Ephesians 1.

And so when we talk with our friends and family, and they struggle, they're squeamish, they haven't been instructed in these things, we of all people need to be very clear and very quick to give an answer.

Because truly when you think about it, all we're talking about here.

Is allowing all of the Scripture to speak.

We are seeking to be balanced. We are seeking to hear everything.

That the Word of God says to us.

And to worship God as He has revealed Himself to be. Because as I said this morning, I can hardly think of any more amazing thing than when people question the wisdom of the Holy Spirit of God to have placed these things in the Scriptures.

Oh, it causes people problems. You know what? When people have to struggle with God's truth and admit, oh, there's some things here that are hard. It's when they work through those things. Maybe not in one sitting.

Maybe not in one year. Maybe not in one lifetime. But when they struggle with these things, their faith in the Word of God is tested and tried and refined and the depth of their understanding of the God they worship is increased in a way that nothing else can ever give to you.

If you have not had to struggle and wrestle with what is found in the Word of God, I hope now you will. Because it's a precious thing to bow the knee to the revelation of God's Word and to experience the ministry of the Spirit as He comes and testifies to you, this is God's truth.

It's a precious thing. And I hope and pray we will continue to do that.

As we work through the testimony.

Of God's Word in our lives.

Let's pray together.

Indeed, our Heavenly Father,.

We would pray that this day.

As we have considered Your Word, that Lord, by Your Spirit, You would confirm in our hearts Your truth. If anything has come from man, let no one be troubled by it. But Lord, if we are troubled by Your truth,.

Trouble us more.

May we truly wrestle with it and be changed by it in the process, and may we come to know You in a greater and more personal way. We thank You for Your Word.

We thank You for the Gospel.

And for all these things in Christ's name,.

Amen.