Meditating on the Will of God: 8: The Nature of God’s Will
Rom 12:1,2 I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will.
These verses from Romans 12 bear looking at again. Previously we considered something of verse 1, this call to give ourselves over to God so that He can do with us what He wills. There are two aspects to that – what He wills in terms of changing our character, i.e. what He can do in us, and then what He wills in respect of what He can do through us. Perhaps before we go considering those two things further, we will consider His will as it is described by Paul in the second verse.
At the end of the verse he describes God’s will as “good pleasing and perfect” Now on the assumption that we so often take for granted the words we read in scripture, let’s analyse each of those words. First of all, ‘good’. Good simply means fine, igh quality, excellent, morally excellent and if something is good, we approve of it. When we come to understand God’s will – and an assumption behind each of these studies is that we do not naturally understand it but have to think about it and seek it, and it comes by revelation – we will see that it is good.
But it is also ‘pleasing’ and we have just said that we will approve it, but more than merely approving it we will see its excellence and that will create an emotion within us that we describe as pleasing, we’re feeling good about it. Now if we take a tangent and remind ourselves that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8,16) then everything God thinks, says and does is an expression of love. Now love might be described as warm affection, attachment, liking, benevolence or strong benign feelings for us and in God it shows “selfless, sacrificial, unrestricted good will towards us. If that is so – and it is – then if there is someone who constantly has for us “warm affection, attachment, liking, benevolence or strong benign feelings” for us and who shows “selfless, sacrificial, unrestricted good will towards us”, I think we can say without contradiction, we will be blessed by that, we will like that, and it will be pleasing to us.
Yet there is also a third description: “perfect”. Put in its most simple of terms, if something is ‘perfect’ it cannot be improved upon. When we come to understand the will of God we will come to see that there is no way that it could be improved upon. It is because we do not understand it that we find criticisms rising up within us, but once we come to see the fullness of His will we will understand that there is no way that whatever He did or didn’t do could be improved upon.
Now that is actually staggering when you come to think about it. Whatever it is that God has on His heart for us, is good, is pleasing and is the absolute best so there is no way it could be improved upon. I commented previously in a series on Romans in respect of these scriptures that if when we get to heaven God allows us to look back on our history through His eyes, we will never be able to criticise anything He has ever said or done or not done in respect of us. We don’t have the whole picture at the present and so sometimes it seems confusing or unclear, but when we see the whole picture and it becomes absolutely clear, we will say that what happened in respect of our lives was good, pleasant and perfect.
But we need to backtrack in these verses to note something important. Paul’s order is 1. Give yourself wholly to God, 2. Change your thinking to conform to God’s thinking, so that THEN 3. you will understand God’s good, pleasing and perfect will. In other words until you have been through the first two, you will not be able to come to the third one. The Christian life starts when we give ourselves over wholly to God for Him to save us, change us and then lead us throughout our lives. In the process of all of that, we then starting learning the truths of the Gospel and we start to understand that God has created His world in a particular way, and so it works best if we live according to the divine design.
We come to understand that part of the process of sanctification, us being changed into the likeness of Jesus, involves us changing our thinking to realise that He knows best, that He has a design for our lives that means the best being worked out in and through them. In all of this our thinking is being changed to conform to His and not to the self-centred and godless ways of thinking found in the fallen world. As this process develops within us, we come to ‘see’ what He is about and, even as we are doing in these studies, start to understand what His will is all about. The details may not always be clear and they will perhaps only be come clear as He reveals them in our relationship together with Him.
God knows what He is about. He sees everything, He sees the big picture – past, present and future – and He understands everything, how the thoughts, ideas, plans and ambitions of mankind work out. His wisdom is such that He also knows what He can do to promote what is best, within the context of the fallen world and within the context of our blindness and limited understanding because of the effects of sin. As He releases us from sin, He works to change our thinking from the patterns of thinking we had before we came to know Him, and bit by bit He wins our cooperation with Him as He seeks to work out the best for us. How amazing, how incredible, how wonderful! Hallelujah!
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