8 essential components for discerning God’s will

[Mark_Smith]

Can a person make a mistake in decisions. YES!

Saying “God will turn it for good” doesn’t help me at least. Take my example. How many of you desire to benefit from what I have learned about cosmology/big bang, etc. I’ll tell you. ALMOST NONE. It does no good. How many of my fellow scientists care about what Genesis 1 says about creation. ALMOST NONE. It is pointless. I don’t believe this is what God intended for me in any “perfect” sense. I made the decisions that led me here. I don’t hide under the canopy of the sovereignty of God. I messed up, and so did those who gave or didn’t give me advice.

I disagree with your first sentence in the 2nd paragraph, strongly.

While you might have “messed up,” as you put it (though none of us, including the ones who gave you advice, are in the position to know or tell you that), God knows where you are now. While most of us here aren’t going to take the conclusions of science over the Bible where they conflict, I still think your knowledge of science (a PhD in Physics, no less) will give you a unique perspective if you ever chose a career path in the ministry. If you can’t choose ministry for one reason or another at this point, I still would suggest that you can go forward for God right where you are (i.e. we are all in ministry, even if not vocationally), and there is no reason to consider yourself practically useless to God because you might have chosen wrongly or received bad advice. Paul made lots of bad choices before he became the man God wanted him to be, and many other men of God made hashes out of their lives after they knew and followed God. They were still able to move forward and have God use them greatly. The best part about our sins being under the blood is that God gives us the grace to choose what he wants from that point on, and each time we confess.

I’m not the kind of creationist ICR or AiG is looking for. I’ll leave it at that. But thanks for the suggestion. Seriously.

dcbiii, what I meant by the comment you object to is God is sovereign, true. But we individually make choices. I believe that is true. Now, God can turn things for good, but I think we “change our trajectory” based off of decisions we make. I don’t think God pre-planned every decision we make for us. We pick them. Some lead us in directions that are hard to recover from. God can work with anything, but some decisions permanently limit where you can go.

For example, if a man improperly divorced his wife, he is permanently disqualified from ministry. Or if a man commits a felony that limits what he can do. Perhaps a man could have used his intellectual talents to be the fundamentalist writer/thinker listed on another thread, but instead he wasted that intellect on quantum field theory and cosmology. You never get that opportunity back!

I’ll leave it at that.

A. W. Pink. I have been reading his Iain Murray biography. Do you really think that God’s best plan for Pink was for him to spend 20 years on some little island of the coast of England, isolated from the world and the church. Now, God did use him to write some good books, but what was lost?

[Mark_Smith]

I’m not the kind of creationist ICR or AiG is looking for. I’ll leave it at that. But thanks for the suggestion. Seriously.

​

Mark, you sound pretty sure about that. Is that based on your conversations here on SI? Or have you actually looked into it directly?

While I may not always agree with you, I don’t see why you couldn’t participate with those organizations or some other similar group. Just my two cents.

Paul

[Mark_Smith] dcbiii, what I meant by the comment you object to is God is sovereign, true. But we individually make choices. I believe that is true. Now, God can turn things for good, but I think we “change our trajectory” based off of decisions we make. I don’t think God pre-planned every decision we make for us. We pick them. Some lead us in directions that are hard to recover from. God can work with anything, but some decisions permanently limit where you can go.

I have been talking about the will of God the whole time.

Thank you for responding. I hear your argument all the time and it is very logical. So then God chooses everything? Everything is decreed by God before hand? You seem to be saying I have no real choice in anything. God decreed it all from eternity. Is that what you mean?

I have been trying to use my life as an example, but that distracts people. I should probably stop.

What bothers me is, lets say I make a big mistake in my life. An example would be divorce, that would preclude me from ministry. Did I pick that or was that God’s plan from the beginning? If I make a mistake I can deal with that. If God planned me to fail and disqualify myself…that is harder to deal with.

[Mark_Smith]

I have been talking about the will of God the whole time.

Thank you for responding. I hear your argument all the time and it is very logical. So then God chooses everything? Everything is decreed by God before hand? You seem to be saying I have no real choice in anything. God decreed it all from eternity. Is that what you mean?

I have been trying to use my life as an example, but that distracts people. I should probably stop.

What bothers me is, lets say I make a big mistake in my life. An example would be divorce, that would preclude me from ministry. Did I pick that or was that God’s plan from the beginning? If I make a mistake I can deal with that. If God planned me to fail and disqualify myself…that is harder to deal with.

How does that work out in a specific situation. You are living your life. A decision needs to be made, go left or right. Only God has free will, but you have to go in one direction. How does that work?

Are you saying there is really not a choice. God willed that you will go right, say. You will pick to go right, you have no freedom to go left.

Said another way, every decision has already been decreed, decided and pre-planned by God. You don’t really have a choice.

Mark, I agree with Chip that everything is under God’s sovereign control, including our mistakes and poor choices. As I may have mentioned before, it is helpful to know that there are two aspects to God’s will, his decretive will (sovereign will) and his revealed will (permissive will) (Deut. 29:29). In the first sense, EVERYTHING that happens is according to His will, even evil (there are too many Bible verses to cite; this theme runs throughout all of Scripture—just look at the death of Christ as one example). In the second sense, we can certainly go against his will by making decisions that are against what He has revealed in Scripture (which is why Jesus tells us to pray that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven).

So perhaps some of your life decisions have gone against God’s revealed will in Scripture (I don’t know for sure, just going off of what you seem to be saying). But NONE of your decisions have gone against God’s sovereign will. EVERYTHING you have done or that has been done to you, including the non-advice you received from the Southern Baptist pastor, is part of God’s sovereign plan for your life. Just think of Joseph—the actions of his brothers and Potiphar’s wife against him were definitely evil and against God’s revealed will (God doesn’t approve of kidnapping, slavery, false accusations, etc.), but they were all EXACTLY what God planned to happen to Joseph according to God’s sovereign will so that he could raise up Joseph as a leader in Egypt. This is precisely what Ps. 105:17 says, and what Joseph meant when he told his brothers “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Gen. 50:20).

I don’t know what God’s plan is for you, Mark, but I firmly believe that nothing that has happened to you has been a surprise to God or has been out of his control. In fact, I think God has sovereignly orchestrated everything in your life, good and bad, to bring you to where you are today and to make you into the person you are today. The question is, how does he want to use the person he has made you to be and the experiences he has brought into your life to make you more like Jesus Christ and to use those things to serve Him?

Don’t sit on the sidelines regretting how your life has gone. Ask God to help you serve Him in exactly the way He has planned for you.

[Chip Van Emmerik]

Actually Mark, that’s exactly what I am saying. The only individual who actually has free will is God. If His decisions are limited in any way, including by our choices, He is actually not sovereign. That’s the underlying thought, the only explanation for, verses like Ephesians 1:9.

Sorry Chip but I have to respond to your comment and yes I know that it does go back over and over old ground (I read a lot but comment only a little …)

It is explicitly clear from the Word from both God’s own mouth as well as Scriptural narratives that:

• God is ultimately sovereign
• man has the ability to make choices and will be held accountable as such

I don’t know how anyone could aim to try to win a debate arguing that a just God (i.e. with fairness and integrity) could in any way interfere in the choices of a person, limiting their ability to exercise free will, then hold then ultimately and eternally accountable for those choices …

Addressing my subject line “God’s Sovereignty = God Decreeing All That Occurs?” … from your comment it would appear that you and some others interpret God being sovereign as being equivalent to Him deciding and enacting every event that happens. This simply does not sync with what we understand of sovereignty in our common usage. Let me illustrate …

There is a king who is sovereign over his kingdom and is well informed (almost to the point of being omniscient) of all that is going on. He becomes aware of a group planning to revolt and overthrow him (which is against the “rules” of the kingdom). In his awareness of many aspects of his kingdom and in his ultimate wisdom, he allows this action to proceed, puts plans in place and responds accordingly, winning the victory (as he knew he would) and emphasizing his superiority. A few observations:

• he allowed actions to occur that were outside of the “rules” of his kingdom
• he did not actively cause the wrong to occur - it was the free will and choice of those in rebellion and they could and should be held ultimately responsible
• he permitted these actions to occur and responded in ultimate wisdom to bring about good (I’m thinking of Joseph and his brothers …)

I would suggest that at no point in the above narrative does the king in any way relinquish his sovereignty. In fact I would argue that by allowing the free will of others and still bringing about the ultimate goal he desired he demonstrated his ultimate superiority.

Can’t God’s sovereignty and man’s free will co-exist without us having to try to rationalize them away to the degree that we come to conclusions only a stone’s throw from “man doesn’t really have a free will” or “God decrees when man chooses to sin”?

[Mark_Smith]

Are you saying there is really not a choice. God willed that you will go right, say. You will pick to go right, you have no freedom to go left.

Said another way, every decision has already been decreed, decided and pre-planned by God. You don’t really have a choice.

I’m heading out the door, but I just read the post Greg Long put up and I could not have said it any better (or as well for that matter). The issue of personal choice is really an illusion for everyone except God. However, since I don’t know God’s complete plan ahead of time, I am still accountable for the direction I go. Spurgeon once said God’s sovereignty and man’s free will are like the twin rails of the railroad track. As we look into the distance, they appear to cross even though we know that is just an optical illusion. I can’t claim all the answers. However, as I struggled with this many years ago, I finally determined that God’s sovereignty was the principle issue. Nothing can be said to hinder or restrict God in any way, or else He ceases to be sovereign and ceases to be God. God’s choices and actions and re in now way dependant upon man’s choices or actions - ever.

Chip,

Unless there is some confusion with terminology then I can only conclude that your statement “The issue of personal choice is really an illusion for everyone except God” is nonsense.

You keep emphasizing God’s sovereignty. Can you please define this?

Does His sovereignty involve both “active” intervening steps in order to achieve His goals as well as “passive” permissive times where in His foreknowledge He permits people to make decisions without direct intervention?

BTW, not being flippant, but we just finished dinner and I had not planned to have another hot dog. Someone offered me the final bread roll and I pondered for a second and decided that I would have another. If personal choice is really an illusion, then please explain to me how that situation just played out according to your standpoint …