The Will Of God                                                                                 9/15/46

 

Scripture:  Luke 22: 39-46

 

Scripture:  Matthew 6:  “Thy will be done.”

 

Not all adventure is found in exploring the unknown.  Sometimes it proves exciting to explore the familiar and to find something new to us where we had assumed we already knew everything thoroughly.

 

One of the familiar experiences of each of us, and I suppose of all Christian folk, is the use of what we call “The Lord’s Prayer.”  Perhaps it might better be called “Our prayer, given us by Our Lord.”

 

At any rate, as oft as we repeat it, we use the words “Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.”  “Thy will be done.”  This phrase is so familiar, learned from the days of our childhood, that we say it with fleeting thought.  We may well pause just now and turn it over in our minds.  There is more there than meets our ears, or passes our lips, when we repeat it formally.

 

What is God’s will?  I raise the question today and propose that we think about it now and probably for more than this one Sunday.

 

Please do not settle back with the expectation that you are now going to be told what is the will of God.  I have no such omniscience.  The will of God is not memorized.  Nor is it committed to the knowledge and care of experts.  I believe that a priesthood which assumes that it is, is deeply in error.

 

The will of God is something for which each of us has to search.  It will be good for us if we do it together, as members of an exploring party set out on an adventure together.  Today I hope to suggest what the will of God is not.  If we can clear away some of the jungle brush of our thinking about this, then we may, on succeeding weeks try our hand at building a cottage, or possibly only a cabin, or perhaps at least erect a tent on the clearing - a structure of belief as to what the will of God is.

 

It is not easy to face the tragedies that come with living, and certainly they can not be met satisfactorily with any pat answer.  So often some voice is heard, in the presence of illness or of bodily suffering, of spiritual anguish, of untimely death - saying: “Well, after all this is the will of God, and we must be resigned to it.”

 

A loved one endures the excruciating pain of an incurable cancerous growth.  The unequal struggle means a wasting of the previous body, mental preoccupation with the symptoms rather than with all that heretofore gave zest to living.  It means eventual death; perhaps soon, perhaps not at all soon.  Is that the will of God?

 

A man just too far away to help sees his best friend mangled by an onrushing train, the engineer helpless to stop the huge rushing power in time.  Someone says to him, “We cannot understand why these things take place, but we must believe that they are the will of God.”  Is it the will of God that a man should be mangled before the very helpless eyes of a friend and under the hand of an engineer pulling with all his frantic strength on the brake lever?

 

It is right to raise an honest doubt about such an assumption for this is one of those assumptions that seem to cast a shadow on the character of God.

 

Let us remember that Jesus taught his own conviction that God is our Father and that we are his children.  Think what fatherhood means - not as illustrated by some scoundrel who happens to be a parent to several luckless offspring, but in the noblest sense of what we are sure a father can be, should be, and often is.  What are some of the characteristics of fatherhood at its best?

 

We think of a good father as one who loves his children; who desires the best for them and has a great deal of sense as to what is best for them; who is willing to sacrifice himself for their welfare; who is pained by their sorrows, their illnesses, their waywardness; who disciplines himself to be a decent example of good living by word and action; who compels rarely and leads his children to do thinking of their own; who encourages them to learn from the experience of others.

 

If these are some of the qualities of a good father, they should apply also to our Christian idea of what God the Father is like.  Does an earthly father deliberately send some pain and suffering to his child?  Not if he is worthy of the name!  Then is it reasonable to believe that God, as Father, deliberately sends suffering and pain to some people as though he mysteriously “picked” on some, dealing, by caprice, severely with one and mildly with another?

 

Now of course tragedy and suffering do come.  It would be foolish and wrong to deny it.  They come into the life of a child in many ways.  But it is not the wish or intent of his father to put them there!  Neither, I believe, is it the wish or intent of God the Father to put them in the lives of his children.

 

Much of the suffering in a child’s experience comes from his own disobedience, willfulness and waywordness.  But the suffering is not the will of his father.  Much of the suffering of people in all stations of life is the result of human waywordness.  The sufferings of war are the result of failure of nations to follow the ways of God as revealed to his children.  If nations deliberately refuse to apply principles of good will to the problems of international relationship; if national policies continue to be dictated by greed and by self interest, international strife and even war with all its horrors will continue.  And it is not God’s will, but man’s doing.

 

But some will say, “Why doesn’t God put an end to wars?  Why doesn’t he make people behave themselves?”

 

Well, does a wise earthly father compel his child to follow a prescribed course of action?  An occasional coercion, and some punishment, may be practiced occasionally.  But the wise parent knows that his own best hope is to surround his child with wholesome environment, good example, fair and honest reasoning - and hope that the child will see and follow the light.  He would never, if he could, deliberately inflict upon his child a deadly or crippling disease, or a heartbreaking sorrow.  And yet we accuse God of doing that when we justify some crushing catastrophe by saying, “It is the will of God.”

 

Much of life’s suffering is the result of human waywordness with innocent people becoming victims of the sin of others.  The year old undernourished or starving child in Europe or Asia today is innocent of the cause of his hunger.  The sons, husbands and fathers whose lives were taken in war, were sacrificed not at all to the will of God but to the brutal and selfish will of tyrants who tried to enforce their will on the peoples of the world.  It is not the will of God that the world should be drenched with human blood every 25 years.  It is God’s will that the earth should be a paradise.  Through our human blindness and human willfulness we people make it a shambles of destruction, death, famine and despair. 

 

God is as much grieved over our sorrow and suffering and despair as any earthly father.

 

In accord with his teaching of the love and compassion of the Father, Jesus brought healing and comfort and hope to troubled people wherever he met them.  Was he defying the will of God in removing sickness and pain?

 

The span of human life has been lengthened by the increasing knowledge of man and his ability to combat disease.  If disease is an evil to be eradicated, how can we ever claim that the disease that takes the life of a loved one is the will of God?

 

I cannot and will not say when some little boy’s body is knotted or twisted with infantile paralysis that “this is the will of God.”  There must be some other answer.  And I propose to suggest that there is such other answer and try to define it in succeeding sermons.

 

How shall we interpret the tragedy of Jesus’ crucifixion?  Did God will it?  Did the Father intend that the Son should be denied, scorned, condemned, nailed on a cross and tortured to death?

 

Many a zealous “passage-citer” will point out the many Scriptural verses and chapters which he has come to believe show Jesus was predestined to die in that manner, with the foreknowledge and intention of God.

 

A contributor to a so-called prophetic magazine writes in this vein: “Jesus came into the world not to live, but to die.  He is, in fact, the only man who ever came to this world for that purpose.  Of other men it is recorded that their life work was cut short by death.  Of Christ it is true that his life work was his death.  Other men lived, Christ is ‘the Man who died,’ and his dying was his main achievement.  He came to do for men what could be accomplished in no other manner than by his death on Calvary - a shameful death, a felon’s death, yet a glorious death, for ‘He put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.’”

 

Such an argument is given in many Christian circles.  Do you accept and believe it?  I don’t.

 

If we accept it we have to raise the question, “Why condemn some Jews for rejecting Christ and having him crucified, if it was the will of God from the beginning that Jesus should be so crucified?  Were the Jews and the Roman officials not merely carrying out the will of God?”  And we could ask another pointed question: what is wrong with Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus?  Was he not doing what God planned all along should be done?  It is tragedy, and we can have a good cry over it, but after all it couldn’t be helped because God willed it.

 

Suppose Jesus had been universally accepted as the “Light of the World.”  Then what would have happened to the will of God?  It would surely have been seriously upset - in fact it just couldn’t have happened, if God’s will had otherwise predestined it.  Such would seem to be logic.  I do not accept its reasoning because I do not accept its premise!

 

It never was the will of God that Jesus’ living flesh should be torn and his spirit scorned and his work hated.  That was the will of evil people! It was a crime - the greatest of all crimes.  God does not decree crimes.  His will is denied, thwarted, blocked for a time by such a crime.  His kingdom tarries long because children of his family will do things like that.

 

1)  Evil is the enemy of God, not His tool.

 

2)  Much evil is the result of man’s wrong choices and man’s ignorance.

 

3)  Much of pain and suffering is still a puzzle to me, and probably to you.  But it solves nothing to blame them on God in defiance of our own best sense.

 

4)  A great deal of courage and nobility are brought out by suffering and especially by the sensing of danger.  But that courage and nobility are not created by suffering.  They were there all the time, and when they do appear it is to combat suffering.

 

5)  The crucifixion of Jesus was the will of evil men.  Of course Jesus, in a sense entirely true, chose it.  But men’s evil forced the choice on him.  The maneuvering was such that either he must accept it, or do what would be worse - compromise or surrender his ideals, his truth.  His choice made him the victim of evil men, and the supreme martyr in righteousness.

 

We have not found solution to the problems raised this morning.  But we have tried to make a clearing in the brush by saying what the will of God is not.  Later, next week, I propose that we make a positive attempt to build in our thinking what we can believe that the will of God is.  With perhaps some fear and trembling, as Paul puts it, we must work out our own salvation, our own structure of the faith, by which we live and promote righteousness and by which we wage war against wrong.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 15, 1946.