God’s Intention 9/22/46
Scripture: Matthew 18: 1-14
Text: Matthew 18: 14; “...It is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.”
Last Sunday, I spoke of “the Will of God” and promised more on that general theme. I found an excellent little book not long ago on this subject by Leslie D. Weatherhead, minister to the great City Temple congregation in London. City Temple, the congregation’s church home, was virtually destroyed during the war’s bombing raids. But the faithful of the congregation have carried on their work and worship and fellowship. Their minister gave them sermons on this theme during the distress and anxiety and toil and sorrow of war years. I propose to follow his excellent thinking rather closely in this series.
Dr. Weatherhead has suggested that our thinking on the Will of God might profitably be classified under 3 headings: (1) the Intentional Will of God; (2) the Circumstantial Will of God; and (3) the Ultimate Will of God. While I speak today of the intentional will of God, I shall follow some of the same line of thought begun last Sunday.
Because we use, or hear used, the expression “It is the Will of God” used so loosely, we need to think carefully of what the will of God is, and is not, in order to think clearly.
A man lost his wife whom he loved dearly in untimely death. When she was dead he said: “Well, I must just accept it. It is the will of God.” But he himself was a doctor. He had been hoping, praying, working, fighting for her life for weeks. He had called in the best specialists to be found in the medical profession of a great European city. He had used all the best, and latest, devices of modern science; all the ingenuity and known apparatus by which nature can be helped in the fight against disease.
Suppose his remark after his wife’s death were right - “It is the will of God;” suppose that God had intended all along that the wife was to die in that manner, at that time. Had he, then, been fighting against the will of God in attempting to save her to life? If she had recovered, would he not have called her recovery the will of God? Can we have it both ways?
A young man was killed in making an air raid on Berlin. Was it the will of God? Was it not rather the will of Hitler? Can the two be the same?
A cultured man of India had lost several children. Latest to die was his youngest son whom he loved deeply. The boy had died of the dread cholera. His one remaining child, a little girl, slept on a cot on a verandah with mosquito netting over her to keep away the flies, while the father walked the floor talking with a friend who was a Christian minister. His oriental fatalism came out in the remark: “Well, padre, it is the will of God. That’s all there is to it. It is the will of God.”
The minister knew him well - very well indeed - so well that he could talk to him as one can seldom talk to one at the moment of deepest sorrow. And the minister said to him, “Supposing someone crept up those verandah steps tonight, while you slept, and deliberately put a wad of cotton, soaked with a solution containing choler germs, over you little girl’s mouth as she slept on her cot. What would you think of that?” “What would I think of that?” said the Indian gentleman. “Nobody would do such a thing. If he attempted it and I caught him, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would kill a snake, and throw him over the verandah to the dirt below. What do you mean by such a thing?” Quietly came the answer: “Isn’t that just what you have accused God of doing when you said it was His will? Call your little boy’s death the result of mass ignorance, mass folly, mass sin, if you care to. Call it the result of bad drains and poor sanitation; or call it community carelessness, but don’t call it the Will of God.”
How can we identify, as the will of God, something for which a man would be put in prison or sent to the lunatic asylum?
When we divide our thinking, for purposes of getting clear on the matter, into the three phases suggested by Weatherhead - (1) God’s intention; (2) the circumstances through which God’s will operates; and (3) God’s ultimate will, we can say readily enough that it was not God’s intention that these tragedies should occur. It was not God’s intention that Jesus should go to the cross. God intended that people should love and follow Jesus, not hate and kill him.
However, circumstances arose in which men’s evil came in conflict with the good purposes of God, and created a situation where a choice between good and wrong had to be made. In those circumstances, but only in those circumstances, the cross became in that sense the will of God.
When his country is in peril, a father may say to his son in that circumstance, “Jim, I’m glad you’re in the army.” But it was not his intention that Jim should go in the army. He intended that his son should be an architect, a farmer, a teacher, a physician. Only the will of an enemy created the circumstance in which it seemed to the father that the honorable and inevitable thing to do was for Jim to be in the army.
There is a real sense in which God’s will is done as an ultimate goal or purpose - in which it is reached even through frustration and wrong. Perhaps we shall see that nothing can happen that finally defeats God’s will. God’s will was not accomplished by the cross, but in spite of the cross -- through the cross. He achieved his ultimate will that people should be redeemed, as fully as he would have done had it not been for the temporary defeat of his will by the cruel evil of the cross. If we are to look up through tears and anguish, and pray “thy will be done” it must be in the sense of God’s ultimate good purposes.
Return again now to the thought of God’s intention.
One would like to say to that bereft doctor, “Your wife’s death is not the will of God at all. It is the fruit of human ignorance. We people do not yet know enough to combat successfully the evil of this disease that took her. If we could spend as much time, effort, thought and money on medical research as we spend on an aircraft carrier, you wife’s life could have been saved.” That is hardly the thing to say to a man in his hour of agony. But one can hardly help thinking it.
When a young man declares his purpose to be a Christian missionary; when he has been thoroughly tested and trained and has passed the necessary examinations; when he has accepted a commission to take the good news of Christ to people who do not know it; then we may truly say “thy will be done.” For God intends that people should know Him and love Him and follow in His way.
Not when airmen are being shot down, but when the war is over and young men shake hands and start the job of building a good world, when people struggle to build a righteous peace -- then is the intentional will of God being done.
Not when a baby is dead; but rather when two young people take their baby to the house of God and there dedicate the child to God because they want God to be enthroned in their home, and in that beloved new life born into it -- that is the time to say “thy will be done,” for that is as God intends it to be.
When children starve in Europe and Asia it is no time to comment resignedly, “God must have intended it,” for God does not intend it. That is the time to work vigilantly, unceasingly, sacrificially for the day when children shall be fed and clothed, when they can sing and play, when they shall have fit bodies and fit minds for the fulfillment of right. Then may come the time to say, “thy will be done.”
One wonders how people could sing to God a hundred years ago while human slaves, held as chattels, were lashed if a master desired it.
Perhaps a hundred years from now our descendants will be incredulous that there was a time when people called themselves Christian while the body of Christ was torn apart in strivings, while people were left to disease when medical knowledge and skill were known to the human family, when bursting bombs and burning steel were dropped on peoples’ homes in one or another city, when people abandoned their sacred vows and broke up their homes in search of individual happiness. Call these things evil; call them the result of human sin. But don’t call them the will of God.
A man abandons his wife and children for the pleasure to be found in another woman. The other woman wants him and he certainly wants her. A friend tries to reason with him and show the great harm that comes not to his life alone but to the life of his wife and several children. But he, mistaking his own desire for the evidence of some mysterious right purpose, stubbornly insists that since he now loves the other woman, that must be the way it’s supposed to be. It isn’t! God’s will, demonstrated in the painful experience of people through the ages, is that one man and one woman should become one home, building one family life through calm and storm, in sickness and in health, in adversity or success, in honor striving to build a love that includes but is above the satisfaction of self, and keeping at it so long as both shall live. God’s intention is thwarted every time two people fail in their ability to perform that vow.
How important it is that we get our thinking straight about God’s will! Men have sealed taboos over their superstitions and prejudice, evaded disturbing questions, justified savage acts as the will of God. Sincere and thoughtful people should have done with it.
Of course there are difficulties. One might be stated like this: “Do not people get a certain comfort in resigning themselves to what they believe to be God’s will? Why take away that comfort? When people feel that their tragedies are the will of God can they not bear them the better?”
This ought to be said - there are times when things can be said and other times when they should not be said. Very little can be said along this line at the moment of tragedy. But remember this, there is no permanent comfort in that which is not true. To face truth may be costly, but it ought to be faced nonetheless, for it is the truth that can set us free. We do wisely to try and find the truth before our storms.
Remember the sorrowful words of Jesus as he looked over a city from a hill and cried, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold your house is left unto you desolate.” [Matthew 23:
37-38]. He said ye would not, implying that ye might have.
At another time he said: “If thou hadst known in this day
---- the things which belonged to peace!
If we are careful how we use the phrase, it can be used with a sense of great appropriate right.
An aged religious leader still preached occasionally though he had not for some time been a minister of a local church, having long since retired from pastoral responsibility. One day when the fog was thick and the air chill, he preached twice, despite his 86 years. Then he made his way home. His wife had died many years earlier. His family was all grown long since.
The old man sat down in his armchair before a fire, quietly dropped to sleep and awakened in heaven. About this one can truly say “Thy will be done.” And devoutly hope that it might one day in the ripe autumn of our own lives be so with us.
Calamity and distress have to be fitted into our framework of living and thinking, because they are real and we must deal with them. But do we not do well to keep the phrase “The will of God” for God’s intentions?
When we see his glory reflected in a lovely earth, his beauty in nature, poem and song, picture and music, great architecture and humble service, lovely lives, happiness of home, health of body and resilience of mind, saintliness of soul - then may we look to the Father and say with peace and joyful praise “thy will be done.”
Let us dedicate ourselves to the harmony of those who seek and perform His Will.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 22, 1946
[date revised from the original handwritten text based on context, the preceding and the following sermons which are obviously a consecutive series; editor.]