The Ultimate Will of God                                                      10/13/46

 

Scripture:  Job 42: 1-6

 

Text:  Job 42: 2;  “I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.”

 

One marvels at the fact that so much of understanding comes through to the consciousness of the reader who goes over again the books of the Bible.  Some of it is difficult; some tedious to our minds, so-much-in-a-hurry.  Criticism, pro and con, has been leveled at it.  But the thing that commends the Bible to a thoughtful person as more-than-ordinary literature is the fact that it yields so much of ethical and spiritual insight.  In the testing of our experience, we find its insights true.  When we have suspected it in error, we generally find at length that it is we who misunderstood or misinterpreted, and that a better reading opens more light for us.

 

Much has been theorized over the book of Job.  But it contains the profound spiritual insights that moved the early fathers to conclude that it belongs in the canon of sacred writings.  The story is that of a man whose patience, fortitude and faith were surely tried by one calamity after another - loss of property, servants, family, personal health; of a man whose personal friends were convinced that he must have sinned grievously that such evil had fallen upon him; but who felt that no such cause existed for his misery.  His faith was grounded on something different from, and better than, the idea that evil comes only in payment for one’s own wrongdoing.  The book represents a spiritual struggle with the problem of evil and the conviction that the innocent do suffer. 

 

Job’s saving faith which keeps him whole is the conviction that God is to be trusted.  “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”  [Job 13: 15].    And that puts him in a frame of mind to receive spiritual truths in his need.  It keeps his soul whole.

 

Toward the end of the book, the message of the closing section is summarized in this sentence: “I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.”  Another reading of the sentence translates it this way: “I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be restrained.”  Moffatt translates the last part of the sentence in these words: “Nothing is too hard for thee.”

 

Through three Sunday sermons, prior to last Sunday’s world-wide Communion service, we have been thinking of the “will of God,” the intention of God, and the circumstances of man’s conniving that deny, frustrate and delay the intention of God.  Dr. Leslie Weatherhead speaks of God’s intentional will, God’s circumstantial will, and then of God’s Ultimate Will.

 

The first is God’s original plan for the well-being of his children, an intention spoiled by man’s foolishness and sin.  The second is the way God works within the circumstances created by man’s evil - often quite different from what God’s original intention must have been.

 

When we speak of the ultimate will of God, we mean the goal which we believe He reaches, in spite of all that man may do, even using man’s evil to further his own plan.

 

We have often referred in the series to Jesus’ crucifixion as the supreme example of what we mean:

 

(1)  The intentional will of God was not that Jesus should be crucified, but that he should be followed.

 

(2)  The circumstantial will of God, His will in the circumstances which man’s evil has provided, was that Jesus should accept this humiliation, suffering, and death - but even using this evil thing, done by man, in such a positive and creative way as to lead to

 

(3) God’s ultimate will - the redemption of man, winning man back to God, not in spite of the cross, but using the cross, born of man’s sin, as an instrument to reach His ultimate goal.  The original intention of God, and His ultimate will, is that Christ should be accepted and followed.  Since man’s free will created the cross, God, in that circumstance, uses it, with all its sacrifice and suffering, to reach his ultimate goal.

 

Little children playing by a tiny hillside stream can dam it and divert its flow.  But the water of the stream eventually gets to the river at last, and flows on toward the sea.  It may not take its original course, but it finally gets through.  That is an incomplete and faulty illustration, but it suggests that in regard to God, we are very little children.  We may, and seemingly do, divert and hinder his purposes.  But I don’t believe we ever really defeat them.  Frequently our very mistakes and sins, our weakness and insufficiency, seem to cause another channel through which God’s plan flows toward completion of His purpose.

 

When theologians speak of the “omnipotence of God” - the “all-powerful God” - they can hardly mean that God gets his own way by sheer exhibition of superior might.  If He did, man’s freedom were surely a delusion.  And man’s moral development - his choosing between right and wrong - would be inconceivable.

 

The end, or aim, which God seems to intend, is that all souls should be at one with Him.  [There is the meaning of the word atonement:  at-one-ment.]  But that end must come, not alone from God’s desire, but from man’s choice as well.  Sometimes suffering wakens man to the right choice.  Jesus’ suffering, or rather the way in which he met and used his suffering, has wakened millions to choose God, as they have seen Him in Christ.

 

The evil of sin and suffering is revolting, and our normal impulse seems to be to turn away from it - to flee from it.  But what we see in Jesus’ suffering - his faithfulness, his consistent staying by and with the truth; his spirit unbroken by all the hideousness of that experience - that attracts us inescapably through it all.  Jesus’ cross doesn’t make suffering one bit less intense, no evil a whit less hideous.  But through it we glimpse the unswerving, ultimate will of God; and in our own measure are able with him to rise over the evil.

 

If man is to have real freedom, and if the community is to be bound together so closely that life is on the family level, then obviously thousands of things can happen that God did not intend.  Millions of people, innocent themselves of a particular sin, may suffer through that sin in others.  The horror of war; the suffering during it, and following it, by millions of people, because of the thirst for power by some other people, offers terribly convincing proof of this.

 

And yet God’s ultimate values are not to be lost in the evil process, however the doings of man may dam up or divert God’s intention.  If God cannot find righteous men enough to carry out His purpose, He will use evil men, at great pain to himself and to themselves, to carry further His purposes.  Job seems to perceive this when he says, in the writing of many centuries ago:  “I know that thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of thine can be restrained.”

 

Now, from the weakness of some of our illustrations in this connection, one might argue, “Very well then, why should we bother with what we do, however stupid and careless and sinful we may be.  If God can use evil, as well as good, let him get on with it!  What does it matter what we do?”

 

Paul fought vigorously with this old argument in his letter to the Romans.  When men said: “Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?” he said: “God forbid.  We who died to sin, how shall we any longer live therein?”  [Romans 6: 1-2].  Once we see that our sin is a “clenched fist” - a “blow in the face of God,” as Joseph Parker called it, how can we continue in the practice?

 

It is one thing to say: “This evil has been done - this harm has come.  How can I win good from it?”  It is quite another thing to say, “I will deliberately do evil, in order to win good from it.”

 

Jesus was forced, if he would win the good, to accept harm and evil.  But he was not destroyed by remorse and despair as was Judas.  God was to use Jesus’ evil cross as an instrument of divine purpose, but that did not stop Jesus from saying of Judas in advance of the final event, “It had been good for that man if he had not been born,”  [Mark 14: 21], and again, “It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!”  [Matthew 18: 7].

 

With some of this clear in our minds, the message comes to us in our day with immense comfort.  These have been days of anxiety and suffering and sorrow.  But they are not days of waste!  We can trust the Lord of the universe to work out his steady purpose.  He doesn’t lose his temper and say of mankind, “I’m sick of you.  I wish I’d never created you.”

 

With selfish, evil intent, men crucified the Son of God.  Within six weeks, other men were preaching about the cross as an instrument of salvation!  They hardly even referred to it as a crime of man.  It was a crime of man, but that faded to insignificance beside the daring assurance that it had become a redemptive act of God.

 

God is using the sufferings of people in our present world to sharpen our consciences.  Not causing the suffering to make us behave, but using the suffering to awaken us to the need of education, and good housing, and better health, and sufficient food for all, for the need of His gospel for all - the mission outreach.  The extreme horror of war was not necessary before men could understand God’s intention for his children who live in great cities and crowded countries.  But in that circumstance God still pushes ahead with his righteous will.

 

There is no glib comfort to be offered to the young woman widowed through war, or by industrial accident, her husband killed and her children fatherless.  Young, the future appearing lonely, she may say “surely God’s intention for me was home and married happiness.  How can this be His will?”

 

Probably the only answer that can be given is in faith.  Eleven men, on Good Friday night, probably said in their hearts, “We trusted him, we followed him.  It was his will to establish his kingdom.  He said so.  An evil has been allowed to take him from us.  It’s the end of everything.”

 

But they were wrong, weren’t they?  It was only the end of their mistake; and the beginning of the most wonderful use of evil which God has ever effected.  One day you, too, young woman, may be sadder at your despair than at your loss.  For your loved one is not lost.  He lives on, used in God’s plan.  Can you take up life in confident communion of spirit with the one you’ve had?  Can you be father and mother to your children; comforter to other sufferers?  You won’t be defrauded.  You will find at the end of the road that you will not feel any injustice; that the sense of loss had gone; that all has woven into a pattern of truth and meaning.

 

God’s intentional will for you was your fulfillment in years of married life.  The stream of that life was blocked and diverted by the circumstance of war or accident.  But is it not God’s ultimate will that the stream of your life is to go on toward a fulfillment that will even use this tragedy for goodness?

 

Evil can do terrible things to us.  But God still reigns.  “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”  [I Corinthians 2: 9].

 

Trust in God.  Rest in the nature of God.  “Underneath are the everlasting arms.”  He who began this strange adventure we call human life will control its end.  “I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” 

[Revelation 22: 13].

 

The last word is with God.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, October 13, 1946