Hey back, Isaac,

Last time, your closing paragraph, about claiming God “gave us a word” and thus risking taking His name in vain, is one of those salient points that should make any reader go … “ooooohh.”

Greg Koukl pointed out that Christians often get offended when people exclaim “Oh God!”. We say “How dare you take his name in vain!” And then we get a “Word from the Lord” and tell someone whom they should or should not marry. Who’s committing the most serious sin in taking the Lord’s name in vain? Ours does much more damage.

Further on that truth: from what I understand, the Fourth Commandment wasn’t just a ban on saying God’s Name aloud when one isn’t actually addressing Him. That is included, but I’m very sure the wider meaning was that the Hebrews, by their actions, should not profane the Name of God to others by what they do.

Two recent (at the time of this writing, Jan. 14) news stories add even more to this point.

The first is the life-shattering earthquake in Haiti. Christians need to clarify that God is not weak; the earthquake didn’t stun Him. But should we say “the earthquake was God’s will” as some might? It is like we should, in one sense, only among ourselves as Christians. But even then we must be careful, because many Christians (likely because they haven’t been taught) are not careful to distinguish God’s on-the-surface will from His deeper will.

Revealed will: God hates sin and suffering. Deeper will: He allows it anyway, for reasons only He knows but that even now we can begin to see, for greater good and His glory.

The second related issue is Pat Robertson’s statement that God’s will is judging Haiti for some sin in the past (such as a “pact with the Devil”). As you said, this seems to take the Lord’s Name in vain as much as anyone who utters His Name aloud as part of a vile cussphrase.

Disclaimer: I think an equal problem to Pat Robertson’s self-righteous announcements is making equally self-righteous pronouncements against him — playing the “I’m the good cop” Christian game, trying to elevate ourselves in the world’s eyes. But instead of falling into the same sin of spiritual arrogance, we ought to plead: Mr. Robertson, you ought to first, get off the TV and come back and renounce false “prophecies”; second, understand that in the deepest sense, anything that happens is according to God’s will! Make it clear God does hate sin and suffering, but that He allows it — like the tower disaster in Luke 13: 1-4 — to remind people to repent!

What I find most often, is people do not use the principles in the Bible to make sound decisions themselves. Often, we wish to get a clear answer about God instead of making a decision for ourselves, taking the responsibility.

Like many Christians do when they claim “God told me” something, I can illustrate this truth with a Personal Anecdote. Recently I visited extended relatives over the holiday break. Someone, in a personal story of her own, told me “God told her” to give a Bible to someone.

Did she take God’s Name in vain? I’m not sure what to say about that. Isn’t it always good to share the Word with someone? Wouldn’t that obviously be in God’s revealed will? So why not just say you followed those clear written words from Him, rather than claiming some special Spirit whisper inside? In this instance, I just smiled and nodded. That action was likely more honoring to God, and to her, than picking a fight with her wording would have been.

But what if she said God wanted her to donate her entire life savings to Joyce Meyer Ministries or something? — and I, knowing her better years later, had already let her “get away” with claiming God’s direct word about her more-minor actions, and not said anything?

Really I think it comes back to being careful about our language. Someone may say God told me directly to do this and mean it very sincerely. As you said, that can still happen! But in so many cases it’s hard not to say that, or use that, as a way of setting ourselves up as so very Spiritual: God speaks to me directly. Thus the implication: Hmm, does He speak to you directly?

This seems much too close to a Gnosticism-type Christianity, in which the Holy Spirit constantly speaks mainly and “loudest” to people on a very deep Spiritual level that only very Spiritual people can hear.¹ But rather than forcing us to cringe and listen closely to whatever God might be saying in between the lines of life, the Bible gives us all the same Word. And yes, it takes physical work with actual language, to understand it. I don’t mean to imply it is easy. But it’s less difficult than how some say it is!

Here’s another point I heard somewhere If God only gave us nudges and whispers, rather than primarily speaking with His direct Word (as He has!), He would be cruel and unloving.

Last time, you mentioned looking for precedents in Scripture about finding God’s will. I think many people actually do look there for precedents, but only selectively. For example, some homeschooling-oriented Christians look to Middle-eastern culture of Old Testament days and their courtship practices² as precedent for matching up in modern times. But they never have their daughters sneak into the handsome field worker’s property when he’s in high spirits from too much drinking, and lay at the foot of his bed until he wakes up and then you say he’s your choice of a mate — a la the book of Ruth!

You also mentioned the many examples of people in Scripture asking for God’s wisdom, but making choices on extra-Biblical matters without waiting for a supposed “direct word from the Lord.” Do you think Christians blithely see past those? For example, the many times Paul in his missionary travels just went to Antioch or Crete or Attalia in Asia Minor and did not wait for a direct leading from the Lord. Instead, readers subconsciously pay more attention to the Spirit not allowing Paul and his fellow missionaries to enter one place and sending them elsewhere, or the way Moses heard from God in the burning bush, and perceive those as the way God normally works. Again, it’s selective. I wonder how much of that ties into the “life verse” fallacy, where someone bases his lifestyle or ministry on favorite parts of the Bible, ignoring the rest.

That probably means that if we were to question someone’s “word from the Lord” about even where to buy a new car, he/she would be upset and assume we believe God never speaks or acts miraculously. Of course we believe He does! Yet like you said, that’s not the Biblical rule for living. We should not expect Him to give us extra revelation when He’s already closed the canon of written Scripture, and gives us wisdom and the abilities to grow in it, with His Spirit’s help.

So here are my closing questions for next time: how do we react when someone says “God told me” such-and-such? Do we nitpick? Lovingly ask deep questions? Ignore it? And especially if someone is using that as a reason/excuse not to make a decision and take the consequences if it turns out to be “wrong” — that is, if God uses it to help us the hard way — what can we do?

Again, Godspeed! And in Him,

Stephen

Stephen,

Good point with the Dan-Brown glasses. Someone once asked my brother if it was God’s will for him to be in the military. Now, think about it for a second. What will does he mean? Is this God’s moral will for him he’s speaking of? Probably not. He clearly knows its not in scripture for him to receive a command to clearly join the military. Sexual purity, yes, but not questions on whether to join the military. While he could use the Bible to gain wisdom on that decision, it won’t give him a clear answer.

Is the man then asking about God’s sovereign will? If so, then one would have to say that he’ll only know if he joins or not. But then, it was also God’s sovereign will for Joseph’s brothers to sell him into slavery, but we wouldn’t want them to answer “Yes” if we asked them whether it was God’s will for them to betray their brother.

You asked as to whether people make judgments on God’s word based on their perception of the audience of the Bible. Well, I’m not sure. In many ways, I do view it as an instruction manual (though that is an insufficient definition that excludes the most important aspects). Yet, people perhaps don’t want that. What I find most often, is people do not use the principles in the Bible to make sound decisions themselves. Often, we wish to get a clear answer about God instead of making a decision for ourselves, taking the responsibility.

Again, look at Solomon. He asked for wisdom so that he could make good decisions. When the two women came before him with the baby, he didn’t pray about a decision. James 1 tells us to ask for wisdom, and we are told God “gives generously”.

This leads me to my next point after talking about Solomon, and that’s examples. We rarely look to the scriptures for precedents in how we ask for God’s will.

Look at Paul. We often speak of open and closed doors. In 1 Corinthians he speaks of a door being opened with many adversaries, and he went through. But in 2 Corinthians he mentions a door “opened for me in the Lord,” but what does he do? He leaves it and goes somewhere else. But that throws a wrench in the paradigm of open/closed doors. Clearly God opens doors in our lives, but just because he opens them, it does not mean we have to take them.

Now before I go further, I want to say something. I believe God can definitely speak to us today in 21st century America. He can do it. I actually hold that he does. Now, God could deliver emails or send letters down in a space ship if he wanted to. Logically, there’s no reason why he couldn’t. But if you’re skeptical, it should probably be because you’re looking for scriptural precedent.

Here’s what I find in scripture: God’s speaking is always miraculous. It is most often unlooked for. It often goes against common sense. And finally, and this is big: It is always clear. No one in scripture misunderstood God’s direct word to them. They may have disobeyed, but they always heard it. And yet we can get seminars on how to listen clearly to God’s will. Nowhere in scripture does God speak through inward nudges. Nowhere does he speak through “checks on my spirit”.

And finally, I’ll end with this. You know, when I was younger, people asked me why I didn’t date. I said I didn’t want to. Nothing spiritual about it. No command from God. I just didn’t want to. Now, I wasn’t thinking as clearly about this as am now. I was still at the point where I was trying to divine God’s will. But we must be very cautious about attaching God’s sacred name to a decision of ours.

Greg Koukl pointed out that Christians often get offended when people exclaim “Oh God!”. We say “How dare you take his name in vain!” And then we get a “Word from the Lord” and tell someone whom they should or should not marry. Who’s committing the most serious sin in taking the Lord’s name in vain? Ours does much more damage.

In Christ,

Isaac

Coming next week: God’s Will Hunting, part 5: Clarifying “two wills.”

My friend Isaac and I are having an email discussion about these topics, to adapt into this series called “God’s will hunting.” We began Jan. 1 with part 1: Christian assumptions, and last week’s column was part 2: Watch your language. All of the series will be available here.

Hey back, Isaac,

From the start in your last message, you zoomed right in on how our views of the Bible affects our views of God’s will. Is the Bible a book whose meanings can be plain to any reader? Or do we go to it with our Dan-Brown-style magnifying glasses, trying to find the Special Personal Meaning, a “Bible code” that is all so much more spiritual and high-falutin’ than the plain meaning of a text? ¹

Do you think a lot of this is rooted in how people view the audience of the Bible? Along with the evangelical “life decision” jargon you mentioned, there’s an idea about (I often fight it in myself) that Scripture is “life’s little instruction manual.” Or people say it’s “God’s love letter.” While surely both instructions for right living and truths of God’s love are in the Bible, saying these things without a bigger picture can lead to unhelpful misunderstandings. Scripture is primarily the story of God and what He has done. It is not mainly about us.

We’ve talked before about The Chronicles of Narnia and how people try to identify Lucy as Mary Magdalene or the Tisroc as King Herod, and things like that. Have you seen, perhaps, that Christians who do that with Narnia do the same thing with the Bible, and themselves?

I’m guessing this is another main source for the assumptions that lead to the “burning bush” notion of how to find God’s will. In addition to the confusion of God’s revealed will (in the Scriptures) and His hidden will (which none knows save Himself), it is the “violent flattening” (as blogger Dan Phillips called it) of Biblical descriptions into behavior prescriptions.

In this kind of view, the stories about King David are not just about how God used him, from a shepherd boy to a warrior to a king, to fulfill a role in the history of Israel, God’s chosen old-covenant people — and especially as a type of the real Christ to come. No, in the wrong way of seeing it, you, gentle reader, are like David, and you need to figure out how exactly God worked with him so you can follow the same guidelines. Do you think God may want you to be a “king” (wink wink) too? What are the “giants” in your life? Etc. …

And instead of seeing, say, Moses’ revelation from God in a burning bush (Exodus 3) as an example of how God was working with him at that point in the Story, people react as though God ought to work the same way with us too and give us a “burning bush.”

Instead of seeing Peter’s visions of a sheet filled with creatures as God’s unique word to the apostle that His Spirit would be bringing Gentiles into the faith (Acts 10), some people see having a vision as normative. It happened to Peter; why shouldn’t it happen to us? ² Thus something really vital in God’s Story, the blockbuster news that Gentiles and not just Jews would be brought into Christianity, is flattened right alongside whether you should get the more-durable Ford or the cheaper Volvo.

But the people in God’s Story (consisting of stories, poetry, history, records, etc.) are not stand-ins for us. He doesn’t say He will give everyone a burning bush, or a vision, or a “peace about it” as you said before.

I think the alternate view comes from the sense of un-Biblical pride that you also talked about. How often we find this in our own lives! Yet figuring out that the Bible, while written for us to be sure, is not about us personally, helps kill that pride. We see ourselves as players in God’s Story, not the stars of a story God writes about us. The self-centered view is subtle, and part of our sin nature. Yet God can change that.

And more and more, as God is helping us grow, we discover we like it that way! He is glorified. We give Him glory, not vice-versa. Slowly we begin to see that the Word is not merely a mirror to reflect our lives, or a collection of various Book of Proverbs-style slogans we can pick out and make refrigerator magnets out of and apply for better choices in daily living. Instead, we learn further to get under His Word, humbly, and let it teach us about Himself. That includes how He has directed people in the past, and how He directs us now.

… Which may lead us to the Holy Spirit. This past Sunday my church study group did a survey on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He gets ignored a lot in some circles, and overly promoted in others — either side of which oddly falls into the quasi-Biblical God’s-will-hunting views. I wonder how that is?

But anyway, the Holy Spirit — we’ll have to tackle that One soon. How has He worked in the past to direct people? How does He work now in the lives of believers to direct them?

Also a huge issue in this is God’s sovereignty. Can we mess up His revealed commands, such as when we disobey His edicts about encouraging each other or staying holy? Yes, absolutely.³ Is that still part of His will? Yes, absolutely, in the sense that He is sovereign and has a “hidden” will, and no one can step outside of it.

I wonder — what would happen if, in some parallel world, God’s people did know about His hidden will in advance? We’d be too much like Him. He would lose glory. We would trust the knowledge, rather than learn to trust Him. And besides that, when we are finally beyond this old Earth and can review our lives from His perspective in Heaven (and later the New Earth), our stories would be much more boring, don’t you think?

His hidden will is a comfort: He is in charge. We can’t fail, because He can’t fail.

His revealed will is a caution: we’re still responsible. We can fail. But still, He never ever will.

Next Saturday: Isaac responds with further thoughts on how Christians, by saying “God told me this” specifically, actually risk taking His Name in vain, and how any of His direct commands to His people are never vague, in Part 4: Asking for wisdom.

Stephen,

Before I begin this series, let me first start by saying two things.

First, I approach this very cautiously. I think approaching the subject of God’s will requires an attitude of humility (also a difficult subject, because as Jerry Bridges puts it, “No one wants to write a book called ‘Humility and How I Achieved It’”). Yet it’s a very important subject, and I think that we need to discuss it, perhaps just to learn for ourselves.

I think the attitude of humility is essential not just because we don’t want to make overly strong claims about God’s will but also because I think our pride blinds and distorts our view of God’s workings in our lives.

Second, throughout this piece, I may knock around some Christian phrases we use. As one of my favorite profs says, “Sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible.” When we use non-Biblical terms to discuss spiritual concepts, we must proceed with caution. Examples could range from phrases like “God has a wonderful plan for your life”, “God called me to go…”, “God gave me a peace”, or they could be terms like “substitutionary atonement” and “trinity.” Just because a phrase isn’t in the scriptures doesn’t mean we can’t say it, but we must be sure that first, it’s an accurate representation of the Biblical concept, and second, that it doesn’t handicap and limit our thinking.

I would start by distinguishing between two “senses” of God’s will.

Like you mentioned, one is his revealed will. Mark Cahill wrote a brilliant piece on this once called “Don’t pray; just obey!” Far from diminishing the power of prayer, his point was that on issues such as sexual immorality, thievery and murder, we don’t have to pray to God for him to tell us what to do when the scriptures are very clear.

Then there is God’s sovereign will. This sort of will comes in with stories like Esther (a book where God is hardly mentioned), yet we can see how his sovereignty had it that he would preserve the Jews from annihilation. Another example is Joseph situation where he tells his brothers that what they meant for evil “God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). Paul also writes in 1 Peter 3:17 that for some they may suffer evil “if that should be God’s will,” so clearly this isn’t a command for everyone to deliberately suffer but states that some believers will suffer in God’s plan more than others.

Like you alluded, people often listen for some sort of “burning in the bosom” or pray for a clear answer to a decision. I think praying for an answer on discernment and knowledge is different, but for know I’m concentrating on people praying for a clear mandate on a decision.

We’ve created a sort of Bible code, and we didn’t need Dan Brown after all. We look at God’s sovereign will as something we have to figure out, as something we need to know or else we’re in trouble (or perhaps we worry that God will be in trouble because we didn’t figure out his sovereign plan).

I’m thinking right now of an example in my own life. During senior year in high school, I was wrestling between two very different college choices. One was my state university which was more local, less expensive but could still provide me with a good education if I worked hard. The other was a private Christian college in New York City that I’d heard nothing but great things about to which I’d been accepted.

God wasn’t closing doors on either side (another fallacy I believed in at the time and will address later), and everything looked good both ways.

So I prayed for him to tell me what to do. I prayed for months for an answer (literally into June before the start of the semester). I listened and listened and eventually realized that I wasn’t going to get a voice. I never kidded myself that a little tug one way or another was God’s clear voice for me, as I couldn’t find examples like that in scriptures (more on that later). I realized I wasn’t going to get a clear “Yes” or “No” from God and that I had to make a decision.

So I prayed for wisdom, looked at the pros and cons of each choice, asked for thoughts from my parents and made a decision to stay with my state university.

I think that was the beginning of when I started to explore more examples in scripture and particularly which examples applied to me.

I think a great deal of what we desire when we ask for God’s will is really God’s forecast. We don’t want to trust in him; we’d rather know if this job will work out long term, if this person will say yes to going out with us, and if living in this state or that state will be worse off for us in the long run. But in addition to not trusting in him, we also limit God in this way. We act as if he will punish us for not figuring out his cosmic plan or that not figuring it out will prevent him from accomplishing his purpose. I can find examples of neither in scripture. Yet despite our foulups in trying to discern God’s will, he’s not limited by that either.

In the end, much of it comes down to trusting God and realizing his sovereignty.

(Coming next Saturday: “God’s Will Hunting, part 3: Living His-story.” And now that Christmas and New Year’s Day breaks are over, new YeHaveHeard blog items will resume this week on the formerly usual Wednesday-and-Saturday schedule.)

How disgusting. Just before I prepared to start this introduction to our email exchange on the topic of God’s will hunting, I read this from an Associated Press story (Nov. 4, 2009):

Rev. Brenda Lamothe says in a complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court that Rev. John J. Hunter of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church repeatedly demanded sex as part of “God’s will.”¹

Haven’t we all heard of similar situations in which someone said “God’s will is that you do this” when obviously His will is nothing of the sort?

In this case, claiming God wants someone to sleep with the pastor is clearly against the Bible’s revealed words on the subject (unless of course you’re the pastor’s wife). But in other cases, it’s not so easy to find a Bible verse to confirm or oppose the notion of God supposedly telling you to do something — such as take this job, go here and do this, shop at that store, buy that car.

As we talked about last night, Isaac, until recently I didn’t know this was such a controversy. Then a few years ago, fortunately at a time of life when I was considering some very big decisions, someone sent me a little book by John MacArthur with the title Found: God’s Will.

This book was an alert for me, yet mostly a relief. At the time, I didn’t try to listen for some super-secret voice of God before making a decision. So I should be okay, right? No, because in the back of my mind the silent assumption was there: if I did seek the Lord’s will like this, it would be a Very Spiritual Thing to do.

What a joy it was to read MacArthur’s reminders that as long as we are in God’s revealed will — what He has given us in the Bible, sufficient for us (2 Timothy 3: 14-17) — we have much more freedom to make life decisions. When we do, we will find faith after the fact in Him and that His sovereignty is being worked out in our “free” decisions!

Also until recently, I thought the listen-for-God’s-voice assumptions were just Out There in evangelicalism, sort of like always having goldfish crackers and fruit juice for Sunday-school children.

Then in April 2009, Pyromaniacs blog contributor Dan Phillips isolated at least one source of the virus: none other than the Blackabys, authors of Experiencing God and its curricula, and a study Bible. Reading Phillips’ direct and desperate critique (part 1 and part 2) shocked me.

This shock was not because of Phillips’ sternness, but because of the fact that anyone would directly propagate this notion: that we, like the Biblical saints and prophets, must be sure that an extra-Biblical choice, especially a big one, is God’s will before we make it. Otherwise, we’re guilty of disobeying direct words from God, we won’t be walking with Him, and there will be consequences (!).

Phillips says he isn’t caricaturing the Blackabys’ view. I believe him. I’ve seen this kind of reliance on “revelation” outside the Bible among “charismatic” Christians. But it’s also among the Baptist-friendly Blackabys who say things like (direct quote, click here for context): “The Holy Spirit is to function in us in the same way that Jesus led his disciples.”

Red alert! Where does the Bible say that? (Might this even be limiting the Holy Spirit?)

Here is the main issue with such ideas, writes Phillips — it’s “Bible in 2D”:

In order to get here, a fundamental, grave and pervasive hermeneutical error is essential to the Blackabys’ position. There must be a great and violent flattening of revealed, redemptive history. Pivotal moments in the Bible are pounded down, mashed and flattened into illustrations of daily Christian living. Direct, binding, inerrant prophetic revelations are radically down-sized into illustrations of God nudging us today towards a particular spouse or church ministry or university course major. Prophets who speak for God are shriveled into everyday Christians listening for that still, small murmur the the [sic] Bible never calls us to seek.

After learning more about the Bible’s main message of redemptive history (i.e., it’s not just a bunch of stories for moral examples) this strikes me as such a travesty to how we are meant to read the Scripture.

Equally bad, it will wreck people’s lives as they’re sitting around, waiting for God to show them the outcome of a big decision or spiritually confirm it in advance. That spins off all kinds of Biblical true-meaning mutations: you have to “put out a fleece” a la Gideon; you have to listen for a “still, small voice” to confirm a certain choice is what God wants; or you have to have a kind of “inner peace” from God (not unlike the Mormons’ “burning in the bosom” experience) about a decision before you make it.

I’m sure these beliefs have affected my life in the past. At least I can think of several occasions where I just didn’t make a decision because I subconsciously expected someone or something else to make it for me².

I now see how such behavior is immature and doesn’t glorify God, Who “gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control” (2 Timothy 1:7).

Where I’m still confused is where these assumptions come from among Christians, especially among less-“charismatic” believers. I had thought they tried to base everything in the revealed Word rather than subjective leadings! We can’t blame only the Blackabys either. I understand you hadn’t heard of them before, and yet you’ve previously had those assumptions too. I’d love to hear your story, compare notes, and discuss why this approach to God’s Will Hunting is un-Biblical and doesn’t work. Over to you …

— E. Stephen Burnett

(Next week — God’s Will Hunting, part 2: Watch your language.)