The "Perfect Will of God"

Years ago, when I finally met a friend with whom I could have honest, uncurtailed, in-depth conversations about the bible, God and our church upbringing and stuff, it was a relief. I wasn't used to being able to talk about this stuff without being shut down.  So it wasn't too long before I raised the topic that always gave me the most grief.  God's Perfect Plan For My Life.  Some stuff I had tossed more readily.  For example, I didn't take a whole lot of time before I dispensed with these other three very Plymouth Brethren ideas:

a) the idea that our church wasn't a church, but rather was the only right way to worship, with a special claim to the Lord's Presence.  We claimed that latter claim by misquoting Matt 18:20 to say we were "gathered to" his name, rather than "gathered in" it, as the verse reads.

b) the idea that our God was personally threatened by us enjoying things that didn't have His designer label on them.  So, our religion was one of sacrificing pleasure on the altar.  Because that's what made our god happy (us forgoing happiness).  Our god was a pleasure-hating god who throve on us burning joy.

c) the idea that we had two stalemated "natures" in us, dividing us.  Of course the "solution" was more of the aforementioned joy sacrifice, with some extra self-loathing and self-denial done to make God reward us.

  ...but the topic that was hardest of all for me to know what to do with was "the Lord's Perfect Will" or "God's Special Plan For Me."  When I was at Mark's sister's wedding, he was climbing up inside a stairwell by bracing his hands and feet against the sides.  I was standing below carrying on a conversation, of course, while he did this.

  I called up "So, how do we know if we're doing the Lord's will?  Like, if we try to do something, and it isn't working at first, how do we know what's going on?  How do we know if it's not working because we don't have the Lord's support and should stop?  Because it could also be that we're on the right path, and Satan is opposing us.  How do we get blessed fully by just really knowing that we're doing the Lord's will for us in our Christian lives?"

  "I don't believe in the Lord's will," Mark said, and disappeared from sight, leaping over a railing to land on a different floor.  I guess that's why it's called a landing at the top of staircases.

At the time, I thought Mark was just being cavalier, but what I found out this weekend was that he'd actually read a book by Gary Friesen, and was vastly oversimplying it back then.  Now, many years later, I'm reading it.

This "Lord's Perfect Will For Me" thing always bugged me.  Because I wanted it so badly. I wanted to wake up, feeling special, feeling like it was terribly important that none of my decisions deviate even slightly from the exact details of what God intended me to do.  We weren't taught, though, as many Christians are, Garry Friesen says, to do the Lord's Will to "get God's best for us."  We were just trying not to make Him mad and wreck everything.  Our God was a god of ruin.  He'd ruin anything, and we were living in days of ruin.  He was intense.  An austere god with impossible standards.  So I didn't want to use my best judgment and decide how specific God was going to get about what was the only right way to do anything.  I just wanted Him to tell me everything to do so I could do it, and never need wisdom or common sense.  I didn't want to make Him mad.

  It was a sweet idea.  Thing is, it didn't work.  Not because I didn't try it.  It didn't work because God didn't play it like that.  I would pray and pray (we were always told if we weren't 100% certain God had communicated His perfect will to us, it was because we hadn't prayed (hard, long) enough). I would pray, but it was like He was standing there with an expression that said "Go on.  Your turn.  Give it a try."  Instead of acting, I would pray more, to an apparently unheeding diety, and it would make me increasingly anxious, indecisive and superstitious.  

  I would try to "read" the flow of events around me like a fortune teller reads tea leaves or palms.  I was looking for God to show me, in advance, exactly which decision was "the right one" in every situation.  So, if there were two schools I'd gotten accepted to, there was one thing I knew: it could not equally be okay to go to either one.  One was wrong.  (Or maybe both were wrong).  Because God had a Plan.  And if I didn't figure it out, I would screw everything up.  I didn't believe in a God who gave me choices.  I believed in a God who was making me guess which Hand the blessing was in.

This is because God wouldn't remove all doubt, not matter how I prayed.  Wouldn't fill in all the details.  He would leave me to make decisions, given past experience, some basic scriptural guidelines, using whatever sense I had and awareness of which way the wind was blowing, and I'd have to just make the decisions myself, in the final analysis.  It was like, if free will exists, if He always told me everything, there was no point in giving me the capacity to decide in the first place.  He wanted collaboration, not just compliance.  

  And I learned that the hardest of decisions are the ones where there isn't one that's clearly right and another that's clearly wrong.  So, "murder a politician or order a pizza?" isn't a hard choice.  Chicken or fish might be.

   But I got frustrated and gave up on the idea of God expecting me to figure out some fixed plan of His that I could easily screw up by guessing the wrong Hand.  I gave up on it, though, only with an uneasy feeling that there are some bible verses that mention the Lord's will.  There really are.  But they didn't seem to mean what I was being taught.  And what I was being taught wouldn't work, so I couldn't do it.  I could fret over it alright, though.  Of course I could.  (And I thought fretting was virtuous, also.  Because it messed up pleasure, which was the ultimate virtue, as far as we were concerned.)

Like with a lot of things, the kind of brain I have was a problem.  Very black and white in my thinking, sometimes.  So when some venerable old dude said "We must seek the Lord's plan for our lives in EVERYTHING!  In the smallest detail, we must seek His guidance and obey His will!" I would believe it.  Unlike most people, I would quash the part of my brain that said "Well, not as to whether the toilet paper roll has the paper going over or under the roll, though" and actually try to do what the man had said.  He was just trying to make people do it more, probably.  To give them some pretty words to feel inspired by and do a little bit.  I was likely to take them for a serious test drive.  That was a problem for me.  Because a lot of the time people don't mean what they say.  And they overstate things and don't give a balanced view of anything.  They don't present all the sides of an issue.  They give you a sound bite.  And you shouldn't, I had to learn to my chagrin, try to live your life by soundbites.

I've only started the book, and I want to see how brief I can make this, but it was pretty plain.   First, what do pretty much all Christians agree on, about all this stuff?

The Sovereign Will of God

1) God intends things throughout all history and reality to culminate in certain ways.  In other words, how things turn out matters to Him.  And He's doing stuff.  Friesen calls this "God's Sovereign Will." Like God being a king and running the whole kingdom.  And there's you wanting to know everything He's planning.  Now, the problem is, God's Will for EVERYTHING is something the bible clearly presents as:

a) quite beyond us

b) not something God's revealing to us, no matter how much we pray, read the bible, and skip episodes of America's Top Model to learn about.  Because we simply don't need to know everything.  We have enough trouble dealing with the basics. Most of it's not our business.  It's His.

So it's a tough one.  Sometimes, God is working His "perfect Will," and the bible is talking about it, alright.  But it is talking about something He's simply not done doing, and something He also feels no need of telling us all about in detail, in advance.  

  God's Sovereign Will/Plan/Counsels for Everything aren't revealed to us, and we can't mess them up, and we can't expect to be told all about them before we make our mundane little choices, which really are terribly unlikely to figure prominently in said Counsels anyway.  But we all believe in "the Will of God" when the bible is talking about this kind of thing.  God does stuff?  We know that.

The Moral (ethical) Will of God 

2)  Other times, the bible is talking about those general instructions for how to properly be a human being or Christian.  General rules or knowledge.  Ten commandments.  The Christian commandments to be at liberty, and to love one another.  Stuff about how to treat people.  That's stuff for everyone, every day.  There's nothing about which school to choose, which girl to date, or which brand of butter to buy, (or if margarine is a better idea) all things considered.  

   And when the bible talks about the Will of God, and it means all that general, moral stuff, we get that too.  And unlike the Sovereign stuff, we get told that stuff.  We understand that God doesn't wish us to go around killing everyone.  That He thinks adulterers are douchebags.  Not to oppress the weak.  That stuff.  And sometimes that's what the bible's talking about, as to the "will of God," instead of the previous thing, the Sovereign Will of God thing.

A Personal, Static, Pre-determined, Uncollaborative Plan?

What we were being taught, though, was that any verse which had the word "will" in it could be used to talk about, or was proof positive, of a whole third thing.  A personal, fixed, perfect, custom-made, individualized plan we weren't to have any say in designing, but were merely to follow, like automatons.  It was supposedly as specific, on a tiny, personal scale, as His sovereign will was for Reality.  It was like that, but unlike that: He supposedly intended to reveal all of it to us, personally, so we'd know what to do.  Which Hand to pick.  With at least a second or two advance warning before needing to know each bit.  Now, this is quite a bit more dubious.

Friesen not only goes into the fact that:

a) believing this and resolving never to act before "finding God's perfect plan" etched in Sharpie on a rock somewhere won't pay off

b) this makes us indecisive and superstitious, imagining stuff

but also

c) we then end up following our own vague internal impulses, and sticking God's face on them and claiming "I just really, really feel like the Holy Spirit is leading me to eat this cake right now, for Him."  So we end up, as a guy I used to know named Bill used to say, doing what we feel like, and saying God told us to.  We pretend we've made no decisions, and that God's made every single one for us.  There is no humility and little accountability if you roll like this.

Most compelling, Friesen points out that although there are certainly a number of stories in the bible in which God actually told someone exactly what He intended (right down to how many cubits high and how many furlongs wide, and whether to use chiffon or tulle), that these aren't typical.  Because:

a) These very special people are special.  They are exceptions to how God was dealing with all the countless other people in that time period. We certainly can't count on God to speak to us so clearly whenever we want, about everything, acting like a micro-managing backseat driver.  We aren't Moses, any of us.  Most of our stuff just isn't that important.  Let's face it: not everything is important, and we can't always even tell what's important or not.  And He has already given us plenty of advisers and common sense and experience and guidelines and stuff.  We have what we need.  He expects us to be able to handle these trivial matters ourselves, somewhat.  Maybe He'd rather not be our guidance councillor.  He gives wisdom instead of being our own personal GPS (that's a SatNav, Brits) whenever we want Him to.

b) He almost never dealt with even these special exceptional individuals with bible stories about them in this "Hey, c'mere!  Wanna buy a letter S?" kind of way throughout the rest of their lives either.  He was not at their beck and call.  The stories of His direct intervention are told because something out of the ordinary had occurred.

Friesen points out that either people in the bible:

-had to wing it a bit, live their lives, make their decisions, figure out what investments to make so they'd have something to give back to their master once he showed up back and asked them how they'd made out,

or

-they actually got a direct, supernatural encounter, with sound, and usually video as well.  Friesen points out that either God "said unto Noah" with an audible voice, giving cubits and all the rest, or else people ended up using their best judgment.  Following their faith as best they knew.  The apostles either had lights from the sky and mysterious voices and visions, or else they spoke of how they had personally decided to do things. 

   There's not one example in the bible of someone "praying really hard"  and just really, really feeling, as a vague, internal conviction, like they'd figured out the specific details of the specific stuff of a specific Perfect Plan, all in advance, without anything external happening.  That isn't how it works anywhere in the bible, even once. Either God outwardly spoke outright to people, with specific instructions, or people had to do what regular folk do.

Does God guide us?  Sometimes.  And not usually so carefully that it won't matter a bit if we remain spiritually blind, clueless and helpless.  That matters, alright.  God watched Adam name animals because He wanted to see what Adam would call them.  Adam had been given a life, and God wanted to see Adam live it.  And boy, did He!

  In the bible, God is compared to a king, a shepherd, a father, a master of servants, and many other authority figures.  Now, it doesn't take a genius to know that no good king keeps courtiers around who need to be told everything, and no good shepherd follows the sheep around pointing at what specific tendrils of grass and weeds to eat, and no good father makes every possible decision for his teenaged children and expects them to somehow guess what the decisions he has made actually are without telling them outright  No master of servants wants a servant who can't be left alone for a moment, because she needs constant supervision.

  Maybe God's a good father, a good shepherd, a good Sovereign, a good master.   Maybe He wants us to be good at our job, and useful, rather than just obedient.  Maybe He wants us to learn, and internalize the boundaries and guidelines and approaches.  I mean, He doesn't like disobedience, but I'm pretty sure He doesn't like immaturity, cluelessness, blindness, helplessness, stuntedness and childishness either.  The bible speaks out pretty strongly against all of those things, quite specifically too.

  Man is the only creature God wished to collaborate with, as to how individual lives and the future paths of races and nations went.  I think He insists upon it.  Upon us getting involved in our lives.  Upon there being life before death. 
  I think it would be a good idea to view today as an opportunity to collaborate, as a chance to be given some decisions to make, and make them so you both can see what they end up being and how they end up working out.