All right, we want to begin this morning by just reading a few verses from Deuteronomy 29. Deuteronomy 29, beginning at verse 27. The anger of the Lord was kindled against this land to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book. And the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger and in wrath and in great indignation and cast them into another land, as it is this day. The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." Let's pray together. glorious and sovereign God, who are sovereign in Thy will and sovereign in Thy power and who does rule all the inhabitants of the earth so that no man can say unto Thee, What doest Thou? Lord God, may we bow beneath Thy supremacy and we learn more and more in our lives to submit trustingly as a child to his Father, to Thee, our Heavenly Father. Grant us Thy grace, O God, to truly live these things in and then live them out. to be formed and molded and conformed to the image of Thy Son, who was always about Thy business, Heavenly Father, that we might also always be about Thy business. Help us to be and then to do Thy will, and that our being may be the roots of our doing. so that we might be motivated by a cause far greater, far higher than ourselves, even thy cause and thyself. Show us thy glory, Lord, and it sufficeth us." Be with us this morning in lecturing. Be also with the NAPARC delegates and visitors that will be gathering in our building today. Help us also this evening as I give a talk to the delegates on experiential preaching, and bless their meetings throughout, and let all things redound to Thy honor and glory. And do bind conservative biblical reformed churches from all over North America to each other to be a hand and foot to each other. We thank Thee for Tim's presence this morning with us and pray Thy benediction upon him, upon his work, upon his colleagues, upon his denomination. Lord, be in their midst and show them great and mighty things that they know not yet. Be with us then in lecturing in this hour. Fill us with a humble reverence about Thee and an experiential reality of Thee. We ask all this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, on our outline, we are moving now to the dynamic attributes of God. Actually, the last section. We're in the bottom of page seven. And we're going to look primarily this morning at God's sovereign will, God's sovereign will. So first we want to then establish a quick working definition. You remember earlier in this course we distinguished between God's necessary knowledge and his free knowledge. And we related that at that time to the subject of the will of God. And I told you we'd come back to that later. Well, this morning we're coming back to that. At that time we said God knows himself, which is his necessary knowledge. God knows himself, that's his necessary knowledge, and God knows his will, that's his free knowledge. Now I want to unpack that a bit as we look at the will of God and find a very similar distinction between the necessary will of God in the free will of God. The necessary will of God in the free will of God. So we can define the will of God in its simplest form as simply His power of self-determination. His power of self-determination. Now that means several things. It means first of all, as you can see on the outline, God wills himself. God wills himself. The attributes of God are identical with his being. Remember we underscored that earlier too. So we can say that God is his will. And since his attributes are identical with his being, His being determines His will and His will determines His being. And that's just another way, really, of affirming the aseity of God, the absolute independence, glorious absoluteness of God. God is not what someone else made him to be, but he's radically self-determined. He's his own final reference point. So he truly is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. But secondly, God not only wills himself, but God also has a will that determines what is outside of himself. What is outside of himself. And this determination, we call in theology, of course, God's decree. Really, God's decree is simply an expression of his will. God wills. And therefore God decrees. And what He decrees always comes to pass. So in Genesis 1, God wills. Having willed, He then speaks His mind. Having spoken His mind, He says, let there be light. And there's light. God speaks and it is done. He utters His word and it comes to pass. Now that raises the question for us. Since the decree is an expression of God's will, and God's will is identical with His being, can we say that God's decree could not be otherwise than what it is? In other words, is the decree of God necessarily what it is, since the being of God is necessarily what it is. If that's the case, then God has no free knowledge after all, but only necessary knowledge. This kind of philosophical reasoning actually introduces into the equation this morning a Greek notion of determinism. Determinism into the very doctrine of God's will and His decrees. And if you take that conception to its ultimate ending point, history becomes irrelevant. because history is frozen, it's meaningless, since everything is necessarily what it is. That's one of the main reasons why I think back in the 60s or 70s, probably 70s, James Donne, D-A-N-E, wrote his book, The Freedom of God. And in that book, he wrongly understands the reform doctrine of the decrees of God as pure determinism. And he argues that the only way to get out of that is to introduce an equally ultimate notion, an equally ultimate notion of indeterminism. And so consequently, to avoid the determinism of decreto theology, he wipes out decreto theology and basically says that is a caricature of the Reformed position. Now, if you look back in church history and you look at some of the Reformed theologians, you'll notice that they were not unaware of this tension, this question, and they dealt with it. And they dealt with it in such a way that they came down between Don's position and Greek determinism. They dealt with it by introducing a distinction which is actually quite unintelligible apart from covenant logic. Basically they said this, and I'll explain this, that the will of God is necessary as to its source or its origin, but that will is free as to its object. I'll repeat that. The will of God is necessary as to its source or origin, but it's free as to its object. Now here's the way they're reasoned. I realize I'm getting into kind of heavy stuff here, and it's beyond our comprehension ultimately, but we're stammering. We're babes. The will is indeed coextensive with God's being. All our Reformed Fathers acknowledge that. The will is coextensive with His being. It is God who wills. The will of God is indeed the will of God. But at the same time, speaking simply out of fidelity to the word of God, the point is also made that God could have willed otherwise than he did. For there are always infinite possibilities open to God. I don't know if you've read the section in Bavink, but I won't bother you with the details. You can find it there. But Bavink has a series of texts that prove this point, that there are possibilities open to God. Now, what God wills comes to pass, indeed, and what He does not will does not come to pass, indeed. But because there are possibilities, in other words, God could have chosen, theoretically, not to have created the world. Therefore, we can say creation is an expression of the free will of God. Creation is not an automatic necessity because of the being of God. God didn't need anyone outside of himself. Therefore creation is not to be absorbed into his being in a kind of pantheistic way, but rather creation is to be seen as a free act of God's will. God willed to create, so he created. So that brings me then to this, underlining this point that God's will is necessary, as to its source or origin, but free as to its object. Now that raises a very important question. The question of distinction in the will of God, and that's part B in the outline, the decretive and the preceptive will of God. We've got to spend a little time grappling with this if we're going to really understand the attribute of God's will. The will of God is a communicable attribute, not an incommunicable attribute. Because men, being made in relationship to God, image bearer of God, has a will. Again, also this communicable attribute isn't really able to be communicated in its fullness, but a touch of it is. Now the covenant which describes the relationship between God and man, therefore, is a covenant between God who wills, and in Christ with men who as God's image bearer also will but the Lord God is the Lord of the covenant so what he wills is that men might live live in covenant with him and so we can gather from the early chapters in Genesis That it's God's will that man, the essence of man's life really, live in covenant with Him. This is really what it is to truly live, to live in covenant relationship to God. To really live is to live in fellowship with God, in communion with God. Therefore, as God entered into covenant relationship with man, His will is also an expression of His command, just as His command is an expression of His will. Now, that already is a little too much for us to get our arms around. But then you add to that this complex idea, and sin always confuses things, makes things more complicated. In terms of history, man rebels against God's will, and man can rebel against God's will. And so scripture speaks in terms of rebellion and apostasy with regard to the fallen man. And because of the complex of sin, we are actually compelled, I'll explain why in a moment, to make a distinction in the will of God. Not that God has two separate wills, one over here and one over there. but a distinction within the will of God from our perspective. And this distinction, decretive, perceptive, has a number of other names. The most common that you would use in teaching in church would be the secret or hidden will and the revealed. Of course, the classic text I just read from Deuteronomy 29.29 would be the classic proof text, although there are many. Other ways of dealing with this, particularly in the Latin, the forefathers that we still have in Latin, they speak of the will of God's good pleasure, and then the will that He has indicated to us, or the revealed will, the will of good pleasure. That's really the same as the decretive and perceptive will. Now, with respect to God's decretive will, we must say, first of all, this will always comes to pass. And secondly, this will is always comprehensive. So that it is true, James Donne notwithstanding, that history is the unfolding of God's decree of will. The precept of will, however, should come to pass. Should. I'm speaking in terms of moralistic terms now. Man should obey God's commandments, God's revealed will, God's word. But that will often does not come to pass because of sin. because of our native opposition to the will of God, our refusal to do as God has commanded. And you see, by that refusal, if we don't repent and believe the gospel, man separates himself from God. He falls out of this covenant fellowship with God. He becomes a covenant breaker. So the goal of redemption is, from one perspective, simply the fulfillment of God's preceptive will. That is, that man's will might again coincide with God's will. That we might be born again to have a will that wills God's will. Now that's embedded in our very prayer. when we pray the Lord's prayers. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. You see, this petition cannot be restricted to a petition for fulfillment of God's decreed will. But rather, just as the angels in heaven are always obedient to the will of God, so also our prayer is that the will of God might be done in earth as the angels do it in heaven. Now that goal of redemption will be achieved by God's sovereign power in creation. We see early on, as I mentioned already, that God wills creation. He wills the sun, the moon, the stars, the animals, the birds, the fish, and man. When he speaks, his speech is a revelation of his will. God spake and it came to pass. It came to pass by the sovereign power of God. That's true in creation. In re-creation, God speaks, God commands, it's an expression of His will, and that will comes to pass. So you have the power of God's Word in re-creation. A power that is miraculous. The Lord Jesus speaks to Lazarus in the grave, Not presupposing that somehow Lazarus has power intrinsically to do what Jesus commands him to do. He's dead. He can't do what Jesus commands him to do. And yet, behold, Lazarus comes forth. Why? Well, he comes forth at the command of Jesus Christ. And that command is a powerful expression of God's will. God's will that comes to pass. so you can see where I'm going with this I hope in the proclamation of the gospel today we do not literally say to sinners come forth out of the grave at least we don't we don't normally go stand in physical cemeteries and do that but we do in essence stand in cemeteries in valleys of dry bones And we call the dead to come forth. And maybe there will be times, I don't say this facetiously, but there will be times in your ministry where you'll probably feel like your church is like a valley of dry bones. Everything seems so dead and so dry. It can be depressing. come out of church and it seems like everything that people talk about is everything but the sermon. If some little lady walked out with her crying baby, oh, they'll talk about that. But everything but the sermon. And you just feel the deadness and the dryness and it's overwhelming. And yet it's your job, it's my job, it's our task as ministers of the word to call upon people who cannot come forth of themselves from the dead. And we call with the authoritative proclamation of Jesus Christ, whose will is to save sinners. And we call not with our words, but with His words. And astonishingly, Behold, sinners do come forth. You will see conversions. You will see fruit. So the power of preaching is the power of the Spirit of God to bring men from death to life. To bring them in the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ into conformity with the will of God. And so when we pray, Thy will be done on earth as in heaven, we're not just praying, Lord, do your decreed of will. We're praying evangelistically for the recreative power of the living God, beseeching the dead would live. So there's a correlation then between the will of God on one hand and the will of men on the other hand. A correlation between the will of God and the will of men. When men do desire the things of God, they come to God not because they are forced against their wills. but they are made willing to will to come they're made willing to will to come so that we can say the will to come is not a will that arises out of the flesh but it's a will that is generated or regenerated we could say by the sovereign created speech of God Now this is important to maintain, so that we don't fall on the one side into free will, easy believism, that man can accomplish it on his own, and on the other side that we don't lose our creatureliness. The fact that we really do have a will that needs to be made willing in the day of God's power. We're not just robots being acted upon. In other words, conversion. Conversion is not an operation in terms of which our creatureliness as image bearers of God is wiped out or bypassed or overcome. So in the power of recreation, we actually see a poignant expression of the will of God in action. And we should think of these two things together. On the one hand, the sovereignty of God in our conversion, because that testimony is everywhere in Scripture. It's God's sovereign will penetrating the inner recesses of our soul. At the same time, That sovereign will doesn't destroy the humanness of man. Yes, we're lost. Yes, we're dead in trespasses and sins. Yes, we would destroy ourselves apart from the will of God. But God's will works on our will and makes us willing in the day of His power. And so this is a genuine regeneration, a genuine conversion that flows out of it. This is not a charade. God wills and men will. But there's also discrepancy. All things transpire according to God's secret will. But there are some things that transpire contrary to his revealed will. And here's where the rubber hits the road. And we go over our heads again. All things transpire according to God's secret will. Some things transpire contrary to his revealed will. The only way we can grapple with that is by saying this, that the essence of the covenant life of the creature, is to live according to the revealed will of God. And when we don't, you see, we're at cross wires with God. That's what we mean when we say, the just shall live by faith. The man who's in a right relationship with God is the man who lives by faith. And that faith can be known and is directed by the revealed will of God. So, when we receive the word of God into our consciousness, and we are conformed in our thinking and behavior to the words that God has spoken, We are obeying the will of God. And then there's a peace, there's a harmony within us, there's a sense of well-being. And we're content with that. We don't want to know the secret will of God. To want to know the secret will of God is to desire to be as God. And the problem with that, you see, is that then we're making an end run around faith, living by faith. And we are abandoning the genius of our creation as an image bearer of God to reflect His covenant, to reflect His will by a life of faith. Now, that's why the old theologians, also the scholastics, have said that the secret will of God is never the rule of faith or practice. It cannot be, because it's secret. And so that's why Moses makes his point with such force at the end of the unfolding of the covenant of history before the people of Israel, as if this is the conclusion of the covenant history, that they are not to live by the secret will of God. For those things belong to the Lord our God. But you are to live by the revealed will, by the revealed covenant will of God, which belongs to us and our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law, Deuteronomy 29.29. Now the fact that the secret things belong to God does not simply mean, as some people rather simplistically put it sometimes, well, we don't know who the elect are. Now that's true. But the sacred will, belonging to God, means something much, much, much more in the life of the believer. It means that we can leave our future in the hands of God and trust Him with the whole unfolding of His secret will, because we're living by faith through His revealed will. So that having been recreated in the image of God, being brought into covenant fellowship with God, we understand that all things will work together for good. We trust God with it, we don't try to probe, we don't try to, you know, Psalm 131 is so beautiful, such a neglected psalm. I don't try to grasp things too high for me, the psalmist says. But I'm like a weaned child, I'm content to trust in the Lord. Oh, Israel, trust in the Lord, henceforth, forever. See, it's that life of faith that makes all the difference. So I don't get up in the morning anxious, my stomach in knots, what's going to happen to me today? No. I go by the revealed will. I do. I want to do the will of God today. I want to teach my children the will of God today. I want to teach my congregation the will of God today. I want to model for the seminary students the will of God today. And I leave the secret things to God. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. All these other things will be added to you. If you try to probe the secret will of God, you just be full of anxiety. It's not the way God made us in covenant fellowship. We have to walk by faith, not by sight. I had a woman in my first congregation who had a baby that died. Well, I shouldn't say a baby, maybe a one and a half year old, two year old. And that woman, I mean, I encouraged her, I said, you know, it's God's normal way to take such a child to heaven, you can leave it with the Lord. That was enough for her. She had to know, God had to reveal to her, she was obsessed with it, day and night, God had to reveal to her some special revelation, this child was in heaven. She begged for that. She agonized over that. Her life was torn apart by it for years. I really don't know how she ever came out with it. It's the first thing on her mind all the time. It's my child in heaven. It's my child in heaven. She's always trying to probe the secret will of God on that. It was her whole life. It consumed everything. And she never grasped this. So even though what we're talking about this morning goes above all of our heads, and it certainly goes above the heads of a congregation, and you can't use it in the form that I gave it to you this morning. You have to modify it. But the applications of it, you can really use in the congregation. The practical applications of Deuteronomy 29 verse 29 are very important. It has everything to do with not making an end run around faith, but living by faith, bit by bit. If we're talking end run terminology, we're thinking football, I guess. Well, living by God is yard by yard, play by play, step by step, run by run, every movement, every pass, every action, every thought, submitting to the revealed will of God. What would God have me to do? Now, that raises the question, the third point on the outline, about the permissive will of God. Let me try to cover this point and then we'll ask a break for questions. In an attempt to resolve some of the philosophical and theological difficulties that arise when you talk about the secret and the revealed wills of God, some Reformed theologians, yes, some Reformed theologians, have introduced in past centuries the category of a so-called permissive will of God. So they would add a third category to the will of God. A will that somehow is neither decretive nor revealed. at least not precisely. The point is made that God decrees not only what He purposes to effect, that's His decree of will, but He also decrees what He purposes to allow or to permit. That's called His permissive will. Now, it's not hard to understand why that distinction is made. The concept of a permissive will and a permissive decree are introduced into Reformed theology to help relieve the pressure of concluding that God is somehow responsible for sin. So if you can say that God does not effect sin by his decretive will, but he permits it, that is very attractive to our mind because what it does is it enables us to understand that sin is still somehow embraced in the decree of God while maintaining that God is not the author or the source of sin. Well, that's a laudable, laudable venture. It's eminently worthy to try to build our theology in such a way that this is true because everything is in God's decree and God is not the author of sin. However, the idea of a permissive will only relieves God of the responsibility for sin by placing the ultimate source of certain actions outside of the will of God altogether. The idea of a permissive will only relieves God of the responsibility for sin if we place the ultimate source of certain actions outside God's will altogether. You see, what I'm saying here is the intention of this distinction can only be achieved by going the whole way and by saying that Certain actions, certain occurrences fall outside of the will of God altogether. And therefore God is altogether relieved of the responsibility for sin. The problem when you go that far is that you actually destroy the absoluteness of God. You destroy the absoluteness of God as the ultimate reference point of all things. So then you end up with a God who has only a principle of good and has no relationship to the principle of evil whatsoever. And the power of evil then is independent of God. And you end up finally, if you take it all the way, with a good God and Satan being a kind of bad God. On the other hand, if God has purposed or willed what he permits, and we accent that, we really haven't escaped the problem, the problem that the distinction is intended to deal with. And we're left with something like Charles Hodge's statement in Systematic Theology, page 548. Sin is and God is, Hodge says, therefore the occurrence of sin must be consistent with his nature, and its occurrence cannot have been unforeseen or undesigned. And since its occurrence cannot have been unforeseen or undesigned, God's purpose of decree that it should occur must be consistent with his holiness. So you see here, Hodge, he's not claiming he understands all this, but he's also not escaping. He's not evading the issue. And yet, it leaves us a little queasy, doesn't it? Because what Hodge is not saying here, and what needs to be said, is that, and we need to say it with equal vigor and force that Hodge said his statement, is that sin is the very contradiction of God's holiness, the very contradiction of his nature. So here's what we're left with. We're left with a formula that goes something like this. Sin indeed does not fall outside of the will of God. Sin indeed does not fall outside of the will of God. The will of God is comprehensive. You can't deny that. And there's plenty of text in the Bible that support it. He does all things after the counsel of his own will, Ephesians 1.11. Shall there be evil in the city and I have not done it? And on and on it goes. But, Sin cannot be integrated into that will in such a way that we somehow conclude that ultimately because God is good, or He decreases good, that sin is somehow good. It cannot be integrated in God's will in such a way that we somehow reach the point that we justify what is evil. So we must maintain At the same time that God wills all things, God is never the author of sin. Nor is God ever responsible for all that He has willed to come to pass. And so you get two blasphemies that seem to be contradictory. One blasphemy is God hasn't willed everything. Another blasphemy is God is the author of sin. Neither one is true. Both are blasphemies. How do you work that out? Well, you say, you freely admit it. It's beyond your comprehension. But the Bible does tell us some things that can help us. One, I think, one of the most vivid ones for me is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. I mean, Acts 2.23 is so powerful. Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ. crowning sin is part of the will of God. But notice what Peter says, Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, not God has taken, and by wicked hands ye have crucified and slain. So you see, on the one hand you say the death of Jesus Christ and you say it with great reverence, is an expression of God's will and God's decree. And yet those who crucify Jesus Christ are guilty of a great crime. John Murray called it the arch crime of human history. And so both sides of this question are being brought to bear in the act of crucifixion. But the Bible also has other examples of this. God wills all men to love their neighbors. The greatest commandment is thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, with all thy strength, and thy neighbor is thyself. Now that obligation to love one's neighbor is not an obligation which devolves upon the regenerate only. But it rests upon all men. This is God's will. But, reality is that not all men do love their neighbors. In fact, they disobey, they act contrary to the will of God, they sin against each other. Another example. Many are called, but few are chosen. The calling is sincere. You cannot ever preach the gospel rightly if you say to people, well, God's calling to you is insincere. That's deadly. If you go into the pulpit with the assumption that God himself does not stand behind his own gospel, he's asked you to preach, you are left all alone. Well, what do these examples teach us? I think they teach us, and this is about as far as we can go, as far as my little puny mind can go, they teach us what Augustine said. And Augustine, I think, is very simple and profound here. When he writes this, quote, sin is contrary to or against the will of God. Sin is contrary to or against the will of God, but not outside of the will of God. So there are things that happen that are contrary to the will of God, such as sin. But Augustine says they don't fall outside of the will of God. That is, they don't fall outside of this comprehensive decree. Well, how do you explain that? There is no way to explain this, to have a resolution of it, that will enable us to live outside of faith. We live according to God's precepts. His precept is that we should not sin against Him, that we should trust in Him, we should walk by faith, we should believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus said, if you love me, keep my commandments. So the whole great commission is to go forth and teach and make disciples. So we live according to God's precepts. And it's precisely in the revelation of God's precepts of scripture that we are assured there is no such thing as chance, that nothing falls outside of the will of God, that God is in control. But the only way we can live that way is to receive it and to live it in by faith. Not by doubt, but by faith. Faith is not something else than, something less than knowledge. Since we cannot have insight, we will have to settle for faith. It's precisely the genius of our existence as creatures to live by faith. If we lived only by knowledge, without faith, we would die. But we live by faith. And that faith in the Word of God is a source of assurance to us that we're not on the wrong road. And so though our minds don't grasp all these things, And for one reason, in one way, this is perfectly understandable, because we're not God, and God is so far above us. But when we do live by faith and trust God, we can say with Paul, I know whom I have believed and persuaded, and he's able to keep that which I've committed unto him against that day. And there's nothing more profound than that. And so we surrender this into God's hands. Not claiming to fully comprehend it, but saying with Moses, the secret things belong to the Lord our God, the reveal to us and to our children. Teaching all that the Bible has to teach about it, but then stopping there and being content to live according to God's reveal will by faith. All right, any questions on all of this? Yes, Diego? What is the page on 5 statement 4? It's page 548 in Systematic Theology. I think it's volume 1 if I remember right. It might be volume 2, but I think it's volume 1. No, I think that's exactly what I'm saying here. I don't know if I'd say it quite that way, but I think that's, yeah, the secret decree of God is always good, even when it embraces sin. I would certainly say with that. I would never not say with that, that this is all above and beyond our comprehension. I really put a heavy accent on the second part of the statement, too. Sin is always bad. Sin is always evil. You don't ever want to say anything about God and His decree that would make sin anything less than abhorrent. I remember preaching a sermon once on I'm Romans 8.28, all things work together for good. And, you know, I went through the things that you would expect you would go through, like, you know, even afflictions, even the death of a child, even, you know, all these things can work together for good, for our spiritual maturation and so on. But ultimately I had to grapple with this, if all things work together for good, does even sin work together for good? I trembled to go there, and I wanted, like anything, to avoid that in my sermon. You understand, it's a thorny problem. Because the last thing in the world you want to do as a minister is to ever call sin good. Sin is not good, sin is terrible. And yet, with great reverence, we have to say that God mysteriously and wondrously works in our lives in such a way that even turns sin on its head so that we learn lessons even through our sin that ultimately work for our good, as dreadful as sin is in its own character. And so to express that in a way that safeguards all the biblical truths is challenging, it's very challenging. That's a good point for me to stress with you in preaching. Sometimes there are things that you just simply have to say about in preaching. Dear congregation, this is what the scripture says and this is the implications of what the scripture says, but I say this with great reverence because we cannot grasp it completely. Please don't misconstrue this in an antinomian way or in any other way that minimizes the dastardliness, the heinousness, the grossness of sin. So yeah, I think what Sproul is doing there is trying to bring these two big truths together and saying it in a very few words. I don't know what he said just before that statement or what he said just after that statement. I'd like to see that. But I think the statement itself is true if it's explained properly. All right, let's go on then and look at one more very difficult question here and then hopefully As we move on into God's sovereign power, things will get just a little bit easier. And that actually, sovereign power, is the very last attribute we have to cover in this course. And I won't complete it today. I just barely started today at best. But I hope to complete that on Thursday. And then we'll move from there to Continuing on Thursday with God's providence, you recall, of course, that last week we had a special guest speaker and that covered Holy Trinity and divine decree, pages 8 and 9. So we'll pick up then on Thursday after we complete this section on God's providence. and work with that on Thursday and probably next Tuesday. And then the angels and devils will carry us over the Thanksgiving break into the last week. All right, are there two wills in God? Now, some people have said that there are. Some Reformed theologians have said that there are because of all these things we've been grappling with. because of statements like Augustine said, decretive, preceptive. And the better Reformed theologians, however, have said really to say that is contradictory with everything we've been saying about God, the oneness of God. the so-called simplicity of God and that to actually insist that God has two separate wills in God himself is to make a serious mistake. Now, a lot of this is semantics and so I don't, this is not the kind of stuff you bring to your congregation either, at least not very often. I don't think people who would say, Reform people say, yes, there are two wills in God. I don't think they're necessarily heretics. Maybe they haven't thought out everything they're saying, but probably what they're trying to say is that both of these things exist. But what we have to maintain is that somehow in God, beyond our comprehension, these two really are one in God. In their manifestation to us, We see them as two. I was looking last night at Richard Moeller, trying to find what he had to say about it, and I did locate a couple paragraphs on page 450 of volume one. One paragraph in particular I find very helpful. I'll just read it to you. Distinctions in the divine will are not to be understood as separate wills, separate kinds of willing, or as alterations in the divine will. The distinctions are made on the part of the things willed, not on the part of the one willing. The distinctions are made on the part of the things willed, not on the part of the one willing. In our finite minds, we divide the will of God, as the scripture itself does, according to the diversity of its objects. To make the point, this is still Muller, to make the point as forcefully as possible, the distinctions of the divine will will serve the purpose, not of dividing the will, but explicitly of preserving the sense of its unity. It is actually the Arminian, not the Reformed theology, that argued two wills in God. That's an interesting point. And that actually coincides with the whole thing of Arminius where he says, you know, in salvation, God actually gets down from the throne of His justice and goes and sends another throne, the throne of His grace, like He has two thrones, two wills. And the Reformed always said, no, no, no. His throne of justice and His throne of grace are one. His grace is always just, and so on, and all His attributes are one in Him. There's also an interesting section in A.W. Pink's book on the sovereignty of God. Pink brings up the idea that the Arminians lob this bomb at the Reform that they believe in two wills of God. And he says, but this is a mistake. Due to their failure to see that the secret and revealed will of God respect entirely different objects, if God should require and forbid the same thing, or if he should decree the same thing should and should not exist, then would his secret and revealed will be contradictory and purposeless. How often do men draw a sharp distinction between what is desirable in its own nature and what is not desirable, all things considered? For example, the fond parent does not desire simply considered to punish his offending child, but all things considered. He knows it's his bounden duty, and so he corrects his child. And though he tells his child he does not desire to punish him, but that he is satisfied it is for the best all things considered to do so, then an intelligent child would see no inconsistency in what his father says and does. Just so, the all-wise Creator may consistently decree to bring to pass things which he hates, forbids, and condemns. God chooses that some things shall exist which he thoroughly hates in their own intrinsic nature. And he also chooses that some things shall not yet exist which he perfectly loves in their own intrinsic nature. For example, he commanded that Pharaoh should let his people go, because that was right in the nature of things. Yet he had secretly declared that Pharaoh should not let his people go, not because it was right in Pharaoh to refuse, but because it was best all things considered that he should not let them go. That is best, because it subserved God's larger purpose. Well, you can see how Pink makes an attempt here, and I'll just refer you to one more without reading it. Reverend Kirsten in his Dogmatics. Let's see if I can find the page number here. 67 through 69 also grapples with this problem. I think quite effectively there. His main thought is that God's command always serves his decree. So that a decree says, for example, and he's drawing, this is an example that a lot of the old divines used really as well, but Kirsten does a good job with it. Isaac must remain alive. Abraham's faith must be tried. And so that trial takes place by means of the command that Abraham obeys by faith. But in the final analysis, you see God calls to him to withhold the knife. So the command actually serves the decree that Isaac would remain alive and that Abram's faith would be tried. Well, all three of these really, Muller, Pink, Carson, these are attempts to grapple with, again, what is beyond our comprehension because we're finite. We're finite. All right, last thought then on the outline, God's will and moral obligation. Let's look at that and then again I'll ask you if you have questions. This may take the rest of our time today. We may not get to power until Thursday. God's will and moral obligation. Now there is no good in and of itself apart from what God says is good. There's no good in and of itself apart from what God says is good. And yet that does not mean that the will of God is arbitrary. The point is that the reveal will of God is the expression of his own perfection. What God commands us to do in His revealed will, think moral law, is the expression of the righteousness which He is. So the perfections of God are really the sphere of God's own life. God is the living God. And as such, he's qualified by these perfections, which come to expression in his perceptive will, or revealed will, or sometimes it's also called his will of command. Now, because these perfections of God are the sphere of his life, God desires that His recreated people who are reformed in His image, that they also correspondingly become the sphere of their lives so that we live and move and have our being spiritually in this sphere of obedience to God's commands. The image bearers of God really live, really live, when they live in conformity to the will of God. And that's why when a Christian sins, he's an oxymoron. He's living contradictory to who he is. in Christ, Romans 6.10, reckon yourselves dead unto sin and alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord so the revealed will of God is the ground of moral obligation the ground of moral obligation but at the same time It's also our charter of Christian liberty. Because we find our joy and our freedom as believers when we live in conformity to the image of God. Now let me say to you that this is an important point to get across to your congregation and in particular to young people. because the whole world is screaming to young people today from bombarding them from all sides, that true freedom is found in breaking law. And what all the scripture reveals is that true freedom is found in obeying God's law. So who is the truly free husband? It's the husband who obeys the laws of marriage and is faithful to his wife. Who is the bound up, the restricted, the entrapped husband? It's the one who's been unfaithful to his wife, who's trying to maintain two women at once, and shuffling between the two, and always worried, going to bed every night with a guilty conscience. and he's gonna get caught. There's no freedom there, no liberty there. So the point of God's revealed will is that we always get our freedom in righteousness, not in sin. Sin is bondage. Sin brings us prison. spiritually, inwardly, we get imprisoned by sin. Some time ago I was standing in an airport waiting for my luggage to come and it wasn't coming and the only person that was left was a tall black man and me and I started chatting with him and I asked him how he was doing. I said, is life treating you well? Are you doing well? And I'll never forget his answer. Yeah, he said, I'm doing well. I ain't never been in prison. Never been in prison. That's the way he thought of life, was well. Would you think of your life as well because you've never been in jail? But you see, so many of other black men around him, apparently, at least that's what I gather, had been in jail that he considered this a fairly major accomplishment. And maybe in his culture, it was in that particular area, in that particular group of people he was working with. It was a major accomplishment. But you see, that's not the way a Christian thinks. A Christian, well, To me, it's freedom to live according to how God wants me to live. That gives me joy, gives me peace, peace of conscience, there's liberty. This is the way to live. Sin is always bondage, and it brings bondage, and it brings confusion. So, in marriage, true freedom is found by living within the rules of marriage. The field of art, I'm not too good of an example because modern art doesn't have any rules at all. Just throw away modern art for a moment. In historic art, art lives within the rules of art. But it's that way in every area of life. I think of my children. When they're close to us and they're walking in obedience, you can just see the happiness radiate from their faces. And when they're not being so obedient, things are strained and difficult and unhappy and they feel guilty. It's not good until things are straightened out again. And then you look at some other young people's children, which, it's only grace. It's only grace. And the kids seem to live in a habitual state of disobedience. It's awful. It's just every day is a stretch. You cut the atmosphere with a knife. The home is chaos. That's not liberty. True liberty for a child is to be obedient as father and mother. So you get the picture. The whole gamut of life is this way. The whole gamut of life is this way. And we need to understand that and have our young people understand that. You've got your freedom when you live in conformity to the revealed will of God. And dear young people, you think you're going to have freedom when you go your own way? That is your bondage. You think you're going to have more liberty? Your life is going to expand when you go your own way? Your life will be confined and trapped and imprisoned. You want real liberty? Serve the God of the universe. You want a big life? Serve the God of the universe. He's not a restrictive God who wants to say no to you. He's a God that says no to sin for you because He wants your life enlarged and He wants your horizons expanded. See, just the opposite of everything Satan says. Somehow we've got to get that across to young people. Sin is bondage. Sin does bad things to you. You've got to get that across. Now, what God says is good, but that doesn't mean arbitrariness, because the revealed will of God, His will of precept, is an expression of His own perfection. And the perfections of God are the sphere in which he lives, therefore the sphere in which we must also live. So the will of God, his precepts, become for us not a source of slavery, but a source of freedom. But now here's the rub. For the ungodly, who don't know what it is to love God, who don't want to move and live in this sphere. There is this constant rub, you see, because for them, they're enslaved to themselves and they don't want to do God's will. And so for them to do God's will and not their own will, deny their own will, produces a tremendous clash within them because For them, it's like slavery to do God's will, because their will runs, rules supreme. And yet when they do their own will, they're out of sync how God made them. So my friend, if you're unconverted, you're going to be really deep down, you're going to be unhappy all the time. You don't really want to do God's will. And when you do your own will, it brings you into all kinds of problems and troubles and trials. There really is no other way to live than to bow under the revealed will of God and learn to love God and hate sin. So you want to take this whole argument a step further and show the unconverted person in your congregation or in your attendance that it's absolutely impossible to be truly happy in a state of separation from God. Now, it's important to see this revealable of God as a moral obligation, a moral obligation, not a mystical obligation. And that sometimes creeps in also into evangelical Christianity. I don't know if people just talk the wrong way or they're really thinking the wrong way. I think it's probably both. I hope that talk is worse than their internal theology. But you often hear people say, well, you know, God told me this morning, And God nudged me over this way this morning. This is God's will for my life. I know I'm doing God's will. I want to do His will. And God just told me this afternoon what His will is. And no mention of scripture. And you start feeling a little queasy and you say, is this mysticism? Or what is this? Or is this just the person talking to himself? Desiring to do what he wants to do and then he gets some kind of confirmation in his own mind and he does it. It's yesterday I had a man say to me, you know, God told me four times this morning to do such and such, so I finally did it. That's rather unsettling. God spoke to him four times this morning without the Bible. I mean, what's going on here? This is a conservative, Reformed, Evangelical, an office bearer in a Reformed church. What do you make of that? Well, there's a problem here. I want to make a couple observations about it. First of all, when people speak about, quote, the will of God for my life, wanting to know what God's will is in a given circumstances, or a given circumstance, I should say. In terms of the dogmatic distinctions I've made to you this morning, right here is the will of God for your life. The revealed will. That's it. Period. In other words, the reference is not to the Decretive Will at all. For one thing, the Decretive Will cannot be thwarted. For another thing, we don't know what the Decretive Will is. So, when you rebel, you're not really rebelling against the Decretive Will of God. But when you rebel, you're rebelling against the Revealed Will of God, because that's the will for which you have your moral obligation. But the problem is, and this is human nature, the problem is it's difficult to often know what this perceptive will is saying to me in a given situation. Should I go to college A or should I go to college B? What's God's perceptive will? And so what we are prone to do is to take the easy way out and put out our Gideon's fleece. And if it's wet, okay, I'll go to college B. If it's dry, I'll go to college, whatever. And it's simple and we know. And so there are Christians that walk that way every day and they get these nudges and these feelings. And they take this as being God speaking to them, actually apart from scripture, telling them, go to college B. I think this is what the man meant to me when he said, God nudged me four times and finally I went this way this morning. And so there's a kind of intermediate category, somewhere in between the perceptive will of God and the decreed will of God, that these people are claiming. And they get some kind of special insight, you see, into what God really wants them to do. Now, that is something very different from looking at College A and College B according to the revealed will of God, and putting pros and cons up according to what the scripture says and then coming to a conclusion, which is harder work. have different atmospheres. Maybe College A has a little more godly atmosphere. Well, that's certainly worth some points according to God's revealed will that you're not in a more ungodly atmosphere. But maybe College B will take you away from home and maybe that might put you in more temptation. Well, that's worth some points on the scale according to the revealed will of God. And maybe, just before you had to make your decision, maybe your mother got cancer and you're only one of two children and your other brother is married and lives a hundred miles away and your mother needs you and College A is at home and College B, well, you really can't go there because you'd be abandoning your mother and that's against the revealed will of God. So that alone might drown out all the other issues. You see, you go by the revealed will of God, not by that quick feeling you've got, which is so nice because it solves all your problems right away and you know what God wants you to do. But it doesn't make you search the scriptures. Listen to the rejection of this intermediate category. that Moses records in Deuteronomy 30, just after he says about the secret revealed things of God, just 11 verses after. Deuteronomy 30, 11 to 14. For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven that thou should say, who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it. Neither is it beyond the sea that thou shalt say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it." The word is nigh to thee. So the question really is whether we're going to live by faith in the word of God. trusting that written word, or whether we're going to bypass faith in order to live in some kind of mystical insight into the Word of God. When we do the latter, we're really circumventing faith, and we're actually absolving ourselves from responsibility. It seems so pious, it seems so true, it seems so impressive. People get really impressed by it. But we absolve ourselves from responsibility. You see, our assurance does not come by our insights, but it comes through God-given faith. And when we live by faith, we live in dependence on God's Word. And His Word functions as a charter of our liberty, the ground of our moral obligation. And so then in that situation of choosing College A, When I get a half a year into college, and college is not going well, and I've got problems, I can fall back on the Word of God, which is my charter of liberty, and say, Lord, Thou knowest. I didn't put myself here. I came here based on the Word of God. Help me in this situation. But if I came by my intuition, by my insights, and by some feelings I had, What do I have to fall back on? But some feelings at that moment. But those feelings, when I come into contrary feelings, they'll cancel each other out. And I won't have anything left to stand on. And I'll start thinking, maybe I made a mistake. Maybe it was just my own feelings. Maybe it was. Should I be here at all? And the tendency then is you jump ship and you quit the college. You see, when you know your decision is based on the word of God, you'll persevere because you know what's right based on the revealed will of God. And that perseverance is very important in life. So, living responsibly before God involves bearing responsibility before God. by searching his law, his word, and bringing that word to bear on our daily decisions making. Recognizing in our lives that God preeminently is the decision maker, yes, but he makes the decision, he helps us make our decisions through his revealed will. And so we are a decision making people. but used as our grid and our criteria, the very means that God has provided for us of dependency upon His Word. So when we live by dependence on God and His Word, we know ourselves to be acceptable to Him. To sin Therefore, it really means not to live by the will of God, not to walk in His ways, not to use the word as our basis for living. And that brings us, if we're Christians, that brings us great anxiety. It's not really an act of piety to withdraw from responsible action in this world. It's not really an act of piety to say, well, let go and let God. Let's see the way God will lead me. As some people say, I get in the car and wherever the steering wheel takes me, you know, God will take me. You know, it sounds so, so religious. But actually you're abandoning what God has made you to be, an image bearer, his vice-gerent in the world. following His will. Now, living this way, I said, leaves you freer. It leaves you in Christian liberty. And you notice this a great deal when you work pastorally with people, that people have really thought out things biblically and can reason with you why they've done what they've done on a biblical basis. You can see it, that they're more at peace. They have less anxiety, particularly when things go wrong. And it's not that we do this as we depend on the Word in independency from God depending on the Word. That too is wrong. There are people that do that. It's all head down. No, you do it in dependency on the Holy Spirit using the Word. So you're praying for guidance as you use the Word. Oh yes, absolutely. But the Spirit and the Word are never at odds with each other. They're never disjunctional. So the Spirit always guides by the Word. So when the Bible says, Romans 8.14, as many as are led by the Spirit, these are the sons of God. This leading of the Spirit is not something that's occasional, that you get every seven months through some suddenly inspired thought. But this is a day-by-day leading as you subject your life to the revealed will of God. And God, as you consciously do that, and you pray for guidance, and you think things through, you ask for light, God gives you his spirit. Day by day, he takes the things of God in his word, and he drives them home to you, so that you may do what is well-pleasing in his sight. So this is, In a nutshell, the biblical idea of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. All right, that brings me then to the end of our discussion on the attribute of God's sovereign will. I guess I just made it through the sovereign will today, and we'll do sovereign power on Thursday. Any final questions? All right, let's have maybe Tim or you close in prayer with us this morning. Thank you.