Broadlands Bible Church
November 1, 2023
(Download Audio)
Thesis: The will of God has been, and always will be, primary in respect to His pursuit of His plan to achieve the objective He had in mind before He had created anything.
Introduction: Having laid out some of the issues of the creation of "persons having volitional capacity and some level of personal power to take action", we come to the greatest issue of them all: the fact that, though God adheres to the realities of His creation of such persons to some degree, He never compromises His own Love or Integrity in His responses to what "creatures" think, choose, and do.
Before any "creation of persons" ever took place, God had a Master Plan in mind that is primarily dominated by a harmonious blend of ultimate realities: His "Love", His "Truth", His "Power", His "Wisdom" rooted in His "Omniscience", His "Integrity", and His "Enforcement" of the necessary details of His Master Plan so that His "Reason For The Plan" will not only come to pass in the experiences of every individual person ever created, but will prove to be successful. His purpose for creating persons will triumph against all opposition.
In our study this evening, we are going to look into what I am calling, "The Primacy Of The Will of God" in view of "The Reality of the Will of Man" (this also stretches out over the will of angelic, created, persons).
- I. The Primacy Of The Divine Will.
- A. Is declared in a multitude of biblical texts, of which, John 15:19 is one.
- 1. When Jesus said, "You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you..." He did not at all mean that the ones to whom He was addressing His words did not actually exercise their volitional capacities in choosing Him.
- a. It is undeniable that men were, and always are, "making choices" in regard to God's revelation in words through prophets and apostles, many of which were "instructive commands" ("commands" always call for "choices").
- b. It is, however, also undeniable that men's "choices" are always subject to the "choices" of God.
- 2. What Jesus was saying is that it is His "choices" that exist beneath whatever choices men make.
- a. John 6:70 addresses the reality, and mystery, of His overriding dominion in regard to what will be "permitted to men" and what will be "overridden".
- 1) Mark 3:13 says, "And He went up on the mountain and summoned those whom He Himself wanted, and they came to Him".
- 2) John 6:70 says that this included "one of [them] that [was] a devil" and John 12:6 says that this "devil" was the treasurer of The Ministry of Jesus and The Twelve.
- b. When we come to grips with the fact that God's "will" is very often "permissive" of men's choices to do evil and to accomplish evil objectives, we are confronted with two fundamental realities: God is omniscient and God is pure goodness.
- 1) In regard to His omniscience, we have to keep Romans 11:33 sharply and definitively in mind.
- 2) In regard to His pure goodness, we have to keep Romans 8:28 sharply and definitively in mind.
- c. When men are confronted with the fact that God has "willed" to permit certain limited expressions of great evil, they must, themselves, deal with the fact that they are being "tempted" to believe that the purity of God's goodness is an illusion.
- 1) The original temptation was to "believe" that God is not as good as His own testimony regarding His "goodness" declares.
- 2) Men, all down through the ages, have fallen upon the deadly spikes of "belief in the essential evil of God", an accusation made by one who was actually the one who had become essentially evil and wished for men to believe him to be the one who is essentially good.
- B. Is all that stands between us and Total Death.
- 1. The Master Plan that underwrites all things is revealed to be a plan to bring created persons into the everlasting experience of a Kingdom in which everyone always only seeks the real best interests of everyone else in that Kingdom.
- 2. The Master Plan is rooted in the claims of the Gospel that it was God, Himself, that endured Total Death in order to spare created persons that experience, and there is no counter argument.
