God's Will

I'm not entirely sure that I understood your most recent post. It has to do with God's will. I think we are in agreement that we can't know what God considers good, but I also think that you are saying that God wants us to be happy based on the verse in Matthew (?)

I would like to start off with a story. A few weeks ago I bought a lottery ticket. I have bought maybe five lottery tickets in my entire life. But it so happened that I was at the drugstore and they were advertising a 17 million dollar jackpot and it so happened that the line was long and before I knew it, I had convinced myself that it just might be my lucky day. After all, someone was bound to get lucky.

Then later, in that half-serious way that my friends and I used to speculate on what we would do if we had a million dollars, when we were kids, I decided that I would give all my siblings a million dollars each if I won the whole thing. My parents aren't short of money but I decided that a million in their direction wouldn't be a bad thing although I couldn't imagine that it would make a difference in their life since they are already doing all the things they like to do and money isn't an issue for them.

But for my siblings - well, it could pay off their mortgage. Pay for a family trip to Disney Land, if that's what they wanted. Pay off a sister's student loans for law school and put her all the way through school without having to worry about money. Pay another sister's way through nursing school. It could buy one budding Jimi Hendrix nephew the electric guitar he always wanted, and another nephew the drum set he would really like.

One set of nephews is in a private Catholic school and my sister always worries about paying the bills, and so it would be so much better if money weren't a problem and she wasn't having to juggle all the things she is juggling.

And maybe our entire family could take the vacation of a lifetime by renting some entire tropical island, with plenty of elbow room for all of us so that we could be together but not on-each-other's-nerves together.

And then I suddenly foresaw a different future: one in which my sister who is just short of her law degree - (her third degree: she has two other degrees, one a Master's) dropped out of law school, her husband out of graduate school and they wasted all the money and never realised their full potential as human beings.

And that my other sister, the one who is in nursing school, would drop nursing - or maybe still pursue it - but leave her husband since she would feel she could make it on her own.

I foresaw another brother's wife leaving him, because she would get to claim half the million dollars as her share.

And I foresaw being confronted by bitter siblings, asking me just where my brain was when I gave them all that money, didn't I know what could happen.

So then I mentally downsized the million to half a million. But then I still foresaw potential trouble ahead.

So where does this fit into your post? It fits in here: If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?
Part of what we discussed privately was that I am not sure that our temporal happiness means all that much to God. That was my position. I think you are sort of disagreeing with it based on Matthew. In my parable above, my intent is to give a good gift to my siblings. But my good gift does not take into account free will. It takes into account how I think they should spend money. To pay off their debts, so that they don't have to worry about money. To provide musical instruments for two extremely talented young boys so that they can increase their talent.

But once I have given then that gift, there is no way to control what could happen and my good intention may have very bad consequences. In fact, by the time I was through imagining all the bad things that could happen with that much money, I totally understood why so many rich people, people like Bill Gates, or Oprah aren't spreading their money around a little more freely.

When Jesus says that it is God's wish to give good gifts to us, what does that mean? We are defining 'good' by our definition of what is good, which means we are defining it as being what we want: good health, good marriage, good kids, successful career that is fulfilling, good relationships with others, nice house, no debts, a few 'toys' to play with.

God is outside of space and time. To Him, all is one - the living and the dead are all together in Him. Yesterday and today are one in Him. He knows the sparrow that will fall before it even begins to falter.

But God's definition of what is a good gift is not necessarily our definition of a good gift. God looks through eons of time. He looks to the future in terms of His good gifts. His first promise was to Adam and Eve, that of their seed a messiah would come who would return things to their former state and glory. But this promise has still not been completely realised.

I partly agree with what you say when you say that there is God's absolute will, and God's permissive will. And I agree with you that we have no way of knowing what constitutes either the absolute will or the permissive will. It is human nature to think that our little screw-ups, our minor decisions have no impact on the absolute will but that is our thinking, and we are told in Isaiah 55:

8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.

9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? You put it well when you wrote that God is non-linear. The butterfly effect is part of chaos theory - the idea that chaotic or random happenings in fact have an underlying order of cause and effect, and that little things can have bigger consequences than anyone ever dreamed of. A butterfly fluttering its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.

As with everything that is written in the Bible, I think because we are linear thinkers and because our thought of what constitutes good is limited to our own self-interest, we have to look at the Bible for examples of what God considers good or permissive will or absolute will.

Moses striking the rock instead of speaking to it seems to be a minor, permissive will sort of thing. But God didn't see it that way and due to that, Moses did not step into the Promised Land. David's use of permissive free will with regards to his adultery with Bathsheba brought a plague on Israel and the death of his son with Bathsheba.

Yet on the other hand, David, when he fled Saul, went into the holiest place with his men, the place where only the priests were allowed to go and ate the shew bread even though the punishment for that was death.

God in the Old Testament when He says that I will have mercy and not sacrifice and Jesus in the New Testament, when He says that the sum of the Law is to love God and your neighbour as yourself, and in His parable of the Good Samaritan, puts minor acts in the place of major, earth shattering acts. Jesus says that the person who gives a drink of water to a child will not lose his reward. These are minor, every day acts and yet those are the things that God judges us by and appears to count as His absolute will.

So in conclusion, I think that I don't really believe there is a difference between absolute will and permissive will. I think that they are one and the same - they are the butterfly effect and one day we will reap what we have sown in our small kindnesses and unkindnesses. Our bending to God's will or what we can best surmise from God's will based on our understanding of the Bible. It seems that God always prefers kindness, turning the other cheek. But we are also told to be watchful and not to fall into the trap of heresy that Paul took issue with in Romans 6:

1 What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?

and ... 12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.

13 Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.

14 For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.

15 What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid.

16 Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?

Our small, personal lives matter, and very often, when you look at the lives of the saints, they are not happy lives. There is nothing in them to indicate that God equated what we would consider a good life, or a good gift, with their lives. All of the apostles but John of the Revelation were martyred in cruel ways. This is not what most of us would consider a good gift or life.

Even in the prophecies of the coming Messiah, through human eyes, in Isaiah 53, Christ is described as, he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

Christian lives, in the effort to obey Christ who lives in us, often reflect the same characteristics, having in them nothing that anyone in his right mind would desire, and certainly not happiness as we understand happiness. I am not saying that God doesn't love us or that He doesn't join in our weeping. But He has His eye on a longer goal, which we can only see through a glass darkly, and that very often the 'good gifts' He refers to in Matthew seem to be only in the world to come.

Layla