Scripture is necessary for the believer. Without it we cannot know the truth, know God, understand ourselves, find salvation, or live God-honoring lives. Our focus at this point of the conversation is on that second item: Scripture is necessary to know God. Scripture is essential to all right theology. All right ideas about God originate in Scripture. In the last article we explored how Scripture is essential to know God’s character and His works. We are continuing down that stream, looking now at a third aspect of God-knowledge that is revealed to us through Scripture: His will.
The Bible is necessary for us to understand God’s will. By God’s will, I mean “that which God desires to do and to have done on the earth.” This includes both what God Himself intends to do and is even now doing, and what He wills for mankind to do. We will pick up the latter component later in this series. For now, let’s zero in on that which God desires to do—that which He Himself has accomplished, is accomplishing, and will accomplish.
But we must first remember that we cannot know God’s purposes without what He has told us about Himself in Scripture. We need God’s word to know what He wills to do and is doing. We cannot discover God’s will by reason, by pseudo-spiritual experiences, by scientific discoveries, or by religious zeal. His judgments are unsearchable and His ways are past finding out (cf. Rom. 11:33). We discover His will only as He has been pleased to reveal it to us in His Word. We receive what He gives and understand His will only has He teaches it to us in and through Scripture.
What of His will has God revealed to us? A good place to begin is “in the beginning.” God, in creating, made everything good. His ex-nihilo creation demonstrates from the start that God’s purpose in the cosmos is to do good. He made an ordered, beautiful world. And He made us to enjoy it. He placed us in this good world and gave us the capacity to appreciate the goodness of His creation.
Perhaps one way of summarizing God’s purposes in the world is to say that God wills to do good. He blesses His creation, His creatures, and His children. All the good that happens in this world originates in God. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). That goodness is sometimes severe, as when He demonstrates His own perfection by judging that which is sinful and imperfect. Yet it is right to say, “The LORD is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works” (Ps. 145:17). God’s purpose—His will—is to bless His creation.
We get more of a grasp of this as we draw concentric circles out from God’s initial creative act. If we trace God’s works throughout the pages of Scripture, we see that He is always bringing order out of chaos, redemption from wreckage, beauty from brokenness. We see that God does good, but also that He wills good. His ultimate purpose is to work what is right and good. We see this in creation, in His covenant with Abraham, in His mercy to Israel, in His giving the law, in His promises to send a Messiah, in Christ’s incarnation, in Christ’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection, in His establishment of the Church, in His not-yet-fulfilled promises to cleanse the world of the impure and make all things new. All that God does is good; thus we conclude that His will is to do good.
Any attempt to summarize God’s will into neat packages falls short, but we can begin to get a handle on it if we group it into five headings: creation, covenant, Christ, cross, and consummation.[1] In each of these acts, God’s will is displayed in tangible ways.
God’s desire to do good is displayed in creation. Genesis chapters 1-2 demonstrate the good that happens when God works His will. He goes to work in the very beginning to create a world of good things, inhabited by good creatures, ruled over by man, who was created in God’s image and created very good. God’s will from the very beginning is to bless us by doing good to us.
When Adam chose to sin, God cursed His good world. But even the curse was infused with blessing. God promised redemption through one of Eve’s descendants. One would come to undo the damage done, to conquer Satan and reverse the damage of the fall. Even as man marred God’s good world, God promised to bring something good. A Savior would come. Genesis is full of God’s promises to bring redemption. God pledged to Adam to bring a redeemer. God saves Noah, preserving a righteous line. As we follow the narrative through Genesis, God draws the circles closer and closer, first covenanting with Abram, then choosing Jacob, setting him and his descendants apart. He chooses a particular people for Himself, covenanting with them for special blessing.
A part of His will, then, is to have a people set apart for Himself. This is clear in His choosing of Israel and is echoed in the New Testament references to God’s people as “elect” and “chosen.” Peter describes the Church as “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people” (1 Pet. 2:9-10). In a certain sense, all men are God’s children. He is the creator and sustainer of all, the Father of all. As such, He does good to all men. “He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). Yet only certain ones are the special recipients of His grace. Those who believe enjoy blessings not experienced by the unbelievers. We learn from Scripture that God’s will is to separate a people unto Himself.
But how will He have a relationship with sinners? Sin brings death (Gen. 2:17). Man’s sin cannot just disappear; it requires righteous judgment. When even the most faithful are shown to be sinners, who can abide in God’s presence? Parallel to His promises to separate a people to Himself are promises to send a Redeemer to save them from their sin. Several themes recur throughout the Old Testament: all men are sinners, God is patient, redemption is coming. As we move into the New Testament, we meet the Redeemer, the One who bridges the gap between God and Man. Christ comes, becoming human to empathize with us, dying to redeem us. He “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), “in all things…made like His brethren” (Heb. 2:17). Christ became human to have relationship with us. God comes to relate with us, not just as our Creator and Lord, but also as our Shepherd and Friend.
There’s a sense in which all Scripture leans toward this event of God’s dwelling with man. God and Adam walked together in the Garden. God dwelt with His people in the tabernacle. Now God lives with them in a human body, feeling their pain, experiencing their weakness, eating, drinking, laughing, crying with them. Christ is with us. Not only that, our cosmos is even now careening toward an even greater restoration of the relationship between God and man. We will one day dwell with God again. As Adam walked with God in the garden, we will walk with Him in Zion. Even as we look ahead, anticipating the completion of salvation in eternity, we look back at Christ’s incarnation as one of the great peaks in the biblical ridgeline. God came to dwell with us. The incarnation shows that God wills to have relationship with us.
Christ’s incarnation not only communicates His desire to understand us and know us, but it also shows His desire to save us. He came, not just to know us, not just to teach us, not just to be an example for us, but to die for us. His primary purpose in coming to earth was to die our death, to bear our curse so we can be freed from it. The incarnation is nothing without Christ’s redeeming death, for it is precisely His death that breaks down the barrier between us and God. Everything else Christ did would have been vain if He had not secured redemption for us by His death. His substitutionary death is the means by which He brought us back to God. The curse of death is turned backwards through Christ’s death, and we who trust in Christ are brought back to God. The cross shows us God’s will to redeem.
This is profoundly communicated throughout Scripture. Again, without divine revelation—without Scripture—we don’t have even the scraps of the gospel. We need God’s merciful revelation to understand what He has accomplished for us.
In creation, God shows His desire to do good. In His covenants, He demonstrates His desire to separate a people to Himself. In Christ, He shows His desire to have relationship with us. In the cross, God reveals His desire to redeem sinners. And in the coming consummation, we see God’s desire that all be restored. God made the world “very good” (Gen. 1:31). That good world was cursed and broken through Adam’s sin. But ever since, God has been working to restore what was broken, to redeem the world and restore a “very good” creation. In the New Jerusalem, all will again be good. “There shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads” (Rev. 22:3-4). The removal of the curse brings restored fellowship. “No more curse” results in “the throne of God and of the Lamb” being in the holy city. God is with His people in fully restored fellowship.
My purpose here is not so much to underline what God has done (though that is also worth our attention) but to draw attention to His sovereign orchestration of history. This is God’s plan for the world. He knows the end from the beginning. But not only that, He established the end from the beginning. History as we know it played out according to God’s will; History yet unwritten will do the same. God created this world with certain purposes in mind, and He has worked them out according to His will.
Coming back to our main thread: He could have done all this without revealing anything to us. He can work His will without consulting us, informing us, or being accountable to us. But He delights in our knowing Him, not only in character but also in works and will. Though we don’t fully understand God’s ways, through Scripture we get a glimpse of the upper side of the quilt where God is working His divine will.
This is a tremendous comfort in the midst of our uncertain world. God is our rock, our certainty when life is crumbling around us. Regardless of what is happening in our homes, our churches, and our nation, we know that God will accomplish His will. And, if we are His, we can rest in that. Just as we find rest and comfort knowing what God has done through history, we find hope in what He has promised to do in eternity. This rest, comfort, and hope is ours through the Spirit-inspired Word. We need this world so we can find our way to our Rock, the one who does not change and always accomplishes what He pleases. Our rest is secure through the Word and the God who gave it to us.
[1] Those familiar with Answers in Genesis will see similarities between this and their 7 C’s of History schematic. I’ve framed this differently since my goal is to underline specific instances of God’s goodness, not necessarily all of the significant events of biblical history.