Whoever enters into a friendly dialogue with the will of God will never be the same person as before this dialogue. However, whatever one believes about God’s will depends on their view of God’s character and, therefore, on God’s purpose for them.
No matter what the doctor decides to do—the most painful operation or even an amputation—no matter how much pain or suffering the procedure causes, you stoically endure it if you are convinced that the doctor is good, competent and well-meaning. The hope that the doctor will save your life gives you the strength to endure the unbearable and heroically overcome the unimaginable. But if you have doubts about the doctor, their methods and their intentions, you will not accept the proposed treatment.
The vital precursor to the revelation of God’s will
Understanding and especially trusting God’s intentions is the most important part of the process of revealing God’s will in our lives. It is also the most difficult and painful part because it challenges our tendency to not take God at His word, to doubt His goodness, and to suspect His good intentions. Once God has gained our trust, then His will and purposes are well received, and the means He uses to get what He wants do not matter.
It was only when he had gained confidence in the One who called and spoke to him that the child Samuel was able to utter these words: “Speak, for Your servant is listening” (1 Samuel 3:10). Likewise, in the case of the Virgin Mary, it was only after the Angel Gabriel, (and thus God’s plan for her), had won her trust that she was able to say: “I am the Lord’s servant, may Your word to me be fulfilled” (Luke 1:38). It seems so simple, and yet so rarely does the scenario of humanity’s intersection with God’s will unfold as in these two famous examples! What is the cause? What are the determining factors, the aggravating or mitigating circumstances, what helps and what hinders the realisation of God’s declared intention for us? If someone chooses to open the gates of their life to God’s will, what is their part in the fulfilment of God’s plan with them?
Is there a condition that precedes any constructive access to the knowledge of God’s will? Yes, there is such a condition, and it is astonishingly just and holy and good and impossible to negotiate: “Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own” (John 7:17).
Your intention and desire to fulfil God’s will will open the way to knowing God’s will. This is not a mystery or a practice reserved for initiates only, but it is the simple and avowed desire to do or not to do what you are about to learn is God’s will. In other words, if you truly intend and desire to do God’s will, you will come to understand it, but if you do not desire and intend to fulfil it, you will hear but not understand. If you want to fulfil His will, you will find sufficient arguments to do so, but if you do not want to, you will find sufficient arguments to the contrary. As a Chinese proverb says: “Where there is a will to condemn, there is evidence.”
Your desire to fulfil the will of God in your life is, in its pure and uninfluenced form, a manifestation of your faith in God. This sincere desire and intention is born before you know what God’s will is. It is by faith that you decide to fulfil His will, whatever it may be or consist in. Mary’s question, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” (Luke 1:34) was not meant to be, “Tell me first so that I decide what to do,” but rather, “I am ready, tell me how and what to do.” You do not anchor yourself in what is to be revealed to you, but in the One who will reveal His will to you.
Responsibilities and culpabilities
It is not the Lord who determines your understanding or misunderstanding of God’s will, but you, by your tacit decision whether or not to fulfil what you want to know and what is to be revealed to you about God’s will. By choosing to fulfil the will of God that is revealed to you, you open up a wide and blessed horizon to your life. And conversely, by your conscious decision to refuse to fulfil God’s will, even before you know it, you close that horizon.
Failure to understand God’s will is not a punishment, nor does it represent God’s will or desire for us, but it is a natural consequence of our silent choice to submit our own will to God’s will only insofar as He works in the direction of our predetermined will. Trying to discern God’s will when you are not determined in your soul to fulfil it destroys your ability to understand it in the same way that lying destroys a person’s ability to believe.
Nothing is more destructive of a person’s identity, soul and spiritual state than to live in contradiction to what we preach and to preach in contradiction to what we live: “Enemies disguise themselves with their lips, but in their hearts they harbour deceit” (Proverbs 26:24). What happens in civil and social life is transferred unchanged to religious life: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught” (Isaiah 29:13). The way we behave in our relationships with those around us has a direct impact on our relationship with God. Surprised by the blind hope of some to be the exception, John says categorically: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20).
No one takes a step in the opposite direction of God’s will without some kind of reason to justify their action: “How skilled you are at pursuing love! Even the worst of women can learn from your ways” (Jeremiah 2:33).
Somewhere in the depths of our being we hope to be an exception, but that exception is slow to come, whether it is David or Judah. We are often shocked to see that the law of reaping what we sow cannot be avoided or changed, and that, however much we may wish it were not true, “as a thief is disgraced when he is caught” (Jeremiah 2:26), so people will be disgraced when they confidently follow their own choices and ignore the will of God.
Scripture declares that God’s will in itself is “good, pleasing, and perfect” (Romans 12:2), but we must be aware that in personal life these attributes have no power when our own will is manifested in opposition. Do our eyes rejoice in God’s ways and means of accomplishing His plan for our lives? Sadly, not always. Sometimes our aversion to God’s ways and means is greater than our desire to live or be happy.
Who will make Ahab change his heart and listen to Micah? God may reveal as much truth through Micah as He wishes, but Ahab does not “find pleasure” in this truth because God’s truth is unacceptable in relation to his own desire. The saving truth can no longer help Ahab, for he confuses the message with the messenger and hates them both. Though he never directly identifies God as the author of the message, he knows and believes that through this man he could know what the will of God but he says, “I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad” (1 Kings 22:8). The Holy Spirit struggles in vain to save this man from a terrible death, because he only wants to hear something “good”, something that reflects his personal will. He “hates” God’s answer, and he hates Micah through whom the Lord speaks, so he rejects both the message and the messenger.
How will the Lord be able to free Balaam from the death that is so attractive to him? How will God help him achieve the high ideal expressed in the very words: “Let me die the death of the righteous, and may my final end be like theirs” (Numbers 23:10)? He has an ideal as high as that of all holy people, and this was also God’s ideal for his life. But Balaam has a different priority. God’s will, which is “sanctification” (that is, to dedicate ourselves to the ideal and destiny that God has prepared for us), comes up against the insurmountable wall of Balaam’s will. Powerfully attracted by riches he will never see, he deliberately stifles any form of sensitivity to the call of the Holy Spirit. He will make every effort to change God, but not himself, in pursuit of the illusion that will cost him everything. What a pitiful investment, what a suicidal risk! God wanted to give this man true riches in Christ, but he takes no pleasure in the gift of the One who loves him with an everlasting love, and instead continues to pursue the shadow of his own fantasies.
Who will be able to save Samson’s eyes from blindness when they are so focused on Delilah that he cannot even see God? His dislike of God’s will is very clear. He loves blindness, mockery and death, and to these he says, “I like it.” What reason could anyone have to make such a choice? What kind of thinking can be behind the rejection of God’s will, which is in favour of our life far more than we can appreciate today? Yet this kind of thinking is a possibility and a reality we face every day. Samson has nothing to say about God’s will for his life. Neither good nor bad. For Ahab, God’s will was “bad.” For Samson it doesn’t exist, he doesn’t even consider it, because his response shows total disregard. Samson doesn’t even have to choose between his will and God’s will, because he has already chosen. And his choice is respected. Instead of the crucified Christ, Delilah comes into his life, bringing with her immorality the loss of his eyesight, the mockery of the Philistines toward him and toward the name of God, and finally his death as a ruin among ruins.
Did Samson know all this from the start? Did he think for a moment that this would happen to him, that the road would go this way? Hard to say, but at the same time utterly useless. The moment he ignored God’s will, he gave himself over to evil, with all its consequences. And what does it matter what the consequences of rejecting God’s will are? To deliberately reject it is to choose death, which can come in any form. Outside God’s will, every conceivable evil becomes possible.
Lives mirrored
We look with horror at Samson, at his unwavering determination to pursue his personal will and his “pleasure.” We look at his impulse to reject God’s will and we realise that we are actually looking at ourselves and at the dialogue between God’s will for our life and our own will for our life:
“Do not run until your feet are bare and your throat is dry. But you said, ‘It’s no use! I love foreign gods, and I must go after them'” (Jeremiah 2:25).
Consequences follow our choices as surely as night follows day, and the one who made the choice and is now suffering the consequences is none other than the one you see when you look in the mirror. Jeremiah writes with sorrow: “‘Your wickedness will punish you; your backsliding will rebuke you. Consider then and realise how evil and bitter it is for you when you forsake the Lord your God and have no awe of me,’ declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty” (Jeremiah 2:19).
We look at Samson, blind and in chains, and see ourselves bound in the suffering that the rejection of God’s “good, pleasing and perfect” will for our lives brings… Suffering makes us rebel and look for someone to blame, but again we hear Jeremiah whispering: “Have you not brought this on yourselves by forsaking the Lord your God when He led you in the way?” (Jeremiah 2:17).
One might say that Samson saw much better when his eyes were removed than when he had them. But all that he sees now without eyes he could have seen very well when he still had them, if he had desired in the depths of his being to fulfil the revealed will of God. If we, all of us, would learn from Jesus’s obedience to the Father’s will, we would not need to go through tragedy to understand God’s will concerning our welfare. All we have to do is want to understand.
The “truth” in our eyes
In a famous experiment, someone put different coloured lenses on the eyes of a chameleon he had in his house. The chameleon no longer took on the colour of the environment, as we would expect, but the colour of the lenses. This helps us to understand that what we perceive to be the colour of God’s will is actually the colour of the lenses through which we look at that will and try to understand it. These lenses are represented by traditions, education, practices, prejudices, by what society accepts without critical evaluation. When the chameleon had different coloured lenses put on its eyes, it completely lost touch with the truth and reality of its surroundings. Everything turns yellow when the lenses are yellow. Only one kind of lenses would have helped it to stay connected to the real colour of the environment, and that is clear lenses, which represent God’s ideal for us to perceive and understand His will.
Approaching God and trying to understand His will through coloured lenses exposes you to one of the most dangerous experiences in life: you will see God’s will in the colour of your lenses and say that this colour represents God’s will! And the only way to avoid the trap of coloured lenses is found in the Psalms: “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light” (Psalm 36:9). It is the only situation in which human beings are truly free from self and prejudice and have access to the true values of life as it is in Christ. Otherwise, as Dr Christiaan Barnard put it, people will live and die lying to themselves and will never know what reality really was.
To see the light through the light of God is what our souls are longing for, tired of the illusions of the changing colours that we are condemned to experience because of our own wills.
Jesus’s statement that knowledge is conditioned by the desire to fulfil His words is not a call to action, but to complete faith in Him. The faithful say: “I do not yet know what Your will is, because first You ask me to surrender myself to the fulfilment of Your will, and then You will tell me what it is.” This is where faith diverges from unbelief: faith believes in the unseen (but not in the non-existent), whereas unbelief is anchored in something only to the extent that this something corresponds to the person’s already established will.
Despite his opposition to God, Nebuchadnezzar had a clear concept of revelation and its relationship to the Godhead.[1] He knew well the difference between God’s revelation and the constructs of the corrupt human mind. The sorcerers claimed to have access to divinity and made this claim the weapon with which they ruled over people and authorities. Nebuchadnezzar was not easily persuaded by this millennia-old claim. His reasoning went something like this: “If you have access to the Divine, as you claim, there is no need for me to tell you my dream. Divinity knows what the dream is about and does not need my help to remind it so that it can give me the translation. If it is Divinity that you claim will give you the translation of the dream, then Divinity will also tell you what the dream is. How can I trust the translation to come from a deity who needs my help?!”
The sorcerers of Nebuchadnezzar, the prophets of Baal in the days of Elijah, or the altar in the days of Gideon inevitably faced the moment of truth, just as each of us, sooner or later, in one way or another, faces the same moment of truth in our lives, when we want to know God’s will without wanting to fulfil it. Truth exalts those who have it and makes vulnerable those who do not.
For those who are faced with the moment of truth about themselves, two roads open up simultaneously and divergently: either to life or to death. The way to life belongs not only to those who have walked in the truth, but also to those who have not, but who, under the spotlight of the Holy Spirit, surrender themselves saying the words: “Who are you, Lord?” (Acts 9:5). The moment of truth has proved fatal in the lives of those who have smothered it with their lies and have not given redemption a chance. The same moment of truth that led to the death of people who chose to walk in falsehood also illuminated the lives and souls of those who walked in the truth, namely the lives of Daniel and his friends. In any case, there will come a time when, as the Lord says, we will all see the difference! (Malachi 4).
Those who say to God that they want to see first what His will is and what it implies for them, and then decide whether they will fulfil it, do not believe in God, but in themselves. True faith says to God: “Lord, You have already revealed Yourself to me and I have come to know, at least in part, Your goodness. I come to fulfil Your will, which I do not yet fully know, but I know with certainty that it is ‘good, pleasing, and perfect’. Fulfil in me, Lord, “every desire for goodness” and “every deed prompted by faith” (2 Thessalonians 1:11).
The crucial question regarding God’s will is not whether we know it, but whether we are willing to fulfil it when it is revealed to us. He who truly believes in God will want to fulfil it, and only in this way will he come to know it.