THE PROCREATIVE ROAD LESS TRAVELED - THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

“Do you honestly believe that you can thwart the will of God?” I said to a friend of mine. “Yes.” Was his simple reply. The discussion was not a deep theological conversation. I was quite simply curious why he had so many kids. Kristie and I had been married for maybe three or four years and we had had two kids at the time fairly close together, and we were wrestling with the topic of when it is ok to prevent. I was becoming more and more nervous (being the nervous sort) about the direction that Kristie was headed on this topic. My argument to her went something like this, if God is sovereign and ultimately He knows and directs what we are going to do, then it doesn’t matter if we prevent or not as whatever we do it was His will for us. He is ultimately pulling the strings and we are merely going along for the ride. Therefore if we prevent, THAT was His will for our lives. It was His will that those children we theoretically could have had should not be born because doesn’t the Bible say that He knew us before we were in our mother’s womb?

It was a thoroughly Calvinistic argument. The problem with it was I am not and never have been a Calvinist. This argument was fundamentally at odds with the rest of my theology and in fact my own experience. You see I knew I was playing fast and loose and I was grasping at theological straws attempting to deny by reason what I knew in my heart was true. I didn’t want to take the road less traveled. It was too hard and required too much trust in God. In short it scared the mess out of me. My wife wouldn’t let me off that easily, and in a loving way repeatedly challenged me. So we continued to talk. It was around this time that my friend invited us over for a meal. His simple statement got me to thinking.

I don’t want to delve too deeply here. I could write an entire book about the interplay between God’s will and man’s, and still not scratch the surface. It is sufficient to say that we do do things that God does not want us to do. For example, God hates sin. It is not His will that we sin against Him for that would make God the author of evil. Yet we still sin every day. Of course God is not surprised by our sin, and He somehow weaves that strand into His redemptive work and that is His will. (I really do want to finish my thinking on God’s sovereignty and the “Reformed” faith. . .) In theology we call what God requires of us His Prescriptive Will, and we call what God allows His Permissive Will. So in some sense everything that happens in this universe is His Permissive Will, He has the power to stop it and yet He permits it to happen. In another sense there are certain things God tells us we must do, this is His Prescriptive Will. In this sense He only wills that which is good. C.S. Lewis presents it much better than I could so I will quote him here.

“Christians, then, believe that an evil power has made himself for the present the Prince of this World. And, of course, that raises problems. Is the state of affairs in accordance with God’s will or not? If it is, He is a strange God, you will say; and if it is not, how can anything happen contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?
But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in accordance with your will in one way and not in another. It may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, ‘I’m not going to go and make you tidy the schoolroom every night. You’ve got to learn to keep it tidy on your own.’ Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible.”

What my friend was saying that night is that of course we can thwart God’s Prescriptive Will, and it was his contention that we do so when we are not open to receive the blessing of children in our lives. That God sometimes desires to bless us in certain ways, it is His prescriptive will, but we always have the free will to say no this blessing, this is His permissive will. This fact in no way undermines God’s ultimate sovereignty. Of course this refusal is only to our own detriment and the detriment of those around us, even if it outwardly appears to not be the case. God’s ways are not our ways. God has placed on us a great responsibility to do the right thing and not only us but others are affected when we fail in this.

I let the remains of my inconsistent Calvinistic tendencies go. I couldn't hide in my theory of the sovereignty of God. However, I walked away still unconvinced, as I had some other arguments up my sleeve. To be continued . . .