THE WILL OF GOD
I wish to speak about the will of God. The will of God is a very extensive matter, but it is a matter also which enters into very small details, and every one of us is affected by it. “Of his own will”, we read in the epistle of James, “he has begotten us by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures”. That shows how important the present time is. A day is coming when heaven and earth will he outwardly and publicly reconciled, and God's will will be done on earth as it is in heaven; the whole creation secured for the will and pleasure of the Creator. But the present time is a time when God is looking for first-fruits of that, and He is looking for it from us.
Now that makes the present day very important, and a time of great privilege. Surrounded as we are by a vast system of lawlessness, of man's will and man’s pride and man's folly, and all the moral confusion and discontent that necessarily arise from it, we have the privilege of being governed by God’s will and ministering to His pleasure. What impresses me more and more is that, in meeting the moral confusion that came in through the introduction of sin, God meets the position by coming into it Himself, in the Person of Christ, of course, and then in the Person of the Spirit; but it is God Himself entering into the position of lawlessness and moral confusion that has come in through sin. He enters into it Himself in order to bring about conditions that will minister to His own pleasure.
The first great movement in this direction is, of course, by the incarnation of Christ—He who is God becoming Man and coming into the world. Coming into the world He says, “Sacrifice and offering thou willedst not; but thou hast prepared me a body”, Heb 10: 5. What a subject for us to take account of! I am speaking now of His own personal body. Christ had a body—how did He use it? His language as coming into the world is, “Lo, I come, in the roll of the book it is written of me, to do, O God, thy will”. That was the purpose for which He came. His language as coming into the world, as having a body prepared for Him, was “to do, O God, thy will”. He says, in the fifth chapter of John's gospel, “as I hear I judge”. That is, He was always listening to the word of God, the word of His Father, and He formed His judgment according to that word, according to what He heard. “As I hear I judge, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my will, but the will of him that sent me”. He gave a moral reason why His judgment was just, and the reason was that he sought not His own will, but the will of H.im that sent Him. There may be some who have difficulties with the truth, but bear with me when I say that, if you face the thing in the presence of God, you will find that your will is the real difficulty. The Lord says that there was a moral reason why His judgment was just, and that is that He was not seeking His own will. He was moving completely in consistency with what was proper to a man. This language of Christ as coming into the world is, “ Sacrifice and offering thou willedst not; but thou hast prepared me a body”. “Thou tookest no pleasure in burnt-offerings and sacrifices for sin”. God can have no pleasure in merely formal ritual. These things had their place as typifying a spiritual order of things which He was about to bring in, but we have come to the real thing, and therefore there can be no pleasure for God in what is mere outward ritual. The scripture continues: “by the which will we have been sanctified” or set apart, “by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”. That is, the will of God entailed pleasure in men; it had in mind that we should be sanctified, a real practical matter in this world of evil and in the particular places where we live, as those who are governed by the will of God.
This sanctification is a very real thing. In the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all there was perfect atonement made and redemption perfectly established, and before God in that death there was the ending and the removal of the first man, but then the Spirit of God has come in order that there may be an answer to it. So in the epistle to the Corinthians the apostle says, “ye have been washed, but ye have been sanctified, but ye have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus”. That is the objective side of the truth, in the value of all that the Lord Jesus has accomplished in His death. But, he adds, “by the Spirit of our God”. God does not want unreality. He wants there to be a real answer subjectively in us to all that which has been brought to pass in Christ by His death.
So the will of God is to be a great commanding influence. It is going to obtain publicly in the world to come, but it is viewed as already secured in the assembly of the saints. God set up the tabernacle system, a picture of the world to come from one point of view; from another point of view, of the assembly at the present time, the assembly as in the wilderness, set amongst men. Actually it was the dwelling-place of God amongst His people. When He gave instructions for the setting up of the tabernacle, the first thing He spoke about to Moses was the ark, and then in the ark Moses was to put the testimony which God would give him. That is typical of Christ according to this chapter, One who has come in, having become Man, and carrying the will of God in His heart. God was giving testimony to the fact that He intended to secure a whole system which took its character from Christ. Not only was the ark of acacia wood, but the boards and other items were of acacia wood. That is to say, the whole system was to take character from the Man who was the Centre of it, that is Christ Jesus, and that is to affect us. I would impress on the young ones especially that, if we do not judge the working of our own wills—when we are young, we shall find them all the stronger and more difficult to judge when we are older. There is nothing so sad as a self-willed old Christian. Ecclesiastes speaks of an old king who refuses to be admonished, and it is a most sorrowful sight. I would advise the younger ones to pay special attention to this matter, which has been set in motion by the coming in of Christ, the Man devoted to God's will. That is to be extended, for we have been sanctified by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. We take the Supper, and every Lord's day morning we are confronted by that which speaks to us of the body of Christ—“this is my body which is for you”, a body wholly devoted to God's will, even to death. Now the Lord says, It is for you to feed upon. It rebukes every kind of lawlessness in us. How can we be out of keeping with that which is an expression of the love of Christ to us?
So the apostle Paul—I am assuming that Paul was the writer of this epistle—when he comes to the end of the epistle, says, “But the God of peace, who brought again from among the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, in the power of the blood of the eternal covenant, perfect you in every good work”. The great Shepherd of the sheep. He is appealing to us. The Lord presents Himself as the good Shepherd, in the tenth chapter of John, and He says, “the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep”. He proves His love in that way to secure us for God and to set us apart through death from every form of lawlessness, because we are to have part in a scene where the will of God prevails. The blood of Christ is the great witness that God is eternally towards us in love. He purchased the assembly by “the blood of his own”, Acts 20: 28. The blood of the eternal covenant is to have an effect on our minds, and so he says, “perfect you in every good work to the doing of his will”. The work of God has in mind to secure that in us, and the Spirit is operating in that direction. The Spirit will never operate in any other direction than to perfect us in every good work to the doing of His will doing in us what is pleasing before God through Jesus Christ. And then, having mentioned Jesus, the apostle says, “to whom be glory for the ages of ages, Amen”. It is a striking feature of Paul in his writings—we find it also in Peter—that time after time when he mentions Christ or God, he breaks into a doxology. That is something to challenge ourselves with, whether we are holding these things in a mental way, or whether Christ or God are real before our souls and more and more the objects of worship and thanksgiving.
Now I pass to Romans, which applies the matter in a detailed way to every one of us. The will of God is extremely extensive in its scope, but at the same time extremely detailed in its application. So here in Romans, Paul beseeches us by the compassions of God to present our bodies. I would urge the younger brethren especially to notice this. Christ had a body and we have bodies. Our bodies, as a result of sin and of our fallen nature, will be vehicles of sin if they are not held as redeemed, held under the influence of Christ. But it is intended that they should be so held. In redemption God has come out, redeeming us by the precious blood of Christ and sealing us with the Spirit, not only as a mark of ownership, but the Spirit is power, the Spirit is life on account of righteousness. The Spirit will always hold our hearts in relation to Christ and His death. So it is possible for the youngest believer to present his body as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is our intelligent service. God is asking, not for great exploits, but for our bodies. That involves the principle of obedience day after day, obedience to whatever God's will might involve. Think of the possibility of yielding pleasure to God in every day of your life, and that with the very body you possess. And your body is temple of the Holy Spirit; it is to be regarded in a dignified way because it is actually the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. The body of every believer is of great value and of great dignity from that standpoint. We are to present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy, acceptable to God, which is our intelligent service, and not to be conformed to this world. The world is a vast system which is influenced by Satan. It has cast out Christ. The princes of this world found no room for the Lord of glory, yet He is supreme in the great system of glory which God has under His eye now in the saints. He is going to be displayed shortly, but even now He is the Head of a great system of universal glory. How important it is to take account of the work of God amongst the saints and how morally glorious it is as it comes into expression for the pleasure of God, enhanced as it is by the dark background of the world around!
And so it is said, “be not conformed to this world”. Why should saints so demean themselves as to think they should conform to the fashions or ways or thoughts around them? This world had no room for Christ, and so the word is, “be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. It is a great thing to have our minds in the right direction; then our actions will follow suit. How simple it makes the path of the believer, as it is taken up every day on these lines! What possibilities for the pleasure of God!
Now the epistle to the Ephesians presents the will of God in its widest aspect, and a most blessed will it is. God being what He is, love absolutely, infinite in wisdom and absolute in power, His will will be absolute in blessing. I might have a will about things and a determination to bring it to pass. The desire may be good, but I find I am confronted with certain limitations, and unable to carry my desires into effect. But not so with God. God is absolutely love, absolutely perfect in wisdom, and absolutely almighty and not subject to limitations at all, and able without the slightest restriction to give effect to what is absolutely good. So we are introduced, in verse 5 of the first chapter of Ephesians, to the thought of the good pleasure of His will. It is no less than that He has chosen us in Christ before the world’s foundation that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love, and has marked us out beforehand for adoption, that is, that we should be sons. Do we believe and value it, that this is what we have come to? What a pleasure to God to hear a brother or a sister say, Abba, Father, with the feelings proper to it, to give expression in the power of the Spirit of God's Son to the very same words and feelings that had place in the heart of Christ as a Man here! It is wonderful that it should be so. One sometimes fears that, with the knowledge we have of the truth, it should become commonplace in our minds, but it is far from being commonplace. These are great matters. It is a question of the pleasure of God, the good pleasure of His will. We should really move into sonship in the conscious enjoyment and liberty and affections proper to it, for we have been marked out for this. Before the world's foundation, God's will took form, so to speak, and then He brought the world into being with a view to establishing the thoughts of His will. And then “to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he has taken us into favour in the Beloved; in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of offences”. Are we going on any longer in offences when we have been redeemed from them? It is brought forward as a lever to deliver us from our own wills, to be secured and held henceforth for the pleasure of the blessed God according to the riches of His grace.
But there is one thing more, and this I would urge on the brethren, and that is this further thought, “the riches of his grace which he has caused to abound towards us in all wisdom and intelligence, having made known to us the mystery of his will”. God wants us to be intelligent. We do not speak to young children about great matters. They have a place in our affections when they are young, but we do not take them into our confidence. They are not equal to it at that time, but we look forward to the time when they will grow up and be capable of entering, appreciatively and intelligently, into our own thoughts. That is one of the things connected with sonship, not only affection and liberty and dignity, but intelligence in the thoughts of the Father, who has made known to us the mystery of His will. The world knows nothing of it; statesmen know nothing of it. The whole position is secure in the hands of Christ according to the good pleasure of His will which He purposed in Himself for the administration of the fulness of times to head up all things in the Christ, the One who is devoted to God's will. It is the guarantee that lawlessness will be eradicated from God's universe. All things will be headed up in the One who came to do God's will. He will take all things up by means of the assembly, and hence it is important that we should be brought into moral accord with Christ and be delivered from every taint of lawlessness, and devoted to God's will as Christ was. There are glorious things before us. The assembly with Christ, loved by Him and united to Him and held under His influence, will be the chief of all families. It will respond to God perfectly in the Spirit of sonship and in the intelligence which the Spirit affords, and will give a lead to all other families. Its influence Godward will go through the universe, and then, on the other band, it will prove itself capable, as coming from heaven as the holy city, to influence the whole creation according to God, “having the glory of God”. Christ came out from God as the perfect expression of God; now it is extended in His body, the assembly, and it will come forth from heaven having the glory of God, a complete expression of God.
These are great things. God has made known to us the mystery of His will in order to regulate our lives. We do not need to be over-occupied with what is going on in the world. We pray for those in authority and pray that God's will provisionally will work out His ends in keeping the way open for the saints and for the blessing of men. But this world must go on to destruction. Thank God, we are in the secret that God is going to head up all things in the Christ, things in heaven and on earth, in whom we have also obtained an inheritance. What a comfort and joy it is that all things are to be headed up and held eternally in the One who said, “Lo, I come ... to do, O God, thy will”, and whose will was His delight. The Lord grant that we may learn to do God's will and take character from Christ, for His Name's sake!
PAISLEY
30th August 1952
From Words of Grace and Comfort
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