What is God’s will? This question requires labored definition because we can mean different things by the term ‘will’ itself. In English, we use the word ‘will’ accompanying some other verb in order to make the word future tense. For instance, “I will go to church this coming Lord’s Day; will you? I’m fairly certain Joe will be preaching.” This use of the word ‘will’ is applied to God also, but, as with other things, not univocally. We can speak of things God ‘will do’ in the future. For instance, he will bring a spiritually dead man to spiritual life through the preaching of the gospel. Strictly speaking, the futurity of the event is on the side of creation’s historical progress. For God there is no yesterday and tomorrow, so it is not as though these events are future for him.
One thing to make clear here at the beginning is that we will not be looking at the will of precept either, or the way we speak of God declaring his approbation of or commanding a particular action, like when we speak of a living will where someone says they desire or command that certain things be done with their estate.
Even with that difficult concept set aside for the moment, we still recognize that there are different ways of speaking of God’s ‘will.’ To begin to contemplate this notion, we can start by looking at usages in the realm of creation, and in this we will work backward. First, we should recognize the end willed. The light is on because I willed for there to be light in the room. In some sense, we can recognize that multiple beings could be involved in the same willed end. For instance, I willed that the table would be moved to the dining room from the truck and so did my friend who helped me carry the table from the truck to the dining room. The same end is willed.
The second way of speaking of a will is built into the notion of the previous concept. In the second way of speaking of a will, we can speak of the act of willing itself. I willed that light would be in the room and I willed that the table would be moved to the dining room. In the latter, mine and my friend’s wills run parallel. We are willing the movement of the table to the dining room, so even though the end of our willing is the same, the act of willing is parallel rather than identical.
Finally, we can speak of the ‘faculty’ of will. I ‘have’ a will that enacts the movement to the thing willed. In this instance, to use our previous analogies/illustrations, I am a creature with the capacity to will that light be in the room and I utilize that capacity in willing for the light to be in the room. Similarly, my friend and I are both beings with wills such that we both will that the table be moved from the truck to the dining room. It is this capacity that precedes the act of willing which shows itself in the thing willed. To get a sense of the difference of the uses of the term ‘will’ that we have just considered, we can say, ‘I used my capacity of will to will that [insert thing willed].’ It was my will to marry my wife, so I used my capacity of will to willfully marry her. Was being married to her my will? Yes, but in a particular sense.
Our explanation of all this becomes a lot more complicated when we explain the way we utilize these same modes of speech about God (note, it is not that God is complicated/complex; our speech must be complex). To speak of the way these sorts of speech can be used of God, we will work through the same three usages of the word ‘will’ that we noted above, and we will use the writing of Scripture as an example, which should fit well with the other topic we have been covering in our articles.
Let’s take the words, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (Jn. 1:1). The thing willed is identical, namely, that those words would be written on parchment (presumably, although perhaps papyrus). Of course you know where I will go with this in the following step, but for now we should note that the thing willed, i.e. the outcome, was not the text just stated and ‘In the beginning the Word was not, and the Word was not with God, and the Word was not God.’ No, the ‘product’ is one.
Second, we can speak of the act of willing. God was willing that the words would be written as was the apostle John. Both wills ran parallel (i.e. concursus) in the production of the words such that all that the apostle wrote was also the production of God. This does mean that the content could not contain any more error than the table in our above example could have ended up in the living room and the dining room. Further, this also means there could be fuller purposes included. For example, I may have plans to bring other things into the dining room of which my friend is not aware, things that complement the table and add grandeur to setting. (I should probably stop there before I overextend the analogy).
Finally, we can speak of the origin of willing in the capacity of the will. To speak of this, we can change texts a little. Consider the fact that Luke says, ‘it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus,’ (Lk. 1:3, ESV). This is the same book that Paul later refers to as “Scripture” (1 Tim. 5:18), which is “God-breathed/breathed out by God” (2 Tim. 3:16). The Scripture is willfully written by the Evangelist Luke, but ultimately has its origin in the will of God (2 Pet. 1:21; it would take more than we intend to say here to interact with 2 Pet. 1:21). Two wills, in this sense, can only occur with two beings. We should note, it is not necessary for there to be two persons, since will is a capacity of nature. The will is a natural faculty to will a willed outcome.
Finally, and this would only be too much if we had not dealt with some of this at greater depth in previous articles, if God has the attribute of will, then the will is nothing other than the divine nature due to the doctrine of simplicity. As Gill rightly states, “the will of God is no other than God himself willing; it is essential to him; it is his nature and essence; it is not to be separated, or to be considered as distinct from it, or as part of it, of which it is composed; which would be contrary to the simplicity of God; or to his being a simple, uncompounded Spirit; which has been established” (I.XI). In other words, if will is something about the nature of a scientient being, then it is just is the essence of God, since God is not composed (for instance, of will and something else). These things will be important to hold onto as we move forward in future articles.