“God Permits What He Hates to Accomplish What He Loves”

Preparing Our Hearts for Holy Week

I learned something years ago that helped me harmonize a sizable portion of Scripture. God has two wills. This was the key that unlocked a lot of the Bible for me. There are places in the Bible that seem to be saying that God’s will can’t be thwarted or resisted by people, and other places that seem to say God’s will can be thwarted and resisted. I couldn’t put it all together until I understood that God has two wills.

What God Knows vs. What We Know

God knows all things, past, present, and future. He knows all that has been and all that will be. He knows the future because he controls the future. If God knows what will be, there is no possibility it won’t be. To say God knows and controls the future is to say that he is God. “God ordains whatsoever comes to pass.”

Our knowledge is limited only to what God chooses to reveal to us. God keeps most of his knowledge to himself for his own good purposes. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God,” declared Moses, “but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever…”(Dt. 29:29). We only know what God chooses to reveal to us.

The Hidden, Secret, Decreed, Will of God

God knows all that he has done and all that he will do as he sovereignly sustains and rules over the universe he created out of nothing. Before the creation of the world, God knew human beings in his image would rebel and fall into sin. He knew he would send his Son to redeem fallen people. And he knows that his Son is coming again.

We also know these things because God has revealed them to us in his Word. Read all about it in Genesis to Revelation. But among the things we don’t know is when Jesus is coming again. God knows the year, month, day, and hour but he chooses to not reveal that to us. The date of Christ’s return is among the secret things that belong to God.

Yet we know Jesus is certainly coming again because “God does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?” (Dan. 4:35). It is God’s will that his Son return. No one can do anything to deny, delay, or detour God from accomplishing his will.

God’s secret decreed will is what shall be.

The Revealed, Moral Will of God

And yet, there are times in Scripture and in our own experience when it’s clear that God’s will is thwarted, resisted, delayed, and denied. For example, Paul wrote, “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Th. 4:3). Sexual immorality refers to sexual intimacy before marriage, outside of marriage, with members of the same sex, or harboring thoughts of sexual immorality. It is God’s will for everyone in the world that they abstain from these things. Sex is a treasured gift of God only for a man and woman who are united in marriage. But every day, in every time zone, God’s will for sex is not accomplished.

How do we harmonize these facts?

By understanding that here in 1 Thessalonians, and in many other places in the Bible, it is God’s revealed, moral will that is being thwarted. God has revealed specifically his will for people to do. Consider the greatest commandment to love God, the second greatest commandment to love others, the ten commandments, and the Golden Rule. These laws are the clearly revealed moral will of God for us.

So, while God’s secret decreed will is what shall be, God’s revealed moral will is what should be. God daily permits in his secret decreed will what does not please him according to his revealed moral will.

How This Unlocks the Events of Holy Week

Was it God’s will for sinful men to murder Jesus? Yes and no. Scripture is clear that “it was the will of the Lord to crush him” (Isa. 53:10). But Scripture is also clear that it is God’s will that men “shall not murder” (Ex. 20:13). But now you know how to resolve the tension. It was God’s decreed will that Jesus should be murdered, but it was not God’s revealed moral will that Jesus should be murdered. On that day, as every day, God permitted what did not please him.

Both wills are clearly expressed in this prayer by the church in Jerusalem:

…for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. (Acts 4:27–28)

In this one act of “gathering together against” Jesus, God’s moral will wasn’t done but God’s decreed will was done. God did not cause them to murder his Son, but permitted them to do what they wanted to do. And what they wanted to do was to violently remove a rival. He could have easily stopped them but he didn’t. Yet “we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Ro. 8:28).

How This Comforts Christians Who Suffer

Imagine quoting Romans 8:28 to the disciples as they watched Jesus die in blood and agony on the cross on Good Friday. I suppose their response might be, “What possible good could come of this?” But, as the old preacher said, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!” On Sunday, it all started to make sense.

No doubt, there will be times in your life when you will ask, “What possible good could come of this?” You may be there right now. How could this be God’s will for you? But of course, it must be his will, for if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have happened. That doesn’t mean it pleases him or that he loves what is causing your pain right now. But he loves you. And he knows what he’s doing, even if you don’t. As John Piper said, “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.”

Joni Erickson Tada was paralyzed from the neck down in a diving accident when she was 18. She’s now 75. Few Christians have had as much impact on the world as Joni. She has suffered more than most, but instead of bitterly turning against God, she has joyfully served him by bearing testimony that in all her suffering, God’s “grace is sufficient” (2 Cor. 12:9).

In her younger years a friend spoke to her the ten words that changed her life:

“God permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves.”

That’s exactly what was happening during Holy Week as God the Father permitted puny men to cruelly mock and torture God the Son. Jesus suffered at the hands of sinful men to save sinful people like us. This is just some of the good that came of that.

Ecce Homo (Behold the Man), by Antonio Ciseri (1821–1891)