Discovering God’s Sovereign Will

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Genesis chapter 1. I told you we were going to talk about God’s will this morning and for the next several Sunday mornings. If you’re a believer, there ought to be something within you that wants to know what God’s will is.

I’m assuming that in each one of us here, there’s something that says, I want to know what God’s will is. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gotten up early on a Sunday morning, a day when it would have been so much easier to sleep in. you wouldn’t have gotten up and gotten dressed and come on into church to hear the Bible preached if you didn’t care what God’s will was.

I think within most Christians, most professing Christians, certainly within all born-again Christians, there’s a desire to know what God’s will is, and I think at least some desire to follow through with it. Now, that doesn’t mean that we always do an absolutely perfect job of following through with God’s will. I don’t think there are any, well, I know for a fact there are none of us who do a perfect job of following through with God’s will.

Part of the problem is the sin nature that we have that keeps us slipping and falling all the time back into the old sin and the old habits, and we have to deal with that and deal with the Lord and walk with Him again. But there’s also the problem of us not always knowing what God’s will is. I mean, God’s will is so often counterintuitive to what the world thinks we ought to do.

As Christians, when we’re trying to obey God’s will, our reasoning process is so much different than the world’s reasoning process, than our normal natural reasoning process, that God’s will, more often than not, is not something that we’re just going to slip and fall into. The world has a set of rules that it plays by. The world has a set of moralities and ethics that it plays by that do not line up with the will of God.

And you know what? That’s our natural state, is to follow that. Well, if I can lie and steal and get ahead, why wouldn’t I?

It’s what the world says, because it’s not the will of God. So if we’re not actively seeking the will of God, it’s not very likely that we’re just going to accidentally do God’s will, at least His will for our lives. And the problem is that so many times we don’t know what God’s will is.

And I think we’ve gotten to a point where a lot of Christians think that the will of God, if we can know it at all, and I’ve talked to some who think, well, I can’t possibly know what God’s will is. I can’t possibly know what God’s thinking. That’s baloney.

He’s given us 66 books of what He’s thinking. But I’ve talked to believers that so many believers think that, yes, we can know what God’s will is. We can sometimes know what God’s will is, but it’s so hard to figure out.

So hard to discern what God’s will is. So hard to know what God expects from me in a given situation. And when we have an idea about it, it’s hard to know for sure.

I spend a lot of time working with high school and college students. Working around Christian high school and college students, of course, they want to know God’s will for their lives. Just like Christian adults do.

Now, just like Christian adults, they’re not always great at following through with what God’s will is for their life when they figure it out. But the question, you know, when you’re somebody and you’re in a place in life where you’ve got all of these great decisions to be made, you know, you’ve got life-altering decisions coming up, you’re going to be really interested in knowing what God’s will is. And so the questions were asked all the time, what’s God’s will for where I go to college?

What’s God’s will for who I’m supposed to marry? What’s God’s will about this? What’s God’s will about that?

And these questions would always come up, and some of the goofiest answers would come along with them, because people were trying to figure out God’s will without really knowing how to figure out God’s will. They were coming up with all kinds of goofy ways of figuring it out. And people say, well, I prayed about it, and God’s will is for me to date this guy.

You’re a born-again Christian, and he’s not. The Bible says don’t be unequally yoked. Well, that’s God’s will.

I prayed about it. You might want to pray again, because the Bible’s clear. I heard men say, well, I prayed about it, and it’s God’s will that I just divorced my wife.

I can’t stand her anymore. Well, if that’s your reasoning, you need to pray some more, because that’s not what he said. Sometimes we think we’ve stumbled into God’s will, and we’ve done it through a process that has nothing to do with finding God’s will, and what we find is what we want.

And sometimes looking for God’s will, people look into some of the craziest places. It happened a few months ago when Christian and I were getting ready to move to Arkansas. When we were getting ready to move here, the church had extended an invitation for us to come, and we’d accept it.

And Christian was having car trouble with her car. I was afraid to drive it even to the gas station. And my car wasn’t running.

And we just didn’t have any reliable way to get around. And I remember my mother saying, well, maybe it’s not God’s will for you to go to Arkansas. No, mother, God has already told me it’s His will to go to Arkansas.

This car’s brake. It happens. I heard people say, you know, or sometimes people say, well, such and such happened.

Maybe it’s a sign that God’s will is this for your life. You know, you had a car break down on the way to work, or on a way to a job interview. Well, maybe it just wasn’t God’s will for you to get that job.

Sometimes cars break down. Well, your washing machine broke. Maybe it wasn’t God’s will for you to work on laundry today.

I’ve had family members tell me this. Maybe God wanted you to do something else. Well, maybe, but if we’re running around just looking for any signs that pop up, saying, oh, that must be a sign of what God’s will is.

It reminds me of what Jesus said about a wicked and perverse generation looking for a sign. talking to the Pharisees and Sadducees, they had the Word of God before them. God had already told them what His will was, and they were running around looking for signs.

You know as well as I do, we can look for signs and find just about anything we want to find. If I wanted to find a sign today that God wanted me to go rob a bank and then split the million dollars with you, I could probably find that sign. You’ll probably wish that I would.

No, I’m sure you don’t wish that. You might for a split second wish that I would find that sign, but I know you really don’t. If I wanted to find a sign of what I wanted God’s will to be, I could find just about anything, any proof that I wanted looking for signs.

And that’s not to say that God doesn’t sometimes speak through the circumstances of our lives or that He can’t speak through the circumstances of our lives. I don’t want to limit God in that way. We’ve seen times when God spoke to Moses through a burning bush.

That certainly was a sign, wasn’t it? God confirmed His will for Gideon with putting out the fleece. Gideon put out the fleece not once but twice and said, God, would you just give me a sign?

I’m not saying God can’t speak to us through signs. The problem is that we look for signs themselves as the objective standard. There’s got to be something else.

If God speaks to us through the circumstances in our lives, it has to line up with what He’s already given us as the objective standard. And God’s will is not some mystical thing that we have to struggle with and that we may know or we may not know. where we reduce God’s will to a Ouija board.

You know, and we expect it to be this mystical thing that we have to interpret. God’s will, at least the part of God’s will that we need to worry about, which is what we’re going to talk about these first three weeks, the part of God’s will that we need to worry about, He’s usually very clear about. And I want to talk to you, I’ve heard people call it the different wills of God.

I don’t want to say that because it sounds like God has all these different wills that He contradicts Himself with, and God is not a God of contradiction. that there are different facets or aspects of God’s will that we’re going to talk about these first three weeks. And we confuse these, and we run around looking for God’s will, and it can be confusing as to what we’re looking for, when really only one of the facets of God’s will is what we need to concern ourselves with.

This morning, I want to talk to you about God’s sovereign will. We see the three different aspects of God’s will in the first three chapters of Genesis. We can see them all throughout the Bible, but we see the three different ways in which He wills something in the first three chapters of the Bible.

That’s what we’re going to look at. We’re not going to look at all three chapters this morning. We’d be here all day.

But He wills different things in different ways. And I’ve heard people talk about the different wills of God, the sovereign will and the permissive will and the perfect will, and they define it based on how He tells people or what He tells them. Well, just so there’s no confusion, I’m going to give you my definitions this morning so we’re on the same page about what we’re talking about.

This morning we’re going to talk about God’s sovereign will, which are the things that must be, the things that must be. Next Sunday morning, we’re going to talk about God’s permissive will, the things that might be, the things that God allows. And then in two weeks, we’re going to talk about God’s perfect will, the things which should be, the things which should be.

You see, God talks about His will. The Bible talks about God’s will. And there are these three different aspects of it that we see throughout the Bible.

That sometimes God wills something in a sense that it must be. You can take it to the bank. It’s going to happen.

It’s God’s sovereign will. Other times, God permits things to happen. And even though He doesn’t directly cause it, it couldn’t happen unless He allowed it to.

Because God is sovereign. And then finally, God has a will for our lives where He gives us principles and says, this is how it should be. This is how you should live.

This is how you should act. These are the principles by which you ought to live your life. This morning, I want to talk about God’s sovereign will.

Let’s look at Genesis chapter 1, starting in verse 1. Familiar story, or it should be. It says, In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void.

And darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so. And God called the firmament heaven, and the evening and the morning were second day. That’s a hard word to say over and over real fast. Firmament.

But what’s happened here is that in the beginning, God created everything. And I’m not necessarily part of this message, but just to be clear, I do believe that God created the earth in six literal days. He created everything.

The earth was without form and void and darkness. All that there was nothingness and darkness. And all of a sudden, the Spirit of God moved and He said, let there be light.

And there was light. And not only did he create the light, but he created it and saw that it was good. Because he created it.

And he divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day and the darkness he called night. The second day, he said, put a firmament, put a division between the waters.

Let it divide the waters from the waters. And he divided some of the matter that he would use to create with from some of the other that he used matter that he would create with. And he created the heavens.

We see already in here some of the, not to get too deeply scientific, because if we did, I’d get lost too. But we already see some of the basic principles of physics at work here, that God is already writing these, what people today call scientific laws, when it’s really just the principles by which God set the universe in motion. You’ve got that He’s created matter, and He’s created space, and He’s created energy here with the light.

And God called the firmament heaven, and the evening and the morning were the second day. Verse 9, And God said, Let the waters under heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And God called the dry land earth, and gathering together of the waters, he called the seas.

And God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed was in itself upon the earth, and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself after his kind.

And God saw that it was good, and the evening and the morning were the third day. So not only has God taken this matter, but He’s actually formed it, and He’s divided the waters and the dry land from one another. And He’s created plants to go on the land.

And not only has He created the plants, but He’s created within them the ability to form more plants so that they could populate the earth. And He looked at it and He saw that it was good. And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years, and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth.

And it was so. And God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also.

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And here we see that God created the sun and he created the moon. And in doing so, he’s created time. See, everything that the universe is made up from, space and matter and energy and time, all of these things that physicists spend their entire career studying where they came from, Genesis tells us right here that he’s created all of these things.

Not only that, he’s created biology, as he’s created plant species that are able to reproduce themselves after their own kind. He’s created chemistry by forming the very bonds that bound the atoms and the particles together to create the water and to create the matter that he built the things out of. See, God and science don’t conflict.

True science always confirms the Word of God. The principles are in here, and if people say that this is a made-up document, that men just wrote down things and it doesn’t really come from the hand of God, I’d like to know how the very beginnings of these scientific thoughts are in. It’s not just a creation story where the universe was a giant egg and everything spilled out of the egg.

I’ve heard that one. See, this isn’t even on the same par as the other creation myths of the other cultures of the world. We see God actively creating the things that we know the universe is made of.

And we see God at work here doing these things. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, and the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind.

And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

So here he’s created animal life to go on this new planet that he’s made. Verse 24, And God said, Let the earth bring forth after the living creature, and bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beasts of the earth after his kind. And it was so.

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind. and God saw that it was good. So He’s created other animals.

I’m sorry, a minute ago I said He’s created land animals. No, He’d created birds and He’d created the fish and the whales and things. Now He creates cattle and land creatures.

In verse 26, And God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. And so God created man in His own image. In the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and after the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of the tree yielding seed, to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat.

And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

So God has created man, he’s created man and woman here, and he’s given them dominion over the earth, over the animals and the plants and the other things. He said, it’s yours. I’ve created it and given it to you.

And we see God here creating all of this from nothing by Himself because He willed to do so. If you ever want to laugh, some of the funniest things to me are some of the shows and documentaries that they produce trying to explain things from the Bible, trying to explain the book of Genesis. As I’m reading this to you, I’m thinking about some of the things that I’ve heard.

When God says, let us make man in our own image, some people think God was talking to the aliens, or that God was an alien, and there are a multitude of them. Let’s make man to look like us. Some people, as we’re about to see in just the first few verses of chapter 2, they go and they give the account of God creating woman from man.

And they say, well, Adam had a first wife. All of these things are readily explained if you look in the Bible. If God said, let us make man in our image, God is one in three persons.

It’s the Trinity talking amongst himself and not having to consult anyone else. And as far as Adam having a first and second wife, Eve being the second wife, it’s ridiculous. It’s a normal thing in literature for sometimes there to be something described, and then you come back and you describe it in greater detail, which is what we have in the beginning of chapter 2.

It’s not two different creation stories. It’s the creation story and then a little window on part of it where we examine it in greater detail. I just want to make that clear.

If you wonder, why is he reading the story twice? Why is it telling the story twice? That’s why.

God’s emphasizing this and giving detail. Chapter 2, verse 1. Thus the heavens and earth were finished and all the host of them.

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. So he takes the seventh day and he rests and he blesses it.

And verse 4 said, These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, and the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew, and the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, And there was not a man to till the ground, but there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. So he says on the day that he created heaven and earth, on the day that he created these plants, there was no man on the earth. We’ve already seen that.

He created these things before he created man. And we jump forward to the sixth day here on verse 7. And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

And man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden. And there he put the man whom he had formed, and out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, and the tree of life, also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pisan, and that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good.

There is Bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river, verse 13, is Gihon. the same as it which compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.

And the name of the third river is Hiddekel. That is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria, and the fourth river is Euphrates. And we’re going to stop there, and we’ll pick up next week with some more of the story.

But what we’ve seen here is God creating the entire universe out of nothing in seven days. Six days. And on the seventh day, he created rest. It’s just be.

. . Rest is also good.

But in six days, God created the universe and everything in it. And what we see here is that God created the universe out of his own idea, out of his own imagination, out of his own design, and with his own effort simply because he willed it to be so. Before God created the universe and everything else in it and everyone else in it, who was there for God to converse with?

Who was there for God to consult with? Nobody. And we see God step on the scene, so to speak.

And he says, let there be light. There’s no discussion. There’s no objection.

there’s light. God said, let there be light, and there was light. You say, what does all of this have to do with the will of God?

It has to do with the will of God, because this morning we’re talking about the sovereign will of God, the things which must be. And they must be, because God, who is sovereign, said they must be. God said, let there be light.

And there was no option for the universe, but for there to be light. Three things that I want to tell you this morning about God’s sovereign will. The first thing is that God’s sovereign will, as I’ve already mentioned, God’s And I find that this is God’s sovereign will working here because He sets these things in motion, as I said, with no consultation, no conversation with anybody but Himself.

God did not have to create the universe. Nobody made Him do it. Nobody else was even there to encourage Him to do it.

But God decided, if we can even say it that way, God willed, God chose, God determined that He was going to create the universe. He determined how He was going to create it. He determined in what time frame He was going to create it.

And you know what? He did it. And because God said it, and because God sovereignly willed it, it had to happen.

There was no other option. We don’t see the atoms that form the matter. We don’t see the atoms that form the earth.

We don’t see the waters. We don’t see the particles and beams of light. We don’t see them arguing with God.

What we see throughout this chapter is not a conversation between God and anyone else outside of Himself. What we see is God saying it, God willing it, and the universe bending and bowing to His will. Folks, such is the sovereignty of the God we worship.

Such is the majesty and power of the God we worship that when He sovereignly wills something, it has no choice but to happen. It must happen. And God set up the universe in certain ways that we still see the effects of God’s sovereign will now.

He set up the universe in certain ways that certain things would happen. And again, I won’t get into all of it because I don’t even understand all of it. But he created it in such a way that gravity occurs.

And thank goodness it does, or we wouldn’t be here. We’d all be floating around in space somewhere. He created that atoms work in certain ways.

And thank goodness he did, because the atoms that we need to bond to one another and form the compounds that we need to even have our bodies here. Folks, he set those laws up. He set up the laws of thermodynamics that talk about how energy works with.

. . I’m getting into things that are above my pay grade here.

But folks, he set up the things that we call the scientific laws of the universe have their basis right here in Genesis chapter 1 when God created it and set it all in motion. And to this day, we really don’t have an option about gravity, do we? Gravity’s pulling down on us all the time.

And we build things that work against that. We build the rockets and the things where we say we can conquer gravity, but we’re not. The gravity still pulls on it.

And God didn’t sovereignly will that gravity would keep everything glued to the surface of the earth at all times. If God had sovereignly willed that gravity meant we couldn’t move, He could have done it, but He didn’t. but He willed that the earth would exist in its form.

There would be gravity. There would be all of these things. And God set these things up that they must happen.

And you know what? Because God willed them, they happen. This is not limited just to Genesis chapter 1.

We see this throughout the Bible. When God said, this will happen, told His people that this will happen in just such a way. And it happened just the way God said that it would.

All of the prophecies, and I’ll not revisit all of them, but all of the prophecies of the Old Testament that we spent months studying last fall, When God said the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, God sovereignly willed that that would happen. There was no way that that was going to happen any other way. There was no way that the Messiah was accidentally going to be born in Nazareth.

There’s no way the Messiah was accidentally going to be born in Jerusalem. God sovereignly willed that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. How on earth was that going to happen?

Because Mary, to whom he told the baby would be born, she lived in Galilee. Well, God got a hold of somebody in Rome, and they decided to have taxation. They decided that everybody would be counted and have to go back to their ancestral hometown.

And bing, bang, boom, they ended up in Bethlehem, just in time for the child to be born. Because God said it would be so. It had to be so.

God had foretold that Christ would die on the cross. Before the foundation of the world, the Bible says that was the plan. Jesus’ crucifixion was not plan B.

God always knew that man would fall, that man would willingly disobey and would fall and would need a Savior. And from before any of this happened, God had already willed that Christ would be the perfect sacrifice. It was not a surprise to God.

It was not a plan B. God willed that it would happen. And when I say God willed that it would happen, I mean the entire Godhead.

God the Son included. It wasn’t God the Father said it and God the Son resisted it and fought against it. No, God decided that it would happen.

And it had to be that way. There are so many things in the Bible that God has sovereignly willed. And the things that God says they must and they will happen this way, folks, when we see that in the Bible, we know that’s the sovereign will of God.

Because God is also a God of keeping His promises, and when God says that it will happen this way, it must happen this way, then we can rest assured that it will and must happen that way. And we can take that to the bank. And when we see statements like that in the Bible, that’s the sovereign will of God.

And people want to know what the sovereign will of God is when really it’s not all that big of our concern, okay? There’s nothing we can do about the sovereign will of God. If we want to know it so we can know more about the person and character of God, that’s fine.

But if we’re trying to figure out the sovereign will of God so that we can use that to determine how we live our lives or so we can do something about it, it’s futile. A lot of times, the sovereign will of God isn’t even revealed to us. Sometimes it is.

But God works at things and at purposes that we have no knowledge of, that we will never understand. We don’t have to understand. The second thing we need to know about today is that God’s sovereign will does not require anyone else’s consent, knowledge, or participation.

does not require anyone else’s consent, knowledge, or participation. As I’ve said here, we see throughout Genesis chapter 1, He is creating without consulting with anybody. He’s doing these things.

We see that He has created the universe only within talking to Himself. He doesn’t consult with man. Even after man is created, God puts the garden there.

God doesn’t consult with him about where He’s putting the garden or how He’s designing it. God doesn’t consult with man about, well, do you think I should put the tree of knowledge here? Do you think I should put the tree of life in the garden?

No, God had already willed it, and it was going to be done. So many times, we’re worried about aspects of God’s will that we have no control over. And sometimes God reveals things to us that are His sovereign will.

He could have not told us about the creation, because it was His sovereign will, and we didn’t need to know how it happened. I wo