Discovering God’s Permissive Will

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This morning we’re continuing on with our series on discovering God’s will. I told you last week that people a lot of times seem to be under the mistaken idea that God’s will is just impossible to know or to figure out. And if we can, after struggling and going through all of this searching, ever have some kind of inkling about what God’s will is, we can never know for sure.

And part of that confusion comes from the fact that in the Bible we see different aspects of God’s will at work. And sometimes we get those all mixed up and rolled into one, and we can’t figure out what we’re talking about when we’re talking about God’s will. Because here it says God’s will is this, and here it says God’s will is that, and how do we put it all together?

And that’s what we’re going to talk about, what we started talking about last week, and we’re going to talk about today and next week. And then once we’ve got nailed down, hopefully, these different aspects of God’s will, how do we find it? How do we discern it?

Because God’s will was never meant to be some kind of mystery that we can never know. If God has a will for our lives, it stands to reason that that will for our lives is what He wants us to do. Well, God is, I’ve never seen in the Bible where God is just a God of putting us in the dark and saying, figure it out for yourself.

We can’t figure it out for ourselves. No, but God gives us clear instructions, I believe, about what His will is, at least if we’re looking for that aspect of His will that we need to be looking for. Last week, we talked about God’s sovereign will.

God’s sovereign will is tricky at times. God’s sovereign will is hard to wrap our minds around because God’s sovereign will, if you remember me talking last week, are the things that must happen. Because God decreed it and willed it sovereignly, it must happen.

There’s no discussion. There’s no objection. There’s no backing out of it.

It’s God’s will. And we saw that with the example of him creating the universe in six days just in the counsel of himself and his own will. He didn’t consult with man.

He didn’t consult with the angels. He didn’t consult with anybody but himself and said amongst the Trinity, let us create these things. Let us make man in our own image.

He said, let there be light. In none of these things do I see discussion, objection, argument. No, God just willed it, and the universe had no choice but to bend to His will.

That’s God’s sovereign will. We see other aspects of God’s sovereign will, that it was God’s plan for Christ to come and be the perfect sacrifice for sin. And Satan, all this time, I believe, thought he was thwarting God’s plans by getting Jesus to the cross, but it was God’s sovereign will that he go and be that sacrifice.

And the cross, as a result, was not the defeat that everybody in Jerusalem those three days thought it was, but what Jesus knew all along it was going to be was God’s ultimate victory and his victory over sin. It was God’s sovereign will that he go to the cross. And it’s God’s sovereign will that one day all of this will come to an end, and he will call all the works and thoughts and deeds of man into judgment, and we’ll give an account to God for what we’ve done.

And we’ll be divided right and left based on in what way we’ve responded to his son. And these are things that God has sovereignly willed. People make mistakes about God’s sovereign will, though, and sometimes there are a lot of people that think God is just as surprised by all of the occurrences of history as we are.

That when something happens that doesn’t make sense to us, we believe God is, not necessarily we believe, but people believe God is caught off guard by that, that God doesn’t see or know or cause things. In the old days, they used to call them deists. People like Thomas Jefferson that just believed that God was like a cosmic watchmaker, wound our universe up and let it run and just kind of sits back.

And if we don’t recognize that God has a sovereign will, we reduce God from creator and sustainer of the universe down to just a spectator in his own creation. But at the same time, there’s a danger, on the other hand, of calling things God’s sovereign will when they’re not. There are people that we talked about last week that fall into things that theologians and their fancy words call exhaustive determinism or fatalism, which are basically two different ways.

And they say, oh, these are two different ideas. No, they both boil down to the idea that everything is determined ahead of time. There’s no escaping our fate.

Every aspect, every second of our life is planned out before we’re ever born. And I told you, I think from what the Bible teaches, that’s a mistake as well. Fatalism, it’s a mistake.

That’s what we’re going to talk about today. I think of the joke that my youth pastor growing up used to tell. And I was usually the only one in the youth group that laughed at it.

I thought it was funny. A lot of his jokes were that way. But he used to tell the joke about the two fatalists who were walking down the street, and one of them tripped and fell down a flight of stairs.

He just went tumbling. You could hear him thud all the way down. And the other fatalist stands at the top of the stairs and hollers down, are you okay down there?

And he says, yeah, I’m just glad I got that over with. Thank you. Somebody got it.

The fatalist believes that God preordained everything, that every choice, every occurrence, every action was written beforehand. And you know what? And at one point, that sounds good.

It sounds like we’re giving God a lot of credit until we realize we’ve got to give God credit for bad things that go wrong that He didn’t do. And it doesn’t matter how good an idea sounds. If it’s not biblical, it’s not biblical. And I don’t believe it’s biblical as we’re going to talk about today because there’s this second aspect of God’s will that God doesn’t just have a sovereign aspect to His will, but God also has a permissive aspect to His will, that God permits things to happen.

We’re going to see this today, I believe, really in Genesis 3, but we’ve got to go get a little of the back story from Genesis chapter 2. We’ll start in verse 15, look at three verses of Genesis chapter 2, and then not that the rest of the story isn’t important, but we’re going to get to it next week, and we skip forward to Genesis chapter 3 this morning. And the Lord God, verse 15, took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it. For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. So God has given a command here to the man, who is Adam, given him this command that here you are, I’m putting you down in the garden, and you can have anything you want in this garden.

It’s all for you. You can eat of any tree. But this one command he gives him, don’t eat of the tree, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

It’s a command that God gave him. Obviously, it’s God’s will, and we’ll talk about it next week, that it’s God’s perfect will that he not eat from the tree. But it’s God’s will that he not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

As we’re going to see in just a second in chapter 3, he eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We know the story. But it’s God’s will that he not eat.

Folks, if all we ever see is God’s sovereign will, if we subscribe to the idea that God decrees and causes everything that happens, then at this point, either God’s sovereign will, if we believe this is God’s sovereign will, God’s sovereign will that he not eat from the tree was broken, and it’s not his sovereign will at all, Or it was secretly, as some would claim, it was secretly God’s will that he eat from the tree, and yet he conveys a will to Adam deceptively that it was not his will for him to eat of the tree. Neither one of them paint a picture of God that I see in the Bible. For that matter, neither of them paint a picture of God that I want to see from the Bible, based on the God I know from reading the Scriptures.

It was God’s will, God’s perfect will that we’ll talk about next week, that he not eat from the tree. But we see in chapter 3 that he did eat. So what’s the deal here?

It’s God’s permissive will. Chapter 3, verse 1 says, Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field, which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden.

And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. Now, I want to stop here and just say, the serpent, as I understand it, is not actually asking her a question out of his curiosity.

This is a direct challenge to God’s word and God’s authority. Hath God said. It’s the same kind of thing that we see as Satan tempts Jesus in the wilderness.

Tells him, well, God has said this and he twists God’s word around as though he could trick Jesus, as though he could trick the one who uttered those words. And here Satan says, hath God said. It’s not really a question.

It’s an attempt to twist God’s word. And she says, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest ye die. Well, I don’t remember him saying in chapter 2, Don’t touch it.

I remember him saying, Don’t eat it. And so she’s partially right in what she said here, but she’s added a little something to it. And people have speculated maybe her husband told her that they weren’t even supposed to touch it.

Because if we look at chapter 2, Adam was created and put in the garden, and then he was given the command, and then after that, Eve was created. And so some have speculated just to keep her with her distance from it, kind of like the Pharisees were going to put these hedges around God’s law so we can’t even get close to breaking them. Some have speculated that maybe Adam told her, we’re not supposed to eat it or even touch it.

Don’t even go near it. But whatever it was, she thought she understood what God’s word was, and she had it wrong. It’s dangerous in any case, because then Satan was able to twist things around.

And he said, you’ll not surely die. Half truth here. Yeah, God did not say they would die if they touched the fruit.

He said they’d die if they eat the fruit, but the serpent here leaves that out. By the way, I do believe, based on what we see in the New Testament, that the serpent here is the devil. The Bible refers to Satan as that old serpent.

Tying back into this. The serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.

The book of Genesis is one of the most attacked and maligned and misinterpreted books of the entire Bible. And I believe that’s by design that people realize if they can shake the foundations, they think they can destroy the whole building. And what’s in vogue right now is this idea that Adam took of the fruit of the tree because he knew that it would be spiritual death if she ate.

That people try to rehabilitate Adam by saying it wasn’t rebellion, it wasn’t any of these things. it was that he couldn’t bear to live without her. She died spiritually, so he ate of the tree too.

I don’t see any picture like that in the Bible. What I see here, whatever the reasons, whatever we can do to try to justify it, what we see here is rebellion against God. Where Adam knew the clear command that God had given and chose to do his own way anyway.

And the fact that he did it to be closer to his wife did not make sin okay. She gave it to her husband and he did eat. And sometimes feminists will also attack the Bible saying that the Bible includes this idea that women are the reason that we fell, that women led men astray.

Folks, it doesn’t matter if Eve ate it first or not. The fact is the responsibility lay with Adam for his own action. The Bible doesn’t have any kind of concept that the women lead the men astray.

Adam was led astray of his own rebellion. He’s responsible. He was a big boy, as we would say.

And he made the choice himself. And he did eat. And verse 7, And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And Adam with his wife and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. And the Lord God called unto Adam and said unto him, Where art thou?

And I think this question was more for Adam’s benefit than for God’s. God knew where Adam was. We believe in the omniscience of God.

God knew where Adam was. But it was to point out Adam’s lostness to himself, I believe. And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.

And he, that’s God, said, who told thee that thou wast naked? Again, the question is not for God’s information, but just to get Adam thinking about what’s going on here. Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?

And the man said, the woman whom thou gave us to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. Now, maybe the idea that I said that people think the Bible blames the woman. Well, the Bible doesn’t blame the woman.

Adam, like a big cowardly chicken, instead of, you know, he was big enough to rebel against God and eat of the fruit, but not big enough to deal with the consequences, he tries to blame his wife. If you haven’t figured out in most things, I’m going to be harder on the men than I am the women, because God has given us a responsibility to lead. He tries to blame his wife, the woman, and if you notice here, kind of a subtle, blaming God, too.

The woman that you gave me, See, it’s her fault, and God also, you gave her to me. Kind of been involved here, too. Gave us to be with me.

She gave me of the tree, and I did eat. Verse 13, And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, and she was big enough to eat from the tree, too, and still not big enough to take the consequences.

The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. Yeah, the serpent was subtle. The serpent beguiled her.

But even though she was a little off on her idea about what God actually said, she did know. He said, Don’t eat the tree. Don’t eat from the tree.

She ate anyway. They’re both responsible. Adam’s responsible.

Eve’s responsible. The serpent’s responsible. The one person we don’t see here, and I use the term person loosely, the one entity we see here not taking part in making this choice is God.

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. And I will put enmity between thee and the woman.

That means I will make you enemies. And between thy seed and her seed, and it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. And to the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.

In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree. By the way, Adam, by the way, Eve, the serpent, talked you into it, but you’re still responsible.

Here’s your consequence. And Adam, because you listened to your wife, yes, she talked you into it, but you were a big boy and made your choice. Here’s your consequence too.

Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for thy sake. In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread until thou return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken. For dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.

So he’s given them their consequences here. some of their consequences. Then he said, okay, serpent, you’re cursed above all cattle and you’re to wallow on your belly in the dust for all the days of your life and you’re going to be the enemy of mankind.

I’m going to put enmity between you and the woman and your seed and her seed and they’ll bruise your head and you’ll bruise his heel. Also, some believe to be one of the earliest prophecies of Christ there, crushing the serpent’s head. He tells Eve, I’m going to greatly increase your sorrow in conception and childbearing.

And all of you ladies can probably attest that there’s sorrow in childbearing. Carrying the baby can sometimes be a miserable experience, especially if it’s during the summer. Christians told me that.

It’s just not always fun being pregnant and childbirth. And to the man, he says, in the sweat of your face you’ll eat bread. I’m going to curse the ground.

And so man was, it’s not a curse that God put man to work. He was working beforehand, but it’s a curse that the land would be cursed for his sake. He would increase the need for struggle and the need for toil and the need for sweat and difficulty and all of these things.

And Adam called his wife’s name Eve because she was the mother of all living. Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothed them. And here we see one of the earliest, I believe the earliest picture in the Bible.

The earliest, you know, I told you when we were studying the Old Testament prophecies that there were outright prophecies that identified Christ in a literal way that he was coming. but there are also these pictures. Some people call them typological prophecies, that they’re a prophecy of a type or picture of Christ. I think this is the earliest one of those in the Bible where we see the innocent dying for the guilty.

Somewhere in that garden, an innocent animal was running around, man sinned, and that animal had to die so that the skins could be a covering for the guilty ones. We see the very first example in the Bible of the innocent dying on behalf of the guilty. Verse 22, And the Lord God said, Behold, the man has become as one of us to know good and evil, And now lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken. And so he drove out the man and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life. So that was the final consequence that they would be kicked out of this earthly paradise that God had created for them.

Now, you say, God’s will was for them not to eat of that one tree. And God is sovereign, and I do believe that. I preached five messages on it right after I came here.

I believe God is sovereign. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean that God has caused and decreed everything that has ever happened. Because God is not a God of confusion or deception, and God’s clearly revealed will to Adam was that he not eat of that tree.

And if God decreed and caused everything, and that was his will, as I said earlier, then his sovereign will was broken. Either that or God said that was his will, and secretly it was his will, his sovereign will, for them to eat of the tree. And that accuses God of deception.

The idea that God decreed and causes everything to happen doesn’t work with Genesis chapter 2 and 3. But there’s this other aspect of God’s will that we see throughout the Bible, which is God’s permissive will. And I’ve told you last week, and I’ll tell you today and tell you next week, the three aspects of God’s will that we have been or are going to talk about are God’s sovereign will, the things which must happen, God’s permissive will, the things that might happen, and God’s perfect will, the things that should happen.

And I want to clarify, I got to thinking about it this morning, I might give you the wrong idea with saying that. When I say the things that might happen in God’s permissive will, I’m talking about from our perspective. From our perspective, there are things that God allows and they might happen because we don’t know that God allows them if they do happen.

From God’s standpoint, even if He doesn’t decree it, He still knows what the future is going to be. When I say they might happen, I don’t mean to say that God is caught off guard of it. He still knows what’s going to happen, but not because he caused it or decreed it.

See, we see God’s permissive will in the fact that mankind is constantly disobeying what he has caused to happen, or not what he’s caused to happen, what he has said should be the case. What God reveals his perfect will to be, man has the option. God created man with, I believe, the innate ability to choose whether or not to follow his perfect revealed will.

And because God created us with free will, He has this permissive will of what He will allow to happen. We talked about this some with the series on the sovereignty of God, too, that all these bad things, people say, why did God do this? Why did God cause 9-11?

How could a good God let there be suffering? People say, God caused Hurricane Katrina. Folks, sometimes God allows things to happen as a consequence of us living in a fallen, sinful world.

Sometimes God allows us to live with the consequences of our disobedience. And that’s God’s permissive will, that he allows things to happen that are not necessarily his best and from our standpoint are not certain to happen. But his permissive will entails the things that might, again from our standpoint, the things that might happen.

We see this in the beginning of chapter 3, in verse 3, where he says, But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die. We actually go back into chapter 2 where God says, Don’t eat of the tree. And then Satan, in the form of the serpent here, says, God has said, you shall not eat it or touch it lest you die.

Even though he added the part in there about touching it. In both of these places, it’s clear that if they eat of the tree, they will die. When God says, this is what you should do, or else, this is what will happen, that or else implies that there’s a chance that God’s will is not going to be followed.

I mean, just from a logical standpoint, it’s right in there. It’s implied. You can’t get away from it.

When God says, my will is that you do this, or else, If God sovereignly willed it, there would not be an or else. Because again, in chapter 1, there’s no discussion with anybody. He says it, and there it is.

God said, let there be light. And there was light, and it was good. But here God’s command is, don’t eat from the tree, or else you’ll die.

Satan picks up on this, don’t eat from the tree. Or God said, don’t eat from the tree, or you’ll die. When God said, or, or lest, or any of those other words that imply that if you don’t, then that tells us there’s a choice here.

That there’s the potential that either God’s will is going to be followed or God’s will is going to be disobeyed here. And that choice, that distinction does not exist when it’s God’s sovereign will. That defeats the purpose of it being sovereign.

When it’s sovereign, there’s not a choice. That God has a permissive will that entails the things that might happen. God allows things to happen without necessarily causing them.

He permitted them to fall into disobedience. He permitted it to happen. So many of the things that happened in the Bible didn’t happen because God caused them, but happened because God permitted them to happen.

God didn’t cause man to sin, but he permitted it. God didn’t cause Moses to doubt, to doubt him and to strike the rock twice to get water. He permitted him to doubt.

God didn’t cause David’s moral failure with Bathsheba, but he permitted it to happen. See, where God’s sovereignty fits into his permissive will, God is not a spectator in all these things. God is still sovereign.

And folks, we would not have the option to fail and to fall if God did not permit it because he’s sovereign. And he can be sovereign without causing it by sovereignly allowing us free will. Because if he didn’t say we had the free will and he didn’t say we had the possibility of failing and falling, then we wouldn’t have it.

And we would just be like the rest of the creatures that he made with no conscience and no moral self whatsoever. But he created us differently. And he said, I’m allowing you to fall this far.

I’m allowing you to do this, not because I want it to happen, but because it’s inherent in free choice. God’s permissive will entails the things that might happen. The second thing this morning is that God’s permissive will requires a choice on our part.

I’m always amazed at the old contortionism that people go through with the scriptures to say that mankind doesn’t have free will. From the very first passage where he shows up, we see our free will rearing its ugly head. It would have been easier if God, I think sometimes, it would have been easier if God had created us without free will.

He didn’t need us, but I believe God created us, again, not out of need because he had everything he needed within himself, but out of a desire and a deserving to have beings that would freely love him and freely choose to worship him. Because he desired it. Because he deserved it.

Because it would be glorifying to him. But for us to freely choose to serve Him, freely choose to love Him, freely choose to worship Him, inherent in that, again, is the free choice not to. And so God, even though it would have been easier for everybody if He created us without free choice, for His own glory, He created us with free will.

And this permissive will of God, where sometimes He allows us to do things, He allows things to happen, requires a choice on our part. Now, when I’ve talked about the permissive will and as that applies to things like natural disasters and tragedies and things that we say are outside of our control, how does that apply? Because nobody chose for Hurricane Katrina to happen.

Nobody chose for famine in different countries. No, we did not directly choose for those things to happen. But death and sin and all of these things entered into the world as a result of the choice that was made there in Genesis chapter 3.

And we now live in a fallen world where bad things happen. So even things that are seemingly outside of our control came from a choice, directly or indirectly, however you want to look at it. But God’s permissive will in our lives, when God says, okay, here’s my will for you, but knowing you are or are not going to follow it, here’s as far as I’m permitting you to go the other direction.

For us to go towards God’s permissive will, he doesn’t force us over there, because again, he permits this. It requires a choice on our part. God’s permissive will requires a choice on our part.

He says in Genesis chapter 3, verse 7, And the eyes of both of them were open, and I think I wrote down the wrong verse. It should be 6 and 7. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she saw these things, that the tree was pleasant, it was good for food, looked good to the eyes, and it was to be desired to make one wise.

As a result of what was going on in her mind, she reached out and took the fruit from the tree, and she ate it. And the same thing with Adam. There was a choice that went on there.

It’s not God’s sovereign will where he says this is going to happen and the whole universe steps in line with what God says. The permissive will requires man’s choice. I told you last week God’s sovereign will doesn’t even require our knowledge, let alone approval or participation.

God’s permissive will requires that we make a choice. I think it’s probably not a great analogy because I’m not comparing myself with God here. But the best analogy I could think of with this was with Benjamin, Nine months old, trying to take steps.

He can crawl and just be gone before you know it. And he can get around the living room and cause all kinds of trouble. Excuse me.

He’s discovered that he likes things that glow. He likes the computer screen. He likes the cell phone.

He likes the Kindle, the TV. He likes the Christmas tree ornaments. He likes the fireplace.

Chords. Even though they don’t glow, I guess they’re the most dangerous thing in the living room. So that’s what he’s drawn to.

The cords and the outlets. And I’ve told him many times, no, no. He’ll play with the cords. I tell him no. He’ll play with the sockets.

I’ll tell him no. When he’ll come and yank on cords and things, I see him coming and I know he thinks he’s being stealthy because he kind of comes sideways and he’ll look at other things. I know what he’s coming and I know what he’s going to do. And he knows very well that Daddy does not want him playing with cords and yanking on cords.

And I could, sovereignly, let’s say, stop him. I could get rid of all the cords in the living room. I could duct tape him to the wall.

I would not do that. I wouldn’t do that. Nobody called DHS.

I wouldn’t do that. But it is an option. I could lock him in his room and make sure there’s nothing in there with cords.

I could put a stop to him with the cords. But I want him to learn. And he knows I don’t want him to play with the cords.

I could stop him even before he gets to the cords. As soon as he reaches out his hand and I know wh