Can I Know God's Will? (Crucial Questions, #4)

by R.C. Sproul

To search for the will of God can be an exercise in piety or impiety, an act of humble submission or outrageous arrogance-depending on what will of God we seek.

God delights to hear the prayers of His people when they individually ask, "Lord, what do you want me to do?" The Christian pursues God, looking for His marching orders, seeking to know what course of action is pleasing to Him.

Certainly the fall must have been the "will of God" in some sense, but the crucial question remains, "In what sense?"

Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for tithing their mint and cumin while omitting the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy. Jesus indicated that the Pharisees were correct in giving their tithes, but were incorrect in assuming that the liturgical exercises had completed the requirements of the law. Here, liturgical righteousness had become a substitute for true and full obedience.

The top priority of Jesus is that we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. All other things will be added to that.

No earnest Christian can ever have a cavalier attitude toward the law of God.

We are not free to do what is right in our own eyes. We are called to do what is right in His eyes.

Both Edwards and Augustine said man is still free to choose, but if left to himself, man will never choose righteousness, precisely because he does not desire it.

"Free will is far too grandiose a term to apply to man."

The simplest way to state the mechanism of sin is to understand that at the moment I sin, I desire the sin more than I desire to please God.

It is stated so often that it has become almost an uncritically accepted axiom within Christian circles that the sovereignty of God may never violate human freedom in the sense that God's sovereign will may never overrule human freedom. The thought verges on, if not trespasses, the border of blasphemy because it contains the idea that God's sovereignty is constrained by human freedom. If that were true, man, not God, would be sovereign, and God would be restrained and constrained by the power of human freedom.

I leave the question of explaining the fall of Adam by virtue of the exercise of his free will to the hands of more competent and insightful theologians.