Dear Friends,

     Scripture often drops diamond nuggets in our lap that just sit there for years before we take notice of their significant value and beauty. Our study verses this week contain at least one such nugget. To whom do we prove God's "...good, and acceptable, and perfect..." will? How do we prove it? What are the implications of such a proof?

     The challenge is obvious. God knows His "...good, and acceptable, and perfect..." will. We need not prove it to Him. We prove it to ourselves by the way we live and by the mold to which we conform our lives. Shall we allow the world around us to mold and shape us into its despicable image? Or shall we retreat into the cocoon of divine grace and submit our lives to God? If we submit to God, the time shall come when we shall emerge from our cocoon, but the image we display then is not the image of the "worm" who entered the cocoon, but the beautiful image of a transformed believer in Christ who has grown into mature faith and has taken on the image of grace that defies human explanation apart from that transforming grace.

     How do you view yourself? What is the deepest sense of image that you have of yourself? No, I'm not talking about a physical image you see in the mirror; I'm rather talking about the deep inner image of you. Do you view yourself as a "worm," or do you view yourself as a "child of the King"? How you view yourself will predict more than you can imagine about how you act out that image in your daily life. The U. S. Army sponsors an advertisement that encourages young people to join the Army as a career, "Be all that you can be in the Army." Like any other human institution, the Army can't mold you into anything beyond what you are. However, the workings of divine grace first change who you are! God first delivers His chosen and beloved children "...from the power of darkness...." Then He "...translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son." (Colossians 1:13) Now that we hold citizenship in the "kingdom of his dear Son," we also hold membership in God's beloved family, and as such we have new abilities and inclinations that enable us to be more than we ever were or imagined ourselves to be.

     What Paul does in these verses is to strongly urge us upward to live out the true character of our new life in Christ. We must embrace that life, not merely think of it as a new philosophy. A popular Christian radio program carries the title "A New Beginning." The denomination (Ah, they intensely dislike being referred to as a "denomination.") that sponsors this program wholly denies the new birth, interpreting Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus in John the third chapter as if God merely gives us a fresh start with a clean slate, but they wholly miss the fact that a new birth produces a new life, not just a new opportunity! With that new life that God bestows upon us, Paul here urges us to live in harmony with that new life and to live faithfully to its true character.

     Forget about being "...all that you can be." Work on being what God has created you and caused you to be in His loving grace.

Joe Holder

Proving the Will of God

"I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. (Romans 12:1-2) "

     I love those glaring road signs in Scripture, those passages that state their point with such obvious uniqueness that you have to work to miss the point. Our study verses contain one of those signs. This study deals with Paul’s closing thought in our passage.

…that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. The word Paul used to translate “prove” in our King James Bible has two primary meanings in its New Testament Greek setting.

1 to test, examine, prove, scrutinise (to see whether a thing is genuine or not), as metals.

2 to recognise as genuine after examination, to approve, deem worthy. (1)

     Clearly it is not Paul’s intention that we need to prove the rightness of God’s will to God. To whom then do we prove the point? I suggest that the intent of the passage is clearly set forth. We prove God’s will to ourselves. Paul defines the exclusive way we can prove the goodness of God’s will to ourselves, and it is by the sacrificial and reasonable service prescribed in Scripture that results in our becoming transformed, not conformed to this world.

     I have often encountered people who were struggling with calamity in their lives by questioning God rather than by trying to deal with the calamity. “If God is sovereign and if God is good, why would God cause this awful event?” First of all, divine sovereignty is never presented in Scripture so as to remotely imply that God causes every event that unfolds in human history. Jeremiah repeatedly confronted this error during his prophetic time in Judah through the Babylonian captivity. The Babylonians had ravaged the nation and taken the leading citizens captive to Babylon, a captivity that would last for seventy years before the restoration of Judah would begin. While Ezekiel and Daniel were held in Babylon, Jeremiah remained in Judah with the rag-tag residue of people there. It is fascinating to study all three of these contemporary prophets, each of whom faced a unique problem in his ministry to the people of God. Ezekiel lived with the rank and file people in the slave camps of Babylon. Daniel was taken to the royal palace to become a “laboratory rat” in a royal experiment. Jeremiah remained in Judah with the discouraged and disillusioned people left in the land after the destructive invasion was completed.

     It is quite common for people in the midst of calamity to seek God or to question God’s involvement in their calamity. According to Jeremiah’s writings, it was not a divine experiment to “permit” the Babylonian captivity. The unbelief and sin of the Jewish people in Judah brought God’s judgment upon them. Just a few generations earlier the northern kingdom had been overrun and destroyed by the Assyrians. Would the southern kingdom suffer a similar end, resulting in the failure of all God’s promises regarding the coming Messiah? Had their faith been empty, just another false religion with futile hopes of deliverance? As the people under Jeremiah’s teaching wrestled with their apparently hopeless situation, they tried to find some way—any way—to blame God for their dilemma. They even tried to blame God for their Baal worship! Read Jeremiah 7:9-10. Jeremiah is fierce in his confrontation and rebuke of the people’s claim that God had “…delivered…” them to do all those abominable sins.

     I believe that the consistent testimony of Scripture affirms that the notion of blaming God for sin and for human calamity is the response of entrenched unbelief that rejects the moral character of God. It matters not whether the person who reaches this conclusion does so out of errant Bible study or through a desperate search to explain their present pain. No doubt God occasionally intervenes in human history and works His will against the designs of sinful man, but Scripture never implies that God robotically manipulates or controls every event that occurs. If so, according to Paul in the third chapter of Romans, God, not man, should face the judgment bar for His actions. In human law the man who “orchestrates” a crime is deemed guilty and is tried and punished for his participation in the crime. Moses’ Law likewise holds the “orchestrator” of crime guilty and punishable under God’s moral law, as do New Testament writers. To claim that God doesn’t cause all calamities, but He “orchestrates” them, fails to relieve the charge of sin at the hands of God.

     I have faced several significant calamities in my life. I have struggled with the bitter “Why did this happen?” question, but in the end I have never concluded that God caused these calamities or that He “orchestrated” them. My wife faced life-threatening cancer at age thirty, a time when we had three very young daughters. She was spared, but as we went through those difficult years, we didn’t know if she would survive or if the cancer would return. Six years ago I faced a diagnosis of prostate cancer. For three weeks I struggled fiercely with the reality of my condition, the reality as I perceived it at the time. After my surgery the Lord gave me peace and assurance that, whatever I faced, I would not be alone; He would stand by me. Never in either of these situations did I struggle with a guilty conscience or believe that God was “punishing me” for sins or that He was “orchestrating” these events for a greater good. Can/Does God often step into such situations in the lives of His children and bring good out of them? Indeed, praise His righteous and kind name, yes, He does. (2) But providential intervention does not imply divine cause or divine “orchestration” of all events in human history. Of all the rich assurances we find in Isaiah 49:14-16, a major theme must be that God’s selective intervention in human history is always specifically on behalf of His beloved elect. Nothing in Scripture implies that God must control every grain of sand in a Sahara Desert dust storm or ever drop of rain that falls from clouds to be sovereign. Biblical sovereignty means that God is in charge over the universe that He created. In some areas, the physical sciences for example, He ordinarily leaves the flow of events to the operation of elements and natural processes such as weather to the natural laws He imposed on them from the creation. We might add that He likely modified these laws significantly by the fall of man and the entrance of sin. However, in matters of human history, God governs humanity, not based on impersonal laws or on robotic manipulation, but on the basis of a moral covenant. He created man to be different from the natural creatures in the world around him. He gave Adam and Eve a single and quite simple moral commandment. In all subsequent times, sin notwithstanding, God has governed humans by His moral Law, not by robotic orchestration. We see this principle in Scripture, both in terms of God’s governance of the wicked and in terms of His governance of His elect people. Within the scope of our human ability, or our regenerate ability after the new birth, we have the ability to discern the distinction between what is morally right and what is morally wrong. We choose our course of action, and we thereby choose the consequences of our actions. Ordinarily God allows this process to take its course. Occasionally He intervenes in the process to bring about special blessings to His people or to fulfill His faithful promises. He also regularly intervenes in chastening us in our sins to bring us back to obedience to Him.

     Paul’s essential thesis in our study verses outlines a process by which we may come to understand God’s will correctly. Conversely, by simple logical reasoning, he gives us the evidence to know that a different course will result in wrong conclusions about God and about His will. Do not overlook the word “reasonable” in these verses, a word that is translated in the marginal footnote of most King James Bibles as “rational.” The only sensible, rational conclusion we can reach from a proper study of Scripture and a wise application of it to our lives is that God’s will is “…, good, and acceptable, and perfect.” When someone tries to rationalize that God’s will is active and causative in the presence of sin and the various calamities of life, they demonstrate an irrational and incorrect conclusion regarding God’s will. This errant conclusion may result from faulty study and interpretation of Scripture, but, according to Paul in this context, it more likely results from that person not practicing the steps of godliness that he outlined in these verses, a self-sacrificing life that presents our ego, our energy, and every other feature of our lives to God in sacrificial service to Him and to His people. The more we focus on the people around us and how popular or conforming we are to them and to their way of thinking the more we jeopardize our ability to understand the “…good, and acceptable, and perfect…” will of God. The more likely we will be to look for ways to blame God for all calamity and all sins that occur. The more we submit to God and experience the incredibly “transformation” of faith the more we will understand—in fact, according to Paul, prove—that God’s will is “…good, and acceptable, and perfect….”

     The believer in Jesus who lives the lifestyle of these two verses may well face a life full of calamities and struggles. Nothing in Scripture suggests otherwise. But Paul assures us that this lifestyle will lead us to a specific conclusion regarding the moral integrity of God’s will; that it is “…, good, and acceptable, and perfect. Have you proved this truth to yourself, or do you still struggle with rationalizing how a moral and omnipotent deity could “cause” sin and human calamity, and yet remain moral and good? Follow Paul’s formula; it works!