"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways," says the LORD. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9)
In a time of distraction by entertainment, technology, and the media the church needs deep thinking and deep feeling Christians. Growing and maturing Christians are always reading, exploring, and learning; especially in regards to the scripture. This is one of the reasons that I have started a new ministry. I have an ongoing frustration with weak, shallow, glib, overly simplistic, and lazy approaches to God and His word. I often hear pronouncements about the nature of God that if they were paid attention to, would raise more questions than answers. Not only that, would have profound practical, pastoral, and personal implications in our lives if thought out and many that are not good. I know, I have seen at times during my journey in my own immature teaching, the effects on the lives of those I have taught and counseled.
I have been studying the Bible for 37 years. Yet the more I read the scripture, the more I realize how little is my understanding of God and His ways. I am not so quick to make simplistic and glib pronouncements about God these days as I once was. Sometimes I listen to myself when I make shallow pronouncements and remind myself that a preacher can sometimes say things that he does not understand and make it seem like it's your fault. Reading God's word raises many questions for me that demand prayerful reflection and thought, careful analysis, humility, teachability, and openness to what God really says and means even if I do not agree with Him, like it, or understand. I often times use the analogy of a man who has a yard full of leaves and a buried treasure in the same yard. He can either quickly rake leaves and have a nice yard or he can work hard and dig for the gold and acquire that buried treasure! I am after the treasure not the nice yard.
The Bible is both simple, yet complex; light, yet weighty; easy to understand, yet extremely difficult. Did not the apostle Peter himself say that there are some things in Paul’s writings that are hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16)? Yet, we are also told that if we think, ponder, and reflect upon God’s word, that God will give us understanding (2 Timothy 2:7). Add to that, we have been given the gift of the holy Spirit to teach us, illuminate us, and guide us into all truth. When we pray like David in Psalm 119:18, "Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law." The Spirit of God does His eye opening illuminating work.
This is the great challenge and joy for a lifetime of studying the scriptures (2 Timothy 2:15) which are profitable for teaching and training ( 2 Timothy 3:16). I am thoroughly committed to allowing the scriptures to set my beliefs, ideas, and understanding about God and His ways excited that God has revealed Himself to us (Deuteronomy 29:29). I Agree with David that the truths of God's word are wondrous things! But they are deep and demand effort in order to glean understanding. After all, they are from the infinite, eternal God!
For example, the longer I know Christ and the more that I understand His ways, the more that I am astounded at how He thinks and feels and wills. God's will is not a simple thing. He can will a thing in one sense and not will it in another sense. When we read that God wills a thing or that he does not will a thing; or when we read that he delights in a thing or that he has no delight in a thing, we must always be ready to admit that this simple statement of what he wills or delights in is not the whole story in our limited understanding. God's heart is capable of complex combinations of emotions infinitely more remarkable that ours. This is the great challenge of reading passages like Psalm 135:6; Ezekiel 18:23,32; and Deuteronomy 28:63. These verses need much prayer, reflection, openness, humility, and illumination in order to understand who God is and how that He operates in this universe.
When I read Psalm 135:6, “Whatever the LORD pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. ” I discover that God always acts according to and for His own “good pleasure,” following the dictates of his own delights. He never becomes the victim of circumstance, or Satan or human decision. He is never forced into a situation where he must do something in which he cannot rejoice. This is a glorious picture of God in his sovereign freedom—to do whatever he pleases and to accomplish all his pleasure. God is not constrained by anything outside himself to do anything he does not want to do. If God were unhappy, if he were in some way deficient, then he might indeed be constrained from outside in some way to do what he is not pleased to do in order to make up his deficiency and finally to be happy. But, because he is complete and exuberantly happy and overflowing with satisfaction in the fellowship of the Trinity, all he does is free and uncoerced. His deeds are the overflow of his joy. This is what it means when the Scripture says that God does something according to the "good pleasure" of his will (Ephesians 1:5).
Psalm 115:3 says the same thing: "Our God is in the heavens;
he does whatever he pleases." This verse teaches that whenever God acts, he acts in a way that pleases him. God is never constrained to do a thing that he despises. He is never backed into a corner where his only recourse is to do something he hates to do. He does whatever he pleases. And therefore, in some sense, he has pleasure in all that he does. Isaiah uses the same Hebrew word (haphetz) in Isaiah 46:10 where the Lord says, "My counsel shall stand,
and I will accomplish all my pleasure."
In Ezekiel 18:30 God is warning the house of Israel of impending judgment: "Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, says the Lord." And he is urging them to repent: "Repent and turn from all your transgressions." At the end of verse 31 he says, "Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I do not have pleasure in the death of any one, says the Lord God; so turn, and live."
This seems to be a very different picture than the one we saw in Psalm 135, where God does whatever he pleases. How can God say that he does not have pleasure in the death of any impenitent person, if in fact He accomplishes all his pleasure and does whatever he pleases?” The very same Hebrew verb is used in Psalm 135:6 (“he pleases”) and Ezekiel 18:32 (“he does not have pleasure”).
So what does this mean? Here God seems to be cornered. It seems that he is forced into judging them when he really does not want to. He seems to be about to do something that he is not pleased to do. Is he going to accomplish all his pleasure or not? Is God really free to do everything according to his good pleasure? Or does his sovereign freedom have its limits? Can he do whatever he pleases up to a point, and then after that is he forced into doing things he only grieves to do?
Let’s add to this. What does it mean that God who takes pleasure in all that He does yet allows Satan to attack all that Job has? But then in Job 1:19 “a great wind” levels the house where Job’s children are and kills them all. The text does not say who caused the wind to blow. But in Job 1:21 Job himself says, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” So even if Satan has a hand in making the wind blow, Job knows that behind Satan is the real Ruler of the world and the wind, namely, the Lord. So he says, “The LORD has taken away.” Should Job have said this? The writer takes away all doubt that Job is right to say this, because in the next verse (1:22) he says, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.”
What does it mean that God who takes pleasure in all that He does yet says in Isaiah says, “ I form light and create darkness, I make comfort and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). Or “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil [i.e.,calamity] come?” (Lamentations 3:38). Or “Does evil befall a city, unless the LORD has done it?” (Amos 3:6). So when Psalm 135 says that the Lord does whatever he pleases, it has to include the taking of personal life through natural forces which he alone controls. This can cause us to be deeply disturbed and confused by God both theologically and practically. It gets deeper.
In Psalm 135:8–10 it says that God’s sovereign freedom was shown most vividly in the Exodus when he delivered Israel from Egypt: “He it was who smote the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and of beast…who smote many nations and slew mighty kings.…” Therefore when the psalmist says in verse 6 that “whatever the LORD pleases, he does,” he refers explicitly to the destruction of rebellious Egyptians and nations and kings. This is the scope of what God does when he does all he pleases.
So going back to Ezekiel 32, it says that God is not pleased with the death of unrepentant people, and in Psalm 135 it says that God does whatever he pleases including the slaying of unrepentant people, for example, the enemies of his people in Egypt.
I would direct attention to Deuteronomy 28:63 where Moses warns of coming judgment on unrepentant Israel. But this time it says something strikingly different from Ezekiel 18:32: "And as the LORD took delight in doing you good and multiplying you, so the LORD will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you."
So what are we to make of all this? Is the bible confused? Is God confused? Are you confused? Are you angry? Are you disturbed? Do you negate one passage or the other?
Here is the truth as far as I can see: We are brought back to the inescapable fact that in some sense God does not delight in the death of the wicked (that is the message of Ezekiel 18), and in some sense he does delight in the death of the wicked (that is the message implicitly of Psalm 135:6–11 and explicitly of Deuteronomy 28:63).
Or to put it another way, there is a sense in scripture where even acts of judgment which in one sense do not please God in another sense do please him. Let us let God be God! Better yet, let us submit to the God of the bible in all of His God-ness and mystery, yet who has revealed wondrous things about Him that make Him God! Let us not be locked into reasoning's, speculation, and our finite logic; let us humbly let the scripture speak even if we are not fully able to understand. Our method is not to choose between these texts, or to cancel out one by the other, but to go deep enough into the mysterious mind of God to see (as far as possible) how both are true. How shall we account for this apparent tension?
The answer I propose (and I borrow from John Piper and Jonathan Edwards) is that God can be grieved in one sense by the death of the wicked, and can be pleased by the death of the wicked in another sense. God’s emotional life is infinitely complex beyond our ability to fully comprehend. Who of us could dare say what complex of emotions is not possible for God? All we have to go on here is what he has chosen to tell us in the Bible. And what he has told us is that there is a sense in which he does not experience pleasure in the judgment of the wicked, and there is a sense in which he does.
From this I conclude that the death and misery of the unrepentant is in and of itself no delight to God. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked! (Ezekiel 18:32,24).God is not a sadist. He is not malicious or bloodthirsty. He grieves over these things.
But...when a rebellious, wicked, unbelieving person is judged, what God delights in is the exaltation of truth and righteousness, and the vindication of his own honor and glory. When Moses warns Israel that the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon them and destroying them if they do not repent (Deuteronomy 28:63), he means that those who have rebelled against the Lord and moved beyond repentance will not be able to gloat that they have made the Almighty miserable. God is not defeated in the triumphs of His righteous judgment. Quite the contrary. Moses says that when they are judged they will unwittingly provide an occasion for God to rejoice in the demonstration of his justice and his power and the infinite worth of his glory. Romans 9:22-23 says, “What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory.”
Jonathan Edwards tackled the problem of how God and the saints in heaven will be happy in heaven for all eternity knowing that many millions of people are suffering in hell forever by proposing that it is not that suffering is pleasant to God and the saints in itself, but that the vindication of God’s infinite holiness is cherished so deeply.
In other words, God can view an event from these different sides and see in it something horrific and from another angle say that I ordained it for these holy purposes by which I rejoice with infinite approval and delight. God can see things that way. So can we in a far lesser measure in our own experience in life. We can look in our own life from different angles and see an event momentarily as undesirable and on another angle as exactly right. God has the capacity to view the death of the wicked from different angles and grieve, take no pleasure in it for itself; but also He can step back and approve and delight in it because of what it accomplishes.
It is so important that we see that God is not miserable in this world. Those who rebel in this world are unable to gloat that they have made the almighty miserable or have robbed Him of His joy. Or to put it another way, Satan will not be able to rejoice through all eternity that at least he has robbed God of His joy because people are in hell that God put there. This wonderful truth of Psalm 135:6 pulls that possibility right out of the devils hand! He cannot say that "I have a frustrated God because I have so many of His creatures in hell". No Satan, you do not have that power!!! Psalm 115: ,"Our God is in heaven, He does whatever He pleases."
So let us stand in awe and wonder at this amazing, unique, deep, profound, awesome, sovereign, purpose driven, and infinitely happy God, —eternally happy and infinitely exuberant in the wisdom of his work; free and sovereign in accomplishing His purposes!
"Our God is in heaven; he does whatever he pleases." Psalm 115:3
Pastor Bill
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