Not So Obvious

Your kingdom come.  Your will be done,  Matthew 6:10 NASB

Your will be done – “I’ll be there tomorrow G_d willing.”  He replied, “Insha’Allah, ‘by the will of God.’”  “Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’”

Judaism, Islam, Christianity—all use the expression “the will of God.”  Do they mean the same thing?  We might think the answer is obvious.  The will of God is whatever God wants.  But that reply might be just a bit naïve.  On examination we notice that the idea “if God wills” is Greek or Roman, not Jewish, and certainly not Islamic.  Why?  Because the formula “if God wills” puts all human action under the umbrella of divine providence as a gradual unveiling of God’s intentions through human history.  It stresses the subjunctive condition—“if”—a condition which leaves us guessing what God really wants.  This ambiguity about the will of God is not found in the biblical world.  Why?  Because the will of God has already been revealed in a definitive display at Sinai.  The will of God is the Law and it is accomplished in doing, not in the happy alignment of my will with God’s intentions.  The will of God “is revealed in the Law as the norm of all life and conduct; it is therefore not so much a matter of willing what God wills, but of doing what God wills . . . The goal set for man is not harmony, but obedience.”[1]  No guesswork is required.  “Your will be done” is the ubiquity of Torah throughout creation.  We don’t have to wonder what God wants. He’s already told us.

Islam takes a different approach.  According to the Qur’an, everything (and that means everything) is directed by Allah because it is all known beforehand.  The will of God is the fixed order of the universe.  Men can act according to God’s will or not—with consequences—but the destiny of all creation is already set in stone.  The goal set of man is not harmony, but submission.  In this respect, Islam is much like the Greek notion of Fate—an irresistible, eternal, immutable program leading to an inevitable end.

And then there’s James.  “Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’”  Is this Jewish or something else?  James’ expression is Jewish Hellenism, that is, it doesn’t overturn the revealed will of God in Torah, but it recognizes the phenomenological circumstance of humanity.  Because of Moses we know what God wants.  We aren’t in the dark, waiting for further revelation.  James isn’t suggesting that we need more information.  He’s acknowledging that we live under the sovereignty of the Creator.  How we live is the application of Torah.  That we live is the benevolence of YHVH.

And what about the Christian view of “the will of God”?  Well, once Torah is discarded, Greek thought takes over.  God’s will becomes “our best guess.”  We live in a state of moral ambiguity because we’ve abandoned the clear directions.  Now we have to work out what God wants from the clues we can gather.  The baby and the bathwater, it seems.

Topical Index: Law, will of God, harmony, obedience, submission, confusion, Matthew 6:10

[1] Ernst Lohmeyer, “Our Father”: An Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer (Harper & Row, 1965), p. 116.