What is Gods will?
H.J. Vine addresses this question most directly in his paper The Mystery of God's Will. He begins by defining what Scripture means when it speaks of God's will:
H.J. VineWhatever God would have to be — whatever is His good pleasure — is His will... when we have the definite expression, "This is the will of God," we are immediately told what He Himself would have. Two verses may suffice to show this fact: (1) "This is the will of God even your sanctification" (1 Thess. 4:3); (2) "This is the will of Him that sent Me, that everyone which seeth the Son, and believes on Him, may have everlasting life" (John 6:40).
Vine identifies four great results of the work of Calvary in relation to God's will:
1. Deliverance: "According to the will of our God and Father" (Gal. 1:4). 2. Sanctification: "By which will we have been sanctified" (Heb. 10:10). 3. Eternal life: "This is the will of My Father, that every one who sees the Son and believes on Him should have life eternal" (John 6:40, 54). 4. Glory: (Eph. 1:7, 9-10). Eternal praise to God.
Christ: The Perfect Expression of God's Will
At its deepest level, God's will is seen perfectly in Christ. Hamilton Smith, commenting on 1 John 3, traces a three-fold progression — Christ doing God's will at every stage of His life:
Hamilton SmithBecoming flesh, He was entirely subject to the will of the Father. Coming into the world, He could say, "Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God" (Hebrews 10:9). Passing through the world He could say, "I seek not Mine own will, but the will of the Father which has sent Me" (John 5:30). Going out of the world, He could say, "Not My will, but Thine, be done" (Luke 22:42).
Smith makes the same point in his exposition of Romans 6, where he presents Christ as the perfect contrast to Adam:
The world He came into was governed by sin, or self-will; Christ was governed by an entirely opposite principle — the principle of obedience or subjection to God's will... Thus, in Christ we see One who, from the beginning of His path to the end, wholly LIVED TO GOD.
Sin as the Opposite of God's Will
A striking thread is the definition of sin as lawlessness — doing one's own will apart from God. Hamilton Smith puts it plainly:
What is sin? ... Sin is defined for us in the word of God as "lawlessness" (1 John 3:4). It is the evil principle of doing one's own will without reference to God, or, in other words, insubjection to God. By one man — Adam, this evil principle entered into the world; as a result, a system has grown up — called the world — which is entirely dominated by sin, or the will of man... Moreover, what is true of the world as a whole is also true of each individual. The misery of each individual life arises from doing one's own will without reference to the will of God.
James Boyd draws this out powerfully from Matthew 22. If we bear God's image, we owe Him ourselves — and that means obedience:
James BoydWhat should characterize every human being? Obedience... What about Christ? He was obedient to death. All that He said and did was the outcome of the will of God. What about us then? If we do the will of God we shall be practically Christ over again. This is walking as He walked, and this is the way to have Christ magnified in our bodies.
Power to Do God's Will
How does the believer actually walk in God's will? The Bible Treasury article on John 15 connects fruit-bearing to personal dependence on Christ:
The question is, what is to give us power to do the will of God here below? Christ says, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman."... But how is my soul to be strengthened for bringing forth fruit? There must be the personal dealing with Christ in whatever is put before me, as the only way of walking with God. The one thing essential to anything being right in a Christian sense is, that Christ should be the first question in it.
The writer of A Happy Life connects surrender to God's will with inner peace:
If we yield to the Holy Spirit and to our conscience, He gives us the strength to do the will of God. And what happens then? Instead of inward conflict, we are in harmony with God, His Word, and His Spirit; and consequently we enjoy a deeper sense of His love and a fuller measure of His joy and peace.
Our will, if not surrendered to God, is self-will. And self-will is the root of all the sin, misery and unhappiness that has ever come into our lives... A will surrendered to God is the gateway to happiness.
The Eternal Scope
H.J. Vine brings all the threads together, showing that God's will spans from eternity past to eternity future:
H.J. VineHaving marked us out for sonship according to "the good pleasure of His will," the present working out therefore of the "counsel of His will" has in view the full display in glory of the "mystery of His will." It is the latter of these three which He has made known to us (Eph. 1:5-10).
Meanwhile, the doing of His will is of the last importance... "He that does the will of God abides for ever" (1 John 2:17); and God hears the petitions of such: "If any one be God-fearing and do His will, him He hears" (John 9:31).
God's will, then, is not a single thing but an unfolding whole. At its grandest, it is His eternal purpose to head up all things in Christ — all in heaven and on earth brought under one blessed administration (Eph. 1:9-10). In its bearing on individuals, Scripture names three things that are expressly "the will of God": that sinners would believe on the Son and have eternal life (John 6:40), that believers would be sanctified — set apart from the world for Himself (1 Thess. 4:3), and that in all things they would give thanks (1 Thess. 5:18). The opposite of God's will is lawlessness — man doing his own will without reference to God — and this is the root of all misery. Christ alone perfectly did the Father's will from first to last, and believers are now called to walk in that same path — not in their own strength, but by abiding in Him and drawing power from Him for every step.