Week 2: The Will of God in the Old Testament

“What should we do?” Now there’s a troubling question. We are inundated by choices! There are so many different things we can do the possibilities can be petrifying. But we do have options and so we must make decisions. But how are we supposed to know what to do—what we ought to do?

This is not a new question. Yes, on average we might have more options than in the past, but trying to decide on the best path is something every human has struggled with. And, given that God exists and has some sort of interest in our lives, what God wants is utterly enmeshed in the decision-making process. For those of us who are devout Christian this seems pretty obvious. Haven’t we always tried to find and do God’s will? Isn’t that something we all share in common?

But our own experiences can be a bit misleading—what is normal for one is foreign to another. For instance, its easy to think that since we Christians and the devout ancient Israelites followed the same God, we have similar experiences of searching for God’s will. But is this really true? What would it look like for an ancient Jew to try and seek God’s will when trying to make a decision?

The Prophetic Vending machine

One of my favorite illustrations of this comes from 1 Samuel 9, where we first meet the future king. Here we find a young Saul wandering around with a servant trying to find his father’s lost donkeys. After a long day of failure Saul is about to turn back when the servant mentions there’s a man of God nearby. They’ll go and ask him what to do next. But there is a problem. As Saul says,

If we go into the town, what can we give him? The food in our bags is gone. We have no gift to give him. Do we have anything?” Again the servant answered Saul. “Look, I have one-tenth of an ounce of silver. Give it to the man of God. Then he will tell us about our journey.” (In the past, if someone in Israel wanted to ask something from God, he would say, “Let’s go to the seer.” We call the person a prophet today, but in the past he was called a seer.)

Here we find what appears to be accepted practice—if you’ve got a problem and want divine advice—go ask a prophet (and bring him a gift). This was a common practice in the ancient world, the Oracle at Delphi being perhaps the most famous.

Keep in mind that what we have here is a person seeking out divine advice. More commonly reported in the Old Testament are the dreams and visions that God sends unbidden to prophets (or for prophets to interpret). But for a guy who needs to find his donkeys, or a king wants to find out if he’ll have success in war (e.g. 1 Kings 22)—you went to a prophet to find what God wanted. Even if the king prayed directly to God, like Hezekiah did (2 Kings 19), the return message still arrived via prophet post. ‘Course, this is not our typical pattern today—it feels a bit strange.

Rolling the Dice

Another method to divine the divine will was by the Urim and Thummim, by dice. The Urim and Thummim were part of the high priest’s garb and, while there is much we don’t know about them, we know they were used to divine God’s will. We see in Ezra 2 that they were things to be consulted by a priest. Similarly, we find King Saul also trying to use them to find God’s will, “And when Saul inquired of the Lord, the Lord did not answer him, either by dreams, or by Urim, or by prophets” (1 Sam 28:6). Most likely they were some sort of objects that were thrown to find an answer, a kind of dice throwing.

We find the dice method described quite clearly in Joshua 7. After the successful and miraculous assault of the heavily fortified Jericho, the Israelites get their butts whipped by dinky little Ai. What went wrong? Well, everything at Jericho was supposed to be given over to God, but one of the Israelites stole a few things from God. But how did they find which person did the dastardly deed? God could have just told Joshua who it was—but he didn’t. Instead, this is what God said,

In the morning therefore you shall be brought near by your tribes. And the tribe that the Lord takes by lot shall come near by clans. And the clan that the Lord takes shall come near by households. And the household that the Lord takes shall come near man by man (Joshua 7:14).

The lot, the dice, were cast—most likely resulting in a yes or no answer. If the answer was yes to the tribe in question, then the process was repeated with the subgroups of the tribe (family clan units). This was repeated until the individual was selected.

Believe it or not, we actually have dice throwing in the New Testament as well. In Acts 1, the disciples were all sitting around together after Jesus’ Ascension. They had a problem (well many problems) at hand—Judas had betrayed them and committed suicide. This meant that there were only an inauspicious 11 disciples instead of a nice round dozen. They picked out a couple of replacement options, cast dice, and presto-bango, the winner was inducted into the club.

So far, these divination options seem rather strange, farfetched, or even dangerous. Of course, people have used not only these, but all sorts of other methods. People read tea leaves, look at animal entrails, call up dead spirits—as even King Saul did (1 Sam 28)! The difference with die casting and prophet listening is that these seem to be recommended methods we find in the OT.

The Way of wisdom

Now there is one other major form of figuring out what God wants me to do—and that is wisdom. There is the Law, of course, the instructions that provide a boundary inside which all actions should be made. But what about all those possibilities that are all consistent with the Law? Well, to decide which of the paths to take requires wisdom. As Proverbs 2 puts it:

6 For the Lord gives wisdom;

    from his mouth come knowledge and understanding;

7 he stores up sound wisdom for the upright;

    he is a shield to those who walk in integrity,

8 guarding the paths of justice

    and watching over the way of his saints.

9 Then you will understand righteousness and justice

    and equity, every good path;

To know the good path we need the wisdom that comes from God. How do we get such wisdom? Well, one must desire the wisdom and search for it, listening to parents, find wise counselors, and walk in the ethical way while avoiding evil. All of these things provide us the wisdom to hear which of the possibilities we should choose. But all of these things start from the same place, Proverbs 1:7,

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
    fools despise wisdom and instruction

It is by putting oneself under God, to live in fear and respect of Him, that begins the successful life. Should you take path A or path B? Well, the prior question is, do you want whatever path God wants?

Conclusion

As modern, technological Christians, this leaves us in a bit of an uncomfortable position. If we put ourselves back in ancient Israel trying to learn which way God wants us to go, we’re left with a rather vague ‘wisdom,’ or a vending machine version of prophecy (put in a coin, get out a prophecy), or dice throwing. Worse, for most of us the prophet and (priestly) dice rolling are beyond our means. We’d mostly be stuck with taking our best, wisest shot possible and letting the cards fall where they may. Is this the way we Christians ought to be acting? Or, do we live in a different world with a different route to the divine will?