Week 3: The Will of God in the New Testament

Now that we covered people making decisions and looking for the will of God in the OT, we take a look at how this works in the New Testament. We can’t look at the entire NT, it is a rather large place, but we can look at where we see people doing stuff and making decisions most frequently, i.e. the book of Acts. So, what do we find there? How does God talk to people in the NT? How do they make decisions?

The Case of Dice Rolling

As we previously saw, dice rolling appears right at the beginning of Acts. Most Christians I know find this rather puzzling – well let’s be honest, some straight-up freak-out. But there it is, right after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. However, if you look carefully, you’ll find that nowhere else in Acts is dice rolling used or promoted. Actually, you’ll look vainly for dice rolling in the NT after Acts as well. And going further, as far as I can tell, you’ll look vainly for it in the early church too. This absence helps explain our surprise and discomfort with finding dice in Acts 1. So what happened?

Well, you don’t have to look far for an answer. It appears right at the beginning of Acts 2. Things changed “When the day of Pentecost arrived” (Acts 2:1). It was, as I used to sing to my wee laddie, “The Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit came, the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost.” And with the Spirit being poured out on everyone the world changed.

That last part is easy to skip over but is truly revolutionary. The Holy Spirit is given to all believers (1 Cor 12:13, Eph 1:13, Rom 8:9). Now, this is super weird. In our modern individualistic, Christianized world, it’s easy to think, “yeah, I’m as close to God as anyone else! I don’t need nobody else between me and God!” Easy to think, or to simply unconsciously assume. Problem is…. for the majority of cultures and history this is just backwards. There were always prophets and priests, or in other cultures, oracles, witchdoctors, shamans… all sorts of people who were special in how they connected to spirit realm, to the divine. Everybody knew you had to go to the witchdoctor, the prophet, to the special person with the special connection to get special knowledge. That is just how the world worked. That’s why these oracles or witchdoctor types had a special honor all over the world.

With Christianity we have the democratization of access to God. The veil has been torn (Matt 27:51) and God’s presence is directly open to all who come to him in faith. And hence, there is a direct connection where God leads individual Christians. The story of Acts is the story of the Holy Spirit going out into the world.

from the Old to the New

Now, this does not mean that all the ways that God talked to people have changed. In Acts we still find God talking to people with many of the same methods, appearances, visions, etc. In Acts 8:26 we find the angel of the Lord telling Philip to go the Gaza road. In Acts 9 we Jesus appearing to Saul directly. Afterwards, Ananias has a vision of the Lord and we are told Saul had a vision as well. The next chapter, Acts 10, tells how Cornelius, a gentile centurion also had a vision, and then Peter.

This all sounds very familiar—what about the new era of the Holy Spirit? Well, we find some new Holy Spirit language as well. After Philip went to the Gaza road we get this comment, “Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go up and join this chariot’” (Acts 8:29). Was this an audible voice or an inner impression? We don’t know—the text doesn’t say. Acts 10 gives us a similar story, “While Peter was reflecting on the vision, the Spirit said to him, ‘Behold, three men are looking for you’” (Acts 10:19).

There are other stories of the Spirit talking and people prophesying in the Spirit. But the most interesting (for our purposes) is found in Acts 16. Here we find Paul’s mission team traveling around encouraging the churches. And then we get to verse 6, “They passed through the Phrygian and Galatian region, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” How exactly did the Holy Spirit prevent them? How did they know it was the Holy Spirit preventing instead of some other force? We aren’t told. And, yet again in the next verse, “and after they came to Mysia, they were trying to go into Bithynia, and the Spirit of Jesus did not permit them.” Again we find the Spirit (the Spirit of Jesus and the Holy Spirit are the same Spirit) preventing but with no clarifying comment.

Finding God’s Will

So, we find in Acts that God informs, directs, moves, and prevents people from doing things in a variety of ways. However, we’ve kinda edged away from the original issue. How do we make decisions and find God’s will? Most of the cases of God speaking in Acts are just as they are in the OT, God just acts and reveals His will at his pleasure. He sends visions, dreams, appearances, words—whenever He feels like it, not generally at our beck and call.

However, God’s action doesn’t appear completely arbitrary, we do find a general pattern in Acts: people pray and devote themselves to God, and then God acts—but often in a surprising way. Acts 1 finds the disciples praying, Acts 2, the Holy Spirit breaks in with the gift of tongues. Acts 4 we find the same thing, prayer, and then the filling of the Holy Spirit.

But what about direction, God telling us what he wants? Well, we find that too. In Acts 9 we find Saul praying, and then Ananias and Saul are given visions. In chapter 10 we find Cornelius who “prayed to God continually” receive a vision. Similarly, Peter was up on the housetop praying when he saw a vision and then the Holy Spirit spoke to him.

Now this can make it seem like every time someone praise God did something immediately. That’s just false. Remember Cornelius prayed continually, probably for years, before he had a vision. The Apostles were continually devoted to prayer, but we don’t hear about constant divine direction. In fact, the vast majority of decisions made and actions taken in Acts make no reference to the Holy Spirit, visions, angels, dreams or anything else divinely specified. But what should we make of that?

All I’m going to do here is just introduce a couple of things that we’ll fill out in more detail next time. The first is different views of the will of God for individuals, and the second has to do with differing opinions about what is the right thing to do.

Two Models of Gods Will

The two views of God’s will are what I call 1) the train-track model (on the left), and the 2) the boundary model (on the right). The train-track view says that God has a specific individual will for everything in everyone’s life. He’s charted out rails he wants us to run on and our job is to try and discern where the rails are and follow them. If we make a mistake, we need to turn around as fast as possible and jump back on the tracks. By contrast, the boundary view says that God has told people the boundaries of good and bad, and while we need to stay in those boundaries, He does not have a specific rail for most people to follow. People are free to follow God anywhere that is within the boundaries.

Now, preliminarily, given what we’ve seen in Acts, what side should we choose? Well, we frequently find God leading and directing people to specific acts and places—so it seems that more than just boundaries are at play. However, given that the vast majority of actions taken in Acts made no reference to God and His will, it seems a bit odd to think that God has decided how every person is supposed to make every action, but that he doesn’t tell us what He wants in the vast majority of cases. It looks a bit like something of middle way is in play.

CHristian Disagreement

The other issue deals with disagreement. We have to conclude that God’s Spirit does not always make clear what side is right. Holy people, filled with his Spirit disagree. Paul and Barnabas disagreed so vehemently about taking John Mark on a trip that they split up and went their own different ways (Acts 15:36-41). The scriptures give us no message about someone not listening to God or not obeying Him. The disagreement is just stated factually along with the results, no judgement added. We find a similar situation of disagreement about Paul going back to Jerusalem (Acts 19-21). Both sides had the Spirit, but one side said go, the other said don’t.

Conclusion

So, what do we see? having the Spirit and genuinely trying to follow God does not mean everyone will agree. What are we to do with that? And what of God’s will? Does it look more like a train track or a mere boundary?