{"id":1974,"date":"2011-04-05T10:17:03","date_gmt":"2011-04-05T17:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1974"},"modified":"2011-04-05T10:17:03","modified_gmt":"2011-04-05T17:17:03","slug":"does-god-get-what-he-wants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/04\/05\/does-god-get-what-he-wants\/","title":{"rendered":"Does God Get What He Wants?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As\u00a0[Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, \u201cIf you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace\u2014but now it is hidden from your eyes.<\/span>\u00a0<\/a> The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side.<\/span>\u00a0They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God\u2019s coming to you.\u201d\u00a0 (Luke 19: <\/span>41-44)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.\u00a0 (Matt. 23:37)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Much of the conversation about judgment and justice in recent weeks has focused on the question whether God “gets what He wants.”\u00a0 We know that God “wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”\u00a0 (1 Tim. 2:4).\u00a0 God’s desire<\/em> for us, His pursuit<\/em> of us despite our rebellion, is a pervasive theme in scripture.\u00a0 It’s something we need to recall again and again and again.\u00a0 It is why, I think, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem in the story of the Triumphal Entry.<\/p>\n

A pastor at my former Church would preach on this passage on Palm Sunday, but he referred to it as the Tragic Entry.\u00a0 I think he was right.\u00a0 Jesus foresees destruction for God’s beloved city — a destruction accomplished by the Roman Emperor Titus not too long after Jesus’ death and resurrection.\u00a0 And Jesus weeps because the “abode of peace” (Jeru-Salem) failed to recognize the Prince of Peace.<\/p>\n

Did God “want” the Romans to destroy Jerusalem?\u00a0 Not according to Jesus.\u00a0 He<\/em> wanted to surround the city with protection.\u00a0 But they “were not willing,” and eventually they were destroyed.<\/p>\n

An easy lesson we could draw from this episode is that God allows us the freedom to choose what we want.\u00a0 Do we want God’s protection or do we choose a path that leads to destruction?\u00a0<\/p>\n

This might be a bit too easy.\u00a0 Left to our own choices, would any<\/em> of us choose God?\u00a0 That possibility is something that the Apostle Paul, reflecting on the Jewish scriptures, seemed to consider impossible:<\/p>\n

There is no one righteous, not even one;
\nthere is no one who understands,
\nno one who seeks God.\u00a0 (Rom. 3:11)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So does God get what He wants, or does He let us choose for ourselves even if it is not what He wants?\u00a0 The right answer seems to be “Yes” on both counts.\u00a0 The Biblical witness emphasizes both God’s sovereignty and human free will.\u00a0 It offers no systematic harmonization of this tension.<\/p>\n

I suspect the scriptures allow this tension to lie open in part because the question of what God “wants” or of what any human person or human culture “wants” is irreducibly complex.\u00a0 Most of us are unable even to penetrate the deepest recesses of our own desires.\u00a0 Very often, we don’t know what we “want,” or we deceive ourselves about what we want to think we “want.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

We know that God “wants all people to be saved,” but we also know that this is not all God wants.\u00a0 He wants people to be free.\u00a0 He wants justice.\u00a0 He wants to expose and strip away evil until the good alone remains.\u00a0 He wants the fellowship of His perichoretic love, unimposed and uncoerced,\u00a0to be “all in all.”\u00a0 God will get what He wants, but what He wants contains more than one element.\u00a0 The entirety of it can’t be isolated to one passage from scripture — perhaps it can’t ultimately be isolated at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As\u00a0[Jesus] approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, \u201cIf you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace\u2014but now it is hidden from your eyes.\u00a0 The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-vQ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}