The Salvation of All the Will of God
“I exhort therefore that supplications, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings be made for all men. This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, who willeth that all men should be saved.” — i Tim. ii. 1-4. “The Lord is long suffering to youward, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.’’ — 2 Pet. iii. 9.
AFTER Paul had urged that supplications, prayers, and intercessions should be made for all men, he reminds us that we may do so in confident assurance that it is good and acceptable to God, because He willeth that all men should be saved. The knowledge and faith of God’s will for all is to be the motive and the measure of our prayer for all. What God in heaven wills and works for His children on earth we are to will and work for too. As we enter into His will for all, we shall know what we are to do to fulfil that will. And as we pray and labour for all, the faith in His will for all will inspire us with confidence
and love.
Perhaps the question arises — If God wills the salvation of all, how is it that it is not effected? What of the doctrine of election, asi Scripture teaches it us? And what of the Omnipotence of God, which is surely equal to the Love that wills the salvation of all? As to election, let us remember that there are mysteries in God and in Scripture which are beyond our reach. If there are apparently conflicting truths which we cannot reconcile, we know that Scripture was not written, like a book of science, to satisfy the intellect, but as the revelation of the hidden wisdom of God, to test and strengthen faith and submission, to waken love and childlike teachableness. If we cannot understand why His power does not work what His will has purposed, we shall find that, as the endowment of the creature with a free will, is an act by which the will of God has limited itself, all that God does or does not do is decided by conditions far beyond our ken, and which it needs a Divine wisdom to grasp and to order. We shall learn that God’s will is as much beyond our comprehension as God’s being, and that it is our wisdom and safety and happiness to accept every revealed truth with the simplicity and the faith of little children, and yield ourselves to it to prove its living power within our hearts. Let us not fear to yield ourselves to the uttermost to this blessed word: God willeth that all men should be saved.
God is love. His will is love. As He makes His sun to shine on the good and the evil, so His love rests upon all. However little we can understand why His love is so long-suffering and patient, and does not take its power and reign, we believe and know the love that God hath to us — a love whose measure in heaven is the gift of His Son, and on earth every child of man. His love is nothing but His will in its Divine energy doing its very utmost, in accordance with the Divine law by which His relation to His creature is regulated, to make men partakers of its blessedness. His will is nothing but His love in its infinite patience and tenderness delighting to win and bless every heart into which it can gain access. If we only knew God and His love, how we should look upon every man we see as one upon whom that love rests and for whom it longs. We should begin to wonder at the mystery of grace that has taken up the Church, as the body of Christ, as a partner in the great work of making that love known, and rendered itself dependent upon its faithfulness. And we should see that all living to do God’s will must lead up to this as its central glory: our doing the will that wills that all should be saved.
God willeth that all men should be saved. This truth is a supernatural mystery, not to be apprehended but by a spiritual mind through the teaching of the Holy Spirit. It is in itself so Divine and beyond our apprehension, the difficulties that surround it are so many and so real, it needs so much of time and of the sacrifice of the humble loving heart to master its teaching, that to very many the words carry but little meaning. To the believer, who in very deed seeks to know and to do all God’s will, they give a new meaning to life. He begins to see that this call to love and to save his fellow-men is not something accidental or additional that, along with other things, goes to make up his life, and to which he can devote as much of time and thought as he sees fit. He learns that just as this loving, saving will of God is the secret source of all His will, and rules it all, so this loving, saving will is to be the chief thing he lives for too. I have been redeemed and organically united to and made a member of the saving Christ, who came to do this will of the Father. / have been chosen and set apart and -fitted for this as the one object of my being in the world. I begin to see faintly that the prayer.
Thy will be done! means above everything that I give myself for this loving, saving will of God to possess, to inspire, to use, if need be to consume me. And I feel the need of spelling out the words of the sentence till my heart can call them its own: God — my God, who liveth in me — willeth with His whole heart, in that will which He has revealed to His people that they may carry it into effect — that all m£n, here around me, and to the ends of the earth — should be saved, should have everlasting life.
Paul wrote these words in connection with a call to prayer for all men. Our faith in the truth of God’s loving, saving will must be put into practice. It must stir us to prayer. And prayer will most certainly stir us to work. We must not only seek to believe and feel the truth of these words, but must act. This will of God must be done. Let us look upon those around us as the objects of God’s love, whom His saving will is seeking to reach. Let us, as we yield ourselves to this will, go and speak to those around us of God’s love in Christ. It is possible that we are not succeeding in doing God’s will in our personal life because we neglect the chief thing. As we pray to be possessed and filled with the knowledge of this will of God, let us in our Sunday-school class, or Gospel work, in our efforts for young or old, for poor or rich, seek to have hearts filled with this love, tongues that speak of Jesus and His salvation, and a will that finds its strength in God’s own will — that all men should be saved. So will our life, and our love, and our work, and our will in some measure be like that of Jesus Christ — a doing of the Father’s will, that none of these little ones should perish.
XXIV
“Then said I, Lo, I am come to do Thy will, O God. In which will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all.” — Heb. x. 7-10.
“Lo, I come. I delight to do Thy will, O my God.” — Ps. xl. 7, 8.
DAVID had said: Sacrifices and offerings Thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein. They had been appointed for a time, as a shadow or picture; they were not what God sought or what could please Him; they were not really the will of God. David understood that what God wanted was the doing of His will, and said: I delight to do Thy will, O my God. While saying this of himself, he spake it of Christ, in whom alone its true fulfilment could be found. They are the great words with which Christ coming into the world announces His work: Lo, I am come to do Thy will, O God. If we are really to penetrate to the very heart of what Christ is, and means, of what He did for us and does in us, we must seek to know Him as come from heaven to earth to do the will of God, and so to restore the doing of God’s will on earth to the place it has in heaven.
His doing of God’s will is first contrasted with the sacrifices and ofiFerings of the Old Testament worship, and then specially connected with the offering of His own body once for all. Of this will of God, as thus done by Him, even unto death, we are taught that in it we have been sanctified, because by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. Let us try and learn the great lessons that there are to be found here in connection with our study of the will of God
The doing of God’s will is the only worship that is pleasing to God, — It was this alone that gave their value to the Old Testament sacrifices. Not in the costliness or the multitude of the offerings lay their value, but in the disposition; in the contrition, or the faith, or the consecration of which they were the expression. Not even in these however, except as they were a Divine appointment, and were brought in accordance with God’s own command. If not accompanied by obedience they were worse than useless. “Obedience is better than sacrifice.” “Thou desirest not sacrifice; Thou delightest not in burnt-offering; the sacrifices of God are a broken heart.” It is as far as they were the doing of God’s will that they were well-pleasing. And so they became the symbols of a life given up in devotion to God, wholly yielded to His will and service. The doing of God’s will is the secret of acceptable worship.
Christ came to this world to do the will of God. — He came and lived as man to show us that the one thing God asks of the creature, that the one thing that can bring the creature life and blessedness, is the doing of the will of God. With this view He not only submitted Himself to all the commandments and ordinances of the law; in all His life and work, in His eating and speaking, in His travels and miracles, He lived a life of absolute dependence upon God’s guidance — in everything He did only God’s will. He did all God’s will. He knew that it was God’s will that He should die as a propitiation for our sins. As the time came near and all that that would imply opened up before His human nature, He had more than once occasion to say: How am I straitened! How is My Soul troubled! My Soul is sorrowful even unto death! But through it all He thought of God’s will; the surrender to God’s will sustained Him. And He gave Himself to be what the sin-offering and burnt-offering had only typified, a sacrifice unto God, obedient even unto death. It was this gave His inconceivable suffering its inconceivable value; it was borne as the will of God, laying God’s just judgment upon Him that the guilty might go free.
It is Christ’s doing the will of God even unto death that has effected our salvation — “In which will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.’’ The word sanctified is used here in its larger sense, as it includes justification and regeneration, and the whole of redemption — our being restored to the fellowship of God, and taken possession of by Him. The great sin of Adam and of mankind was doing their own will instead of God’s will. The great, the only root, of all sin and misery was self-will. Jesus Christ came to take away sin. He did so by a life and a death of the most perfect sacrifice of His will to the will of God. He bore the consequence, the punishment, the curse that our seltwill had brought. Through His perfect obedience to God’s will He made a perfect atonement for our sin, and won for the will of God its place of supremacy in this sinful world. He did this by the offering of His body, once for all, and so perfected for ever them that are sanctified.” By the obedience of one, many are made righteous,” As the partakers of a complete and perfect righteousness, won by obedience to the will of God, as ‘’ created after the image of God in righteousness,” their entrance into the perfect love and Ufe of God is complete and for ever.
The doing of God’s will by which Christ wrought out our salvation is now and ever the power of the salvation He imparts. — Doing God’s will is not only, as many think, the price by which salvation was won. Doing God’s will is salvation itself. In Christ it was the power that conquered every temptation to self-will, that proved what human life ought really to be, that brought a perfect human life and laid it a sacrifice at God’s feet, that broke for ever the power of self-will in its dominion over us. In Christ it proved that sacrificing self-will to the very utmost, doing the will of God even unto death, is the path to the fulness of the life and glory of God. In Christ doing the will of God is seen to be the life and joy of heaven brought down to earth, and the power to rise from earth to heaven. Doing God’s will is at once the cause, the object the power, the blessedness of salvation.
It is only by Christ in us that we can in any measure do the will of God on earth as it is done in Heaven — The prayer that Christ taught us was meant to be heard; God answers it in many various degrees. To pray it daily means to aim at it in the faith of God’s answer. And yet how many earnest Christians who are utterly hopeless in regard to it. Their surrender to do God’s will is ever failing. Is not the great reason that they are attempting it in the power of a life that is not wholly possessed by Jesus Christ? Listen to His Word: ‘* Lo, I am come to do Thy will.” All power to do God’s will is in Him. As we can truly say, Christ liveth in me, we shall find His strength is perfected in our weakness. The call comes to each believer, as one sanctified in the will of God, by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all, and perfected for evermore, to accept the will of God as done by Christ for us, as still being done in us by Him, as God’s free gift in Christ Jesus. The one thing needed, when the heart sees and accepts and loves and vows this doing of God’s will as its one desire, is the faith that Jesus does take charge of a surrendered will, and that in the power of Him who lives in heaven and lives in us, the doing of God’s will can become our daily life.