Perfect Vs Permissive: What God Wants Vs What He Allows

by Dan Steward

If God loves us, why do bad things happen? I cannot tell you how many times I have heard this said over and over again by thousands of confused people who do not understand how the God of Love and Righteousness, supposedly all-knowing and omnipotent, would allow such evil to persist in His world. The common answer is free-will. If we have free-will, and God knows every choice we could ever make, then how can He be all good knowing we have the capacity of evil? Why does He not destroy Satan and his cohorts millennia ago and just bring about universal love and joy forever more? Would it piss you off if I said free-will again? God does not want robots. God wants intellectual, educated, and, most importantly, autonomous consensually devout followers who choose to follow Him, not ones that are forced. Also, we have to have free-will because He wants to respect us and love us by honoring our choice if we choose not to follow Him. If we choose to be apart from Him, He will honor our decision by allowing us to spend eternity away from Him because that is what "Hell" is. Hell, from a biblical standpoint, is wherever God is not. Our free-will is so important to God, He will change His plans and make a way for us to have our free-will and still come to Him in the end.

God's perfect will is that we all rely on Him wholly, trust in Him in all things, and know He will always have our best interests at heart and follow Him willfully and faithfully and listen to everything He says and follow His instructions. His perfect will, originally, would have been that Eve never fell to the temptation of the serpent in the garden and that we stayed close with God and never built a division between us and our Creator. God's permissive will is what is developed when we go our own way and then God changes things so that, even though we strayed so far from Him, we still have a path back to Him. This happens when we are so far gone, as was the case with the ancient Israelites, and God has to build a new path for us to return to Him because we dug ourselves a hole so deep, we cannot climb out ourselves. He already wiped the majority of life from Earth at one point with a flood, but He gave us a rainbow to promise that was not going to happen again. To put it simply, God's perfect will is what He wants out of any given situation, and His permissive will is what He allows to happen that He uses to still get the outcome He ultimately wants yet does not prefer. He concedes with our hard hearts as Jesus put it.

In Mark 10:2-12; Christ speaks to the Pharisees about this when they bring up the point that Moses permitted divorce amongst the Israelites. Jesus explains that this was a concession to their "hard hearts" and that anyone who divorces their spouse then remarries is committing adultery. God created marriage to be a union between man and woman (Mark 10:6) that they become one flesh (Genesis 2:24) and is an indissoluble relationship except on the highest grounds (Matt. 19:9). The only grounds Jesus explicably gives for divorce is unfaithfulness (Matt. 5:32). Obviously, I am sure God would also permit it in grounds of if one partner was abusive or anything along those lines; but the point is that marriage is a sacred union between a man and woman that they become one unit under God. They should work together in synchronicity much to the same respect as two eyes or ears. In respects such as these, divorce would not be sinful of the initiator as God is just and He does not want us to be in a situation of undo suffering. He most likely leaned His commandment on divorce in order to ensure the Israelites could still follow Him. He did this because conceding to His follower's hard hearts made it possible for them to grow into being able to follow Him more properly. We are, as you can imagine, unable to fully follow Gods commandments for us right from the get-go. The Ten Commandments are, in my belief, the bare minimum rules of Gods kingdom. They are the essentials and easiest, most straight forward rules God could give us (and we still manage to screw them up). Something that was commonplace amongst the people such as divorce is something God decided to put up with in order so they could get closer to Him and eventually work their way towards abolishing casual divorce from their practices. This is an example of God using His permissive will in order to allow us to still be able to spend eternity with Him.

One example of God's perfect vs permissive will is the story of Job. In the Book of Job, God and Satan have a wager that no matter what Satan does to him, so long as He does not kill him, Job will not turn from the Lord (Job 1:6-12; 2:1-7). He rebukes his wife for questioning his faith (Job 2:10) and argues his innocence and freedom from sin with his three friends (Job 3-31). The Lord explains that even though we do not understand why He does things, it is our position to simply trust in Him because He is the one who allows all things to happen, and He knows all things that go on. He has no ignorance of anything, so if we know Him, and we know that He knows all goings on, we must simply understand that somethings happen that we may not understand, or ever will understand, but God, so long as we remain faithful to Him, will provide a way for all things to benefit us (Job 38-42:6, Romans 8:28). This is an example of His permissive will because He allowed Satan to torment and ruin Job's life even though Job was completely righteous (Job 1:1). It is not God's perfect will that His righteous children, or any of His children, suffer but due to free will; we are bound to suffer and die because we do not live perfect sinless lives as God intended. Despite our self-enacted suffering however, God always makes sure we have a way to come back to Him. In Job's case, even though he was perfect in Gods eyes, he suffered still due to the fact that God allows suffering in our lives sometimes because it is in that suffering that we can learn to better rely on Him. Sometimes it is accrued by our sin, sometimes God gives it to us to strengthen our faith. The fact of the matter is that God took something bad and made it into something that can produce good (Genesis 50:20). That is the beautiful glory of God's permissive will.

Throughout both biblical and modern history, God allows Israel to be conquered a total of 44 recorded times throughout the nation's history. This happens because they constantly turn from God for one reason or another. God explains this in Jeremiah 12. "I have abandoned my people, my special possession. I have surrendered my dearest ones to their enemies. My chosen people have roared at me like a lion form the forest, so I have treated them with contempt." (Jeremiah 12:7-8) God however claims that once they return to Him, He will offer forgiveness and give them their land back and even give land back to those who invaded Israel so long as they live for Him (Jeremiah 12:15-16).

God gives the gift of His love through His son Jesus Christ freely. Anyone can come to Him as they are and He will take you as you are, no matter how far from Him you might think you are. He delivered me and made a way for me to return to Him after being a magick practicing Satanist. If He can drag me out of the dark, He can do the same for you because His permissive will makes it so we eventually are able to follow His perfect will. Trust in Him, and He will make a way for you. "He is the Rock, his deeds are perfect. Everything he does is just and fair. He is a faithful God who does no wrong; how just and upright he is!"(Deut 32:4)

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