God's Will as Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

[eponymic]

There’s a thread in the spirituality section about God’s Will that I commented on, and after posting and seeing what other people posted, it got me thinking. Instead of threadjacking, I’m posing this question here.

I’ve heard many people say, comment or whatnot that we need to follow God’s Will for our lives. Specifically, God has a plan for our lives that we must follow. We have the freedom to follow God’s Will, or to turn our back on God:

CCC 1730
God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. “God willed that man should be ‘left in the hand of his own counsel,’ so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him.”

It is clear that our freedom is not a moral blank check, but our freedom is the choice to do what God wants us to do, or to go against God’s wishes. This gets tied into God’s Will in the sense that we must follow God’s Will for our lives so that we can seek out our Creator of our own accord.

Herein lies the problem. How do we know what God’s Will is? I have heard many statements to the effect of “If it is God’s Will, then it will all work out for you”. Therefore, if you achieve success, you are following God’s Will. However, is it not possible to achieve success in any number of avenues of life? What if we were not called to a certain life or vocation, but we achieved success there anyway?

As an example, there are many people who may have talents that go unused, or not explored to their fullest potential. Let’s say a certain person has amazing talents as a musician. As a child, he could play almost any instrument, wrote beautiful songs and made beautiful music whenever he performed. However, this person decided not to pursue a musical endeavor outside his own hobbies later on in life. Instead, he became a construction worker, married, had kids and brought them up to be productive members of society, volunteered to help the less fortunate and was an overall moral, upstanding citizen. His clear talent, the music, did not manifest itself in any way outside his basement.

It is obvious that this person would have been successful as a musician, but instead he chose a different path. One could argue that God’s Will for his life was to become a worker and family man, since that what worked out and he was successful in it. In this sense, God’s Will is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We ignore the obvious God given talents a person may have to arbitrarily assign “God’s Will” to whatever path a person’s life follows, as long as they are successful in it, yet at the same time we state that God’s Will is a specific plan. If the man had chosen to pursue his musical talents and became an accomplished musican, would he then be going against God’s Will since he did not end up being a construction worker? Or in the alternate scenario, would we say that it was God’s Will that he become a musician instead?

This is clearly a thought experiment, as one person cannot take both paths in life. The experiment is that if we could do it all over again, from the beginning, but make a fundamental change in the path our lives take. In one of these “lives”, we would therefore not be following God’s Will. If God’s Will is a specific path for our lives, could we be successful in our lives while not following God’s Will? Essentially, we believe we are following God’s Will for our lives, as our lives may be full of blessings, but in reality, God’s specific plan for our lives is not being realized.

The alternative to this, as I laid out in the post on the other thread, is that God’s Will for us is not specific, and that we can make any number of choices in our lives and still be following God’s Will. In this case, following God’s Will is again evident by the blessings and success we receive in life, however it is not self-fulfilling. It allows us freedom, while still following God’s Will. We are not defining God’s Will by our choices in life.

 

[StCsDavid]

Immediately, I would have trouble defining success in this life as evidence of following God’s will. One can achieve tremendous success and be total moral wreck, i.e. Madonna.

I would define following God’s will as having the grace to recognize Him in every moment of one’s life regardless of how good or bad those moments might be. Following God’s will involves using the gifts and talents He has bestowed upon one, but IMHO, it doesn’t necessarily mean one’s vocation is a predestined absolute. So one who has the intelligence to be a nuclear physicist but instead opts to paint houses for a living has not necessarily resisted God’s will. Perhaps a career in science would have taken him further from God instead of closer.

You are reading this right now. It is only by the will of God that you have that ability. So you have a choice to use this moment to move closer to God, to reject Him, or to respond to the moment with indifference.

 

[Camron]

There’s a thread in the spirituality section about God’s Will that I commented on, and after posting and seeing what other people posted, it got me thinking. Instead of threadjacking, I’m posing this question here.

I’ve heard many people say, comment or whatnot that we need to follow God’s Will for our lives. Specifically, God has a plan for our lives that we must follow. We have the freedom to follow God’s Will, or to turn our back on God:

It is clear that our freedom is not a moral blank check, but our freedom is the choice to do what God wants us to do, or to go against God’s wishes. This gets tied into God’s Will in the sense that we must follow God’s Will for our lives so that we can seek out our Creator of our own accord.

Herein lies the problem. How do we know what God’s Will is? I have heard many statements to the effect of “If it is God’s Will, then it will all work out for you”. Therefore, if you achieve success, you are following God’s Will. However, is it not possible to achieve success in any number of avenues of life? What if we were not called to a certain life or vocation, but we achieved success there anyway?

As an example, there are many people who may have talents that go unused, or not explored to their fullest potential. Let’s say a certain person has amazing talents as a musician. As a child, he could play almost any instrument, wrote beautiful songs and made beautiful music whenever he performed. However, this person decided not to pursue a musical endeavor outside his own hobbies later on in life. Instead, he became a construction worker, married, had kids and brought them up to be productive members of society, volunteered to help the less fortunate and was an overall moral, upstanding citizen. His clear talent, the music, did not manifest itself in any way outside his basement.

It is obvious that this person would have been successful as a musician, but instead he chose a different path. One could argue that God’s Will for his life was to become a worker and family man, since that what worked out and he was successful in it. In this sense, God’s Will is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We ignore the obvious God given talents a person may have to arbitrarily assign “God’s Will” to whatever path a person’s life follows, as long as they are successful in it, yet at the same time we state that God’s Will is a specific plan. If the man had chosen to pursue his musical talents and became an accomplished musican, would he then be going against God’s Will since he did not end up being a construction worker? Or in the alternate scenario, would we say that it was God’s Will that he become a musician instead?

This is clearly a thought experiment, as one person cannot take both paths in life. The experiment is that if we could do it all over again, from the beginning, but make a fundamental change in the path our lives take. In one of these “lives”, we would therefore not be following God’s Will. If God’s Will is a specific path for our lives, could we be successful in our lives while not following God’s Will? Essentially, we believe we are following God’s Will for our lives, as our lives may be full of blessings, but in reality, God’s specific plan for our lives is not being realized.

The alternative to this, as I laid out in the post on the other thread, is that God’s Will for us is not specific, and that we can make any number of choices in our lives and still be following God’s Will. In this case, following God’s Will is again evident by the blessings and success we receive in life, however it is not self-fulfilling. It allows us freedom, while still following God’s Will. We are not defining God’s Will by our choices in life.

I think this may be what the Bible refers to as “walking with God”, with reference to Noah and Enoch for example.

Another passage in Colossians 3 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism.”

So I think that God does allow the freedom to choose many paths (such as various professions: doctor, farmer, etc.), which, so long as they are obedient to Christ in doing so, inevitably lead to Him.

But I also think that, because He is omniscient, He would also know the paths in advance that we would walk in as well. In fact, He seems to have prepared our paths for us too.

As Ephesians 2:10 says, “we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

I guess the question would be reducible to, “Do we really have freedom to choose if God already knows the paths we should walk in?”

I think yes, because I think that many are probably walking in paths that God did not call them to walk in-- but, of, course, He would know this in advance too.

 

[myredeemerlives]

The reason you aren’t sure what God’s will is is because you haven’t been born of the spirit (or baptised in the spirit) so that’s why you can’t hear God’s voice leading you.