The Counsel of His Will

I thought this was interesting.

One of the biblical texts that rolls around in my head all the time, that shapes my existence, that makes life bearable and even wonderful, is a single phrase in Ephesians. There Paul claims that God "works all things after the counsel of His will." (Eph 1:11) It is a bold and complete claim to the absolute sovereignty of God. That "all things" tethered to "His will" makes life's joys more full and life's sorrows more bearable. Catastrophes become another thing a good God is doing. "All things work together for good" becomes not only possible, but certain.

There was a minor difficulty, though. Well, there was a major one -- "We don't like that." So while the text is unambiguous, it still needed to be defended. But the minor difficulty was, "Just what is 'the counsel of His will'? What does that mean?" The language is actually a bit odd. For "counsel" Paul uses a Greek word that means "volition" and for "will" he uses a Greek word that means "will" (go figure). As it turns out, the New testament is full of these two words. One is often translated "desire" and the other "will," leading people to think there is some distinction, but there are too many places where they are used interchangeably to make that clear. That is, these two words are essentially synonyms in the Greek. So Paul essentially says, "God works all things according to the choices He wills." Um, okay, I guess that's fine. In fact, fairly certain. He essentially nailed it down by repeating the same concept in two different ways.

Then I came across this.

The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations. (Psa 33:11)

In the previous verse the psalmist had stated that the Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing. Then he contrasts that with this. You'll notice a parallelism here. We have "the counsel" parallel to "the plans," "the Lord" parallel to "His heart," and "stands forever" parallel to "to all generations." So the two phrases support and explain one another. That is, the counsel of the Lord is the plans of His heart, and these last forever, to all generations.

If we take that "counsel" and plug it back into the Ephesians passage, we get, "God works all things after His will which is informed by the plans of His heart."

Now, again, it is somewhat of a repeat and, again, somewhat of a nailing down, but I think it helps make "the counsel of His will" clearer. The claim here from Paul is that God works all things to always accomplish what it is that He intends, what is in His heart, what He plans. And since God is a good God and a loving God, I'm good with that. Even if I'm not always aware of what it is He is doing. Now, for those of you who are pretty sure that God has surrendered His Sovereignty to Human Free Will, you still have a problem. This verse makes no sense. But to me this is such a sure resting place that I have no intention of wrestling with it.