I believe this image best sums up the answer to this question:

Let’s begin!

“Thwarting God’s will” could mean anything from changing God’s mind on something to upending the entire work of salvation and creation. I’m slightly more confident in my ability to do the former.

Well, yes.

There are many examples in Holy Scripture of human beings changing God’s mind. Abraham bargains God down from destroying Sodom no matter what to only destroying the city if there were fewer than fifty righteous people living there, then only if there were fewer than forty-five, then only if there were fewer than forty, then thirty, then twenty, then ten (pretty good bargaining skills!). Admittedly, since there aren’t even ten righteous people in the city, it doesn’t matter, but still.

God opposes the Israelites having a king over them, but relents when they keep demanding it. It doesn’t turn out well for them, but God does it anyway.

Jonah tells the people of Nineveh that God has decided to destroy them in forty days. He’s not there to convince them to change, merely to announce what’s been decided. Instead, Nineveh does such hardcore repentance that God decides not to destroy the city. Jonah is upset by this and pouts, saying he knew this would happen since God has a history of being a pushover and deciding not to dish out divine judgment when someone repents.

Many, many times in the Bible, people pray in order to convince God to intervene where God would not have otherwise. That’s the whole point of supplicatory/intercessory prayer. Prayer is pointless if we don’t trust that God can hear our prayers and respond to them.

There’s also the reality that life hasn’t gone at all according to what we assume the plan was. The mythic origins of humanity in Genesis are almost immediately derailed by the first humans, thwarting God’s intent.

Lutheran theology also teaches that God’s grace is resistible. We can’t choose to accept it anymore than I can choose for my ears to hear a sound bouncing into them. But we can choose to reject it, the same way I can choose not to listen to what I hear.

So I would say, yes, God’s will can be thwarted. It can be ignored, it can be changed.

But actually, no.

In the big picture, I don’t believe that we can thwart God’s will. I also think it’s really, really good that we can’t.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray, “Your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” Martin Luther in his Small Catechism, explains it this way: “What does this mean? In fact, God’s good and gracious will comes about without our prayer, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come about in and among us.” For Luther, that God’s will will be done isn’t even a question–it will be done. The question is how willing we are to cooperate with it.

John 3:16-17 also greatly informs my thoughts on this: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

I preached last week that God is in the business of salvation. The entire Biblical story makes clear that, more than anything else, God wants to mend the relationship between God and all of creation that we broke. And if that’s what God wants, then that’s what God will get. After all, who’s going to stop God?

At least, that’s my hope. My hope is in the promises of God that tell me God will never abandon the work of salvation, and in the willingness of God to let us make our own choices, good or bad, for or against God, to even reject God, God still continues the same work that has preoccupied God since the dawn of human history.

So yes, but actually no. And thanks be to God.

— Pastor Ken Ranos

UPCOMING QUESTIONS:

Is God’s love unconditional?

Antisemitism and Supersessionism.

PREVIOUS COLUMNS:

Ask the Pastor, Nov. 2020 (Heaven and the Resurrection)

Ask the Pastor, Dec. 2020 (Faith and Belief)

Ask the Pastor, May 2021 (The Gnostics)

Ask the Pastor, July 2021 (The Nicene Creed)

Ask the Pastor, August 2021 (Forgiveness)

Ask the Pastor, February 2022 (Bishop Controversies)