Wednesday: God’s Ideal and Remedial Wills

Daily Lesson for Wednesday 19th of February 2025

Read Ephesians 1:9-11. What is this text saying about predestination? Are some people predestined to be saved and others to be lost?

The Greek term translated “predestination” here and elsewhere in Scripture (prohorizo) does not itself teach that God causally determines history. Rather, the Greek term simply means “to decide beforehand.”

Image © Rolf Jansson from GoodSalt.com

Of course, one can decide something beforehand unilaterally, or one can decide something beforehand in a way that takes into account the free decisions of others. Scripture teaches that God does the latter.

Here and elsewhere (for example, Romans 8:29-30), the term translated “predestined” refers to what God plans for the future after taking into account what God foreknows about the free decisions of creatures. Thus, God can providentially guide history to His desired good ends for all, even while respecting the kind of creaturely freedom that is required for a genuine love relationship.

Ephesians 1:11 proclaims that God “works all things according to the counsel of His will” (NKJV). Does this mean that God determines everything to happen just as He desires? Read in isolation, Ephesians 1:9-11 might seem to affirm this view. However, this interpretation would contradict the many texts we saw earlier that show that people sometimes reject “the will of God” (Luke 7:30, NKJV; compare with Luke 13:34, Psalms 81:11-14). If the Bible does not contradict itself, how can these passages be understood in a way that is consistent with one another?

This passage makes perfect sense if one simply recognizes a distinction between what we might call God’s “ideal will” and God’s “remedial will.” God’s “ideal will” is what God actually prefers to occur and which would occur if everyone always did exactly what God desires. God’s “remedial will,” on the other hand, is God’s will that has already taken into account every other factor, including the free decisions of creatures, which sometimes depart from what God prefers. Ephesians 1:11 appears to be referring to God’s “remedial will.”

So powerful is God’s foreknowledge of the future that, even knowing all the choices, including the bad choices, that people will make, He can still work “all things together for good” (Romans 8:28, CEB). What comfort can you draw from this truth?

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