The Permissive Will Of God

I’ll start this with defining the word thelēma: will in the sense of desire, wish, what one wants. But then there is also boulē, which carries the weight of deliberate counsel, settled purpose, a decision reached and fixed.

When Peter preaches at Pentecost that Christ was delivered up “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23), the word is boulē. When Paul writes that “this is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3), the word is thelēma, what God wants.

This has been longmarked this out as the difference between God’s sovereign will, what He decrees and which always comes to pass; His moral will, what He commands and which we routinely violate; and His permissive will, what He allows without endorsing.

These categories are not imposed on the text, however–they are forced by it.

By that I mean that God works all things according to the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11) and that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but desires that they turn and live (Ezekiel 33:11). If both are true, and the text gives no permission to discard either, then there must exist a space where God permits what He does not want.

I am a novice archer, and the picture I keep returning to is a target with a broad perimeter and considerable room inside it.

Not a single point– The whole target. Hear me out…. because the alternative, a narrow bullseye representing one perfect choice, I would argue is more dangerous despite it being more popular.

The reason for this is that the bullseye model requires a capacity we do not possess. To hit a single correct option among many, I would need knowledge I do not have, foresight I cannot manufacture, self-control I demonstrably lack, and resources that may not exist. But Scripture says God “knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14). The word for frame, yetser, is the potter’s word, describing what we are formed of and formed as. God’s expectations are calibrated to the creature He actually made. A will obeyable only by someone with more capacity than He granted would be cruelty, and He is not cruel.

More decisive is Paul’s own practice. In 1 Corinthians 7, addressing marriage, singleness, and remarriage, he repeatedly flags the limits of his own directive: “I say, not the Lord” (v. 12), “I have no command of the Lord, but I give my judgment” (v. 25), “in my judgment she is happier if she remains as she is” (v. 40). An apostle writing inspired Scripture explicitly leaves a range of legitimate options open on a matter as weighty as whom you marry. Had there been a single divinely correct answer available for discovery, Paul was the man positioned to name it, and he declines.

The deepest objection to the bullseye is this: If proximity to the center earns favor (or success), then God relates to us as an employer grading performance.

The whole structure of the New Testament resists this. “You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15).

The elder brother in Luke 15 makes precisely the bullseye argument: “these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command.” The parable treats his precision as evidence that he never understood he was a son at all. He had been keeping score in a house where no score was being kept.

A child is not loved more for folding the towels the way the parent folds them. If that holds in our relationship to God, it must hold in the thing analogized.

God’s will explicitly is identified in a handful of places, and what strikes me is how consistently those statements are moral and dispositional rather than circumstantial.

“This is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thessalonians 4:3)
“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)
“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).

None of these tell you which job to take. All of them tell you who to be while taking it.

Romans 12:2 makes the pathway a bit more explicit: “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God.” The verb dokimazō means to test, examine, prove by trial. It is the word used for assaying metal. Paul assumes the Christian will need to evaluate, which presumes multiple live options rather than one hidden correct answer.

So that means the target “perimeter” would consist of the character of God (revealed to the believer through His Word), and the ongoing work of the Spirit forming a mind capable of judgment. Inside that boundary must lie some kind of buffer…..enough to accommodate temperament, history, capacity, and the thousand contingencies of an actual life, without the target itself changing shape.

Yet the hardest territory is not the no. **It is the yes God gives to things He does not want.**

Look at 1 Samuel 8. Israel demands a king “like all the nations.” God tells Samuel the demand is a rejection of His own kingship. He then instructs Samuel to warn them exhaustively: the king will conscript their sons, take their daughters, seize the best of their fields and vineyards, tax their grain and flocks, and “you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves” (vv. 11-18). They refuse to listen. And God says, “Obey their voice and make them a king” (v. 22).

The surrounding nations had monarchs, and Israel’s distinctiveness in that space had become an embarrassment. The demand was for conformity, and God knew precisely what it would cost. He warned. Then He gave them exactly what they asked for.

This is permissive will too– **When the answer was yes, and the yes was not a blessing.**

So then you might be asking: If God permits you to have what you are not ready for, and you take it, have you sinned?

I do not think the categories collapse that way. Receiving a permitted thing is not identical to transgression, though it may sit adjacent to it, and it reliably produces consequence. Israel’s monarchy was not itself sin. God later worked through it substantially, and the Davidic covenant runs straight through it to Christ. But the consequences arrived exactly as forecast, and they were severe.

Jesus makes the concession explicit regarding divorce: “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Matthew 19:8). The verb epitrepō is permission language, meaning allowed or conceded. Moses’ provision was not God’s design. It was accommodation to a condition God did not create and did not approve. Yet the accommodation was genuinely given, and operating within it was not automatically sin.

If permission were without any kind of boundaries, it would be indistinguishable from abandonment. But it is not.

Job 1 and 2 make the limits almost structural too. The adversary complains that God has “put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has” (1:10), an explicit boundary. When permission is granted, it comes with a specified ceiling: “Behold, all that he has is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand” (1:12). When that ceiling is raised, a new one is set: “Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his life” (2:6). Permission is issued with limits attached each time.

Here’s a parental analogy I relate to that I feel earns its keep fairly well here.

A parent who permits a child to attempt something beyond their skill is not being negligent.

They may be doing the only thing that will actually teach. A child told the ladder is too tall for him has received information. A child who climbs three rungs and feels the wobble has received knowledge. The parent stays at the base, not to prevent the lesson but to prevent the catastrophe. Some pain is instructive precisely because being told is insufficient. Irreparable harm is not.

The prodigal’s father does exactly this. The son demands his inheritance, which amounts to wishing his father dead, and the father gives it to him (Luke 15:12). No lecture is recorded. No blockade. The son goes and squanders it and ends among the pigs, which is a ruin but not an irreversible one. And the father is watching the road: “while he was still a long way off, his father saw him” (v. 20), which means he had been looking. Permission and vigilance, at the end of the day, are in the same stance.

The other side to this, then is that permission has a severe end

Romans 1 uses one verb three times: paradidōmi, to hand over. “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity” (v. 24). “God gave them up to dishonorable passions” (v. 26). “God gave them up to a debased mind” (v. 28). The term is judicial, the word used for handing a prisoner over to custody. This is not passive tolerance. It is an active judgment whose content is letting people have what they insisted on.

The logic is this: God does not need to import a punishment. He removes the restraint and allows the desire to complete itself. Which suggests permission is not always mercy in disguise. Sometimes permission is the judgment.

And yet the same category that contains Romans 1 also contains the 2 texts where redemption is stated most starkly.

Joseph tells his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive” (Genesis 50:20). The verb chashab, is identical in both clauses, which means: to devise, to reckon, to intend. Same action, two simultaneous intentions, and God’s is not a salvage operation performed after the fact but a purpose running concurrently with theirs.

Acts 2:23 pushes this further when Christ was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” and in the same breath, “you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.” The worst act in human history was fully permitted, fully culpable, and fully purposed.

This shows that permission does not remove God from the outcome. What He allows, He also redeems, not by retroactive rescue, but because it was never outside His counsel to begin with.

If my understanding is correct, the anxious search for a “hidden” bullseye is energy thats been deeply misdirected.

Meaning, there is no specific coordinates to have to find. There is a perimeter to remain inside and a character to be formed into, and within that perimeter, real freedom, sufficient to make choices that are truly my own as well as consequential.

Acts 16 gives a nice image of this. Paul is already traveling when “they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia,” and then, attempting Bithynia, “the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them” (v. 6-7). Note the exact sequence here. He was going forward, making his own reasonable judgments, and the Spirit redirected within all that. He was not standing still awaiting for some set of specific coordinates. Guidance was given to a man already walking.