The Two Wills of God

In light of the current discussions that have been going on in the blogosphere concerning hyper-calvinism and the two wills of God I thought I would attempt to, in a very terse fashion, explain how I understand the two wills of God, especially as it pertains to the universal saving desire of God. I remember first being introduced to the two wills of God in John Piper’s work The Pleasure’s of God. I had by that time become fully convinced of the biblical teaching of sovereign grace and was seeking to harmonize scripture without negating or ignoring those scriptures that clearly spoke of man’s responsibility and inability do what is agreeable to God’s holy character. The two wills seemed to the most simplistic and most defensible position to hold to in order to reconcile this conundrum. I was almost satisfied until I came across Turretin’s works that spoke of the compound and divided sense of God’s will. Curiosity took over and I became increasingly intrigued with Turretin’s way of speaking of the will of God. It seemed to house both the perceptive and decretive will of God without making the two wills of God the entire house itself. In other words, the two wills became a subset of the more encompassing hermeneutic of the compound and divided sense of God’s will.

So what is the compound and divided sense of God’s will? Basically the compound sense is the will of God as it pertains to who God is essentially and eternally within Himself, and the divided sense is how he has communicated Himself to us; which would include all language of accommodation, metaphors, symbolism, anthropomorphism, anthropopathism etc. So how does this relate to the universal saving desire of God? Well it gives full affirmation to this truth without putting the decretive will of God in direct contradiction to perceptive will of God. I would argue that the compound sense of God’s will can house God’s desires for the salvation of man as well as His decree to save the elect only; the salvation of all man because God within Himself always desires what is agreeable to immutable holy character, and the salvation of the elect alone since He has eternally determined within Himself to display his justice in judging the reprobate, thus bringing satisfaction to immutable holy character. The difference would then be more of purpose and intention, not so much as desire or will, because desire and will can be spoken of in reference to both His precepts and His decrees.

Therefore by understanding God's will in the compound and divide sense we can logically make room for us to think of God as sometimes desiring things He has not decreed and decreeing things that He does not desire, thus avoiding direct contradiction since both His desires and purposes are satisfied and fulfilled in either the cross or the sinner.

Corrections welcomed, just be kind about it :-)