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For many years, my aunt worked for AAA in Detroit. Her job was creating custom route planners called TripTiks. You would go into AAA—in person, no less—and say, “I’m driving to Florida this summer,” and my aunt would take out a stack of paper maps, from Michigan to Florida, and highlight the route you should take. And when you were driving, you would consult the route and make sure you were on the right track.
Later, MapQuest and then Google Maps came out. You could now go to a website, plug in where you were starting from and where you were going, and print out turn-by-turn directions. It was handy, and if my aunt had not retired by then, it would have put her out of a job.
Then we got GPS, first as dedicated dashboard devices and then as an app on smartphones. Yet even with these devices that know exactly where we are and exactly what we need to do when to get where we are going, we still miss turns and get lost.
We might think that it would be nice to have a GPS for the will of God. In Exodus, we are told that the glory of the Lord came and rested on the tabernacle while the Israelites were camping, and it would lift when they were to set out. It would guide them as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night (Ex. 40:34–38). Wouldn’t it be nice to have that? The truth is, as good as that sounds, we have something better.
Paul says in Ephesians 5:17, “Do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” When Christians speak of the will of the Lord, they are often trying to discern what sorts of choices they should make—about marriage, vocation, and other important issues. They want to make sure that what they are doing is in line with what God wants for them.
This gets at what’s called the secret will of God, whereby He foreordains whatsoever comes to pass (see Westminster Confession of Faith 3.1). But it’s called His secret will for a reason. He doesn’t tell us everything that He’s going to do. So we can’t actually figure out ahead of time what’s going to happen.
What we can do is look at God’s revealed will as found in Scripture. We find that above all, “This is the will of God, your sanctification” (1 Thess. 4:3). The sanctified life is a life that strives for holiness and obedience. It is a life that is pleasing to God.
So when it comes to the big issues of life—what to look for in a spouse, what kinds of pursuits are lawful and what kinds are not, and so on—we can find principles for approaching these issues in Scripture. What’s more, God has sent His Spirit to dwell in our hearts, and He continually speaks through Scripture to guide us on our way.
The Word and the Spirit are not like the spirit of the age or the vagaries of our own desires, turning us this way and that and sending us down dead ends. The Word and the Spirit are reliable guides, given that we might be wise, that we might be sanctified, and that we might find our way home, to the glory of God.