Yesterday, I spoke about how we can know God’s will for our life. You can read that post here. As part of that, I spoke about the different forms of God’s will. I thought it might be helpful to give a brief outline of the different forms of God’s will here.
First, we might speak of God’s decretive will. This is sometimes known as his sovereign will, or his secret will. God’s decretive will concerns his decrees; the things that he has determined will happen. We can think about things like the creation of the world or the cross of Christ. These are events that God has sovereignly determined would take place and brought them to pass. His decretive will concerns the things God has determined will happen.
Second, we can speak of God’s preceptive will. This concerns God’s precepts or commands. When we speak of God’s preceptive will, we mean the things he has commanded, the things he expressly wants his people to do. We can think of the overt commands of scripture – do not lie, do not murder, etc, etc – or we can think of broader principles. Anything in scripture that expressly tells us what God wants us to do is God’s preceptive will.
Third, we can talk about God’s will of disposition. This is the stuff that makes God happy. The kind of things that please him generally. For example, God is happy when his people enjoy him. But it is evidently true that his people don’t always, by his decree, enjoy him as fully as they might. God is similarly happy when he creates things. God’s disposition towards certain things make him happy or, by contrast, may grieve him. God’s will of disposition is the things he wants to happen that please him.
When we speak about God’s will, it is helpful to understand what form of God’s will we are talking about. God’s decretive will, for example, is secret and so seeking to know it is not for us to know. The secret things belong to God. By contrast, God’s preceptive will is what he explicitly wants for us, this is entirely knowable to us through the Word. God’s will of disposition may not be known exhaustively, but we can know much of what makes God happy through what he has revealed in his Word.
Understanding these forms of will also helps us understand bits of scripture that discuss what God wants. God may desire something, but that doesn’t mean it is part of his decretive will so that it necessarily must happen. Similarly, God may desire things through his preceptive will that doesn’t come to happen because he has decreed otherwise. Understanding the differences between these things helps us make sense of the things God wants and how he orders his priorities more broadly.