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TranscriptAmerica has voted, and Donald Trump has been elected to be the next president of the United States. It's interesting to see how people have reacted to this ( and I promise this episode is not all about politics.) I think looking at the situation and how people have responded to it can be an interesting segue to talking about what God's will is and how we know it.

It's interesting, some people on the left have been criticizing anyone who voted for Trump and saying they're a bunch of racists. Well, clearly this is not true. There are people of good conviction who abhor racism, who voted for Trump for other reasons and perhaps, they voted more against Hillary. It's maybe not so much an endorsement of Trump as it is a repudiation of Hillary.

There are people who voted for Hillary who had good intentions and should not be slandered and said that they don't care about the life of the unborn. Maybe they weighed those things differently. We need to be careful how we talk about people who fall on different side to this issue.

Actually, the one type of response I want to talk about today is the response of what you might call “the Christian who goes to Scripture” in terms of how to respond to this. I've seen people posting that God is sovereign, God is the one who installs kings, maybe quoting Daniel 4 and some other passages like that. “It is God's will that Donald Trump has been elected president.”

Now, there are some people that by this mean God has his hand sovereignly on Trump such that he is kind of the ordained and anointed man for the job. That kind of sounds like Israel language. Now, I certainly don't think there's biblical precedence or basis for saying that Trump is the anointed man of God.

However, some people are saying that this is simply the sovereign will of God. I would agree with these people but I have a question. If we have non-Christian friends and maybe they are hurting because they're scared. They don't know what's going to happen because Trump got elected or they associate anyone who could say anything positive about Trump with racism and we come along and we say, "Well, it's the sovereign will of God that Trump's elected," or more that, "It's God who installed Trump." What does that say to this person?

This is a true factual theological statement, a statement of reality. And Trump is where he is because it's the sovereign will of God. If you say that to someone or even if you're the Christian saying it and you don't have a robust biblical foundation to stand on when you say that, to many people, it sounds like you were saying, "God wanted a racist man to be president. He wanted a man with a low view of women, who talks disparagingly about them, to be president," because they don't have a foundation. They don't have a context to understand what you mean when you say, “this is all the will of God.”

The question this brings to mind is “can something be God's will that is not good” - something we don't often talk about. I actually believed there are two wills in God. I think God has a moral will and he has a sovereign will and we don't often do a good job as Christians at distinguishing between these two. We flip back and forth between them. Oftentimes, this makes us seem inconsistent.

Let's look at some verses in the Scripture that reference the will of God and we'll see what we can pull together and build an understanding of the will of God.

Ephesians 1:11 says, "God works all things according to the counsel of his will."

That's a very expansive statement, “all things.”

Romans 9 says, "Who can resist his will,"

This is a rhetorical question. It's not like the answer is going to be, "Well, there's this guy over that can."

Daniel 4:35 says, "He does according to his will in the host of heave…