Summary
God's Will: Unyielding Trust
In Matthew 11:25-26, Jesus prays a prayer that, on the surface, seems strange: "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will." Coming on the heels of widespread rejection of His ministry and that of John the Baptist, Jesus does not vent frustration—He gives thanks. And what He gives thanks for is the Father's sovereign hiding and revealing.
The "wise and intelligent" here are the self-sufficient: those who, by their own reckoning, need no Savior. Scripture gives several reasons people fail to believe. Some are blinded by Satan, "the god of this world" 2 Corinthians 4:4. Some refuse out of their own sinfulness, like the Jerusalem Jesus laments over in Matthew 23:37, unwilling to be gathered. And sometimes—as in Romans 1:24-28—God responds to persistent rejection by "giving them up," shortening the time of grace and saying, in effect, "have your way." The "infants," by contrast, are those to whom God in His grace has revealed the truth: people who know they cannot save themselves and depend wholly upon Him, as a small child depends upon a parent.
What is striking is that Jesus gives thanks for both the hiding and the revealing. Underneath that thanksgiving lies something deeper: an unyielding trust in the perfect will of the Father. "Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will." Whatever the Father ordains is right—even when it includes mystery, even when it includes judgment, even when His ways do not match our expectations.
The seventeenth-century Lutheran Samuel Rodigast captured this confession in his hymn Whatever God Ordains Is Right. Every stanza begins with that line. The hymn does not pretend that life is free of sorrow; it speaks plainly of joy and sadness, of bending each heart and will to God. But it rests on the truth that nothing happens outside the throne of God. There is not one "maverick molecule" loose in the universe. Every event passes before Him, and so we can trust Him in it.
We see the heart of this trusting Father most clearly at the cross. At just the right time, the Son took our sin upon Himself, paid a debt we could never pay, shed His blood, and was raised from the dead. That victory is brought to us in the Word joined to the water of Baptism and the bread and cup of the Supper. Because we have seen the Father's heart in Jesus, we can trust His will even when we do not understand it. This is what shapes a Christian into the people described in Philippians 4:4—rejoicing always; in 1 Thessalonians 5:18—giving thanks in all circumstances; and in Habakkuk 3:17-18—rejoicing in the Lord even when the fig tree does not blossom.
We can sing "whatever God ordains is right" more easily than we can live it. Yet through Word and Sacrament, God Himself works in us the trust to pray with the Savior, "Not my will, but yours be done." That is the substance of God's Will: Unyielding Trust: a thanksgiving rooted not in pleasant circumstances but in the unwavering goodness of the Father whose heart we have seen in His Son.
Video citations
- God's Will: Unyielding Trust 11-9-25 — Would you open your Bible's please with me to the 11th chapter of the gospel of Matthew? If you're using a Pew edition of Holy Scripture, you're going to find in front of you or underneath you,…