The Jagged Journey. Barry Lee Callen

to the historical challenges, failures, and sufferings that we cause by misuse of our freedom (Heb 10: 5–10). Human willing is able to resist the will of God, but temporarily, never ultimately.

      We will use these perspectives as essential theological markers to understand our walking on the jagged pathway of faith. They arise naturally from the anchoring truth perspectives found in the Bible and our resulting inclination to favor the ROSE over the TULIP model of understanding God’s sovereignty (see chapter two). They also are fully consistent with the threefold understanding of God’s will.

      It was in the terrible war year of 1944 that Leslie D. Weatherhead shared unusual wisdom with his City Temple congregation in ravaged England. Suffering was everywhere and so were the questions about how God was related to a reeling world at war. What was God’s will for the suffering English people, not to mention the terrible plight of the Jews on the continent? Surely God did not intend the awful evil seen everywhere. But if the mass suffering was not God’s will, how did it manage to happen? Was God really in control or was the will of God being defeated by the forces of evil?

      The answer from Weatherhead came in the form of his explanation of the threefold will of God. This understanding can be of great comfort to the sufferer tempted to blame herself or God when neither is actually at fault. Published in the book The Will of God,31 Weatherhead describes the three dimensions of the divine will as follows.