Have you ever found yourself being misunderstood? Perhaps you were trying to help, only to ruin everything. Maybe romantic feelings you found difficult to express pushed the object of your love far away.

Nothing can seem more insurmountable than being misunderstood. I would not argue that our thrice-holy Lord suffers from the same fragile emotions and responses we do, but I would say He is often misunderstood over a point of doctrine that continues, in our day, to set apart confessional Presbyterians from most other groups of theological nuance: His decrees.

Question 12 of the Westminster Larger Catechism turns us back to Question 6, which asks: “What do the Scriptures make known of God?” The answer comes: “The Scriptures make known what God is, the persons in the Godhead, his decrees, and the execution of his decrees.” Having been taught who God is and the interrelationship of the persons of the Godhead in questions and answers 7–11, we are now told what He does. The Catechism puts forward the how, why, and what of God’s decrees. We will take these in reverse.

What. Here is the rub for many, the very place where, quite frequently, God is misunderstood: there is nothing in the history of the world—past, present, or future—that is outside the decrees of God. Theodicy (the “problem” of evil), personal disappointments or failures, undesired outcomes in life, and even abuses of all kinds within the house of God cause saints and sinners alike to es-chew or scoff at the idea that God has an unchangeable will, foreordained by Him, that covers all events of human history, especially as it pertains to His specially created beings. That is giving many the benefit of the doubt. Knowing the dark corners of our hearts, we might simply want a bit of control in our own destiny.

What does this mean that God has foreordained all that has or will come to pass? Must we simply, then, accept the matrix of this providence and resign ourselves to lives of ultimate meaninglessness, no matter how meaningful they seem or feel to us? Does the unchanging, set-in-stone nature of His decrees mean that God Himself is a mere slave to His own divine providence, as it appears that a “fate” or “chance” has ultimately taken over? No. The psalmist reminds us that “the counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations” (Ps. 33:11). Too many ignore God’s intentionality through His decrees, thereby depersonalizing Him, making Him cold and distant, and removing Him from the real experiences of this life.

Why. Seeing the divine decrees as mere fate robs us of experiencing our very purpose, the holy center of human history—God’s eternal glorifying of Himself by every event in history—which is the result of His very own trinitarian counsel. I won’t belabor this point. God has done all for His own glory, and He is deserving of that. We can make no demands upon His plans and purposes for us (Rom. 9:14–15, 18, 22–23; Eph. 1:4, 11).

How. Here our sinful hearts are exposed again in the radiant glory of our triune God. As we said, God is not subject to fate. He doesn’t decree in response to what He knows is unavoidable. He doesn’t quit because He knows He will be fired in order to feel in charge. No. His decrees are His own acts rooted beautifully in His wisdom, freedom, and holiness, interwoven by His singular divine volition. We, of ourselves, are not wise (Jas. 1:15); we are not free (Rom. 6:20); and we are not holy (Rom. 3:23). And those things that we have by Christ in the Spirit, we are utterly inconsistent in all of them (Rom. 7:18–25).

We cannot fathom a fount of all goodness that would methodically, patiently, and determinately bring all things to an end that glorifies Him, including the wicked designs of volitional beings. Yet, it is true. We declare with Paul: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways” (Rom. 11:33). And we do so humbly, because we know that this triune God has seen fit, in the glorious interweaving of His divine decrees, to save sinners like you and me. For, “in him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11).