All of Jesus’s human life led him to this garden. As he knelt and prayed in Gethsemane, waiting in agony — with beads of sweat “like great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44) — here he made the Choice.

Countless decisions, big and small, brought him here, but only in the garden did he finalize the decision to go to the cross. Gethsemane marked his last and most distressing moments of deliberation. He chose to enter the garden, and he could have chosen to flee.

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me,” he prayed. “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). There, on his knees, Jesus chose — with his human will, like ours, which naturally recoiled at the threat of pain and death — to embrace the one divine will of his Father, which was also his, as eternal Son.

When he rose from prayer (Luke 22:45), the decision was done, his fully human will in perfect synch and submission to the divine. Now, as Judas and the soldiers arrived, he would be acted upon: arrested, accused, tried, struck, flogged, and crucified.

Two Wills in Christ

For centuries, dyothelitism is the term the church has used to refer to the two wills of Christ — the one divine will he (eternally) shares as God, with his Father (and the Spirit), and a natural human will that is his by virtue of the incarnation and his taking on our full humanity. We speak of two wills in the one unique person of the God-man.

“Jesus has a human will, like us, with which he sympathizes, strengthens, and saves.”

In multiple places in John’s Gospel, Jesus refers to his human will in distinction from that of his Father, “the one who sent me.” “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34). “I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30). “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 6:38).

Yet the place where Jesus’s distinctly human will stands out most is Gethsemane, in those final moments of Choice before he is taken and, humanly speaking, there is no turning back. Not only did Jesus teach his men to pray to his Father “your will be done” (Matthew 6:10), but in the garden, Christ himself prayed, “not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39), and then again, “your will be done” (Matthew 26:42). And in doing so, he embraced the divine will with his human volition.

Human All the Way?

The early church endured attacks against both Jesus’s deity (from Arians) and his full humanity (from Docetists and Apollinarians), questioning his fully human body, emotions, and mind. The battle for his human will came last and was the most sophisticated. The conflict, prompted by political intrigue, raged in the seventh century and led to a sixth ecumenical council in 680–681, the third at Constantinople. Obscure as the refined nature of the controversy may seem to us today, the debate between dyothelitism and the opposing view (monothelitism) still carries the theological significance it did more than twelve centuries ago, and warrants our attention, perhaps all the more in circles where it has been neglected or forgotten.

In contrast to monothelitism, which claims the divine will of the Son animates the human body and soul of Jesus, dyothelitism presses for the full, uncompromised humanity of Christ. We find two wills in the agony of Gethsemane in the one person of Christ. There is a human nature in him that desires the removal of the cup — that there be some other way, if possible, than the divine will. The question, then, is when Christ prays, “not my will, but yours, be done,” whose will is “my will,” and whose is “yours”?

When the question was freshly pressed on the church in the seventh century, the explanation that emerged as most compelling, and enduring, was that of Maximus the Confessor (born 580) — even though he did not live to see the triumph. At the time, dyothelitism was not politically expedient to the emperor Constans’s ambitions to reunite Christian regions against the threat of Islam. Maximus was arrested and exiled, and he died in exile eight years later at age 81. Seven years later, Constans was assassinated. Soon the imperial attitude changed, and twenty years after Maximus’s death, his theology carried the day at the ecumenical council.

It was Maximus, claims Demetrios Bathrellos, who “was really the first to point out in an unambiguous way that it is the Logos (the eternal Son) as a man who addressed the Father in Gethsemane. . . . [Maximus] emphasized the fact that in Gethsemane Christ decided as man to obey the divine will, and thus overcame the blameless human instinctive urge to avoid death” (The Byzantine Christ, 146–147).

In this way, we confess two wills in the unique divine-human God-man. As God, Jesus “wills by his divine will and as man obeys the divine will by his human will” (174). In Maximus’s own words, “The subject who says ‘let this cup pass from me’ and the subject who says ‘not as I will’ are one and the same.” So, writes Bathrellos, “[B]oth the desire to avoid death and the submission to the divine will of the Father have to do with the humanity of Christ and his human will” (147).

Why His Wills Matter

Obscure as the ancient debate may seem at first, one reason for its enduring relevance is our own humanity. We are human as they were human. And in particular, our wills are human, constrained by finitude. Humans like us have an interest (not just intellectually but very practically) in the question, Was Christ indeed “made like [us] in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17)? And is he able “to sympathize with our weaknesses [as] one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15)?

“If Christ is not fully human, there is no great salvation for humans.”

Even more than sympathy, Is Christ truly able to save us? If he is not fully human, there is no great salvation for humans. As the famous maxim of Gregory of Nazianzus claims, that which Christ has not assumed, he has not healed. And not just healed eternally, but even in this life. What hope do we have of his reclaiming, sanctifying, and redeeming our own fallen, sinful human wills if the eternal Son has not descended to the full extent of our humanity, yet without sin? As Edward Oakes writes, “Since will is the very seat of sin, its fons et origo, we are still left in our plight if Christ did not have a human will” (Infinity Dwindled to Infancy, 162). Would Christ come in human flesh and blood, emotions and mind, and leave the human will, “the very seat of sin,” untaken, untouched, and unredeemed?

Also, a “trinitarian logic” informs and reinforces the two wills of Christ. According to Donald Fairbairn and Ryan Reeves, “Maximus argued that since in the Trinity there are three persons and one nature, and also one will, the will must be a function of the nature, not the person” (150). That is an important distinction: that the will, whether divine or human, is a function of the theological category “nature,” not “person.” Two wills in Christ (one human, one divine) correspond with one will in God. One will in Christ (divine only) would mean that the two wills in tension in Gethsemane would be between divine “persons” (Father and Son) rather than between “natures” (divine and human), challenging oneness in the Godhead, and thus revising not only orthodox Christology but also trinitarianism.

Yet, “even more significant,” notes Fairbairn and Reeves, is the “soteriological conviction that the unassumed is unhealed” (150). Human salvation in Christ is at stake in the human will of Christ, not only in his receiving in himself the penalty of our fallen wills (as we’ve seen), but also in his own obedience, as the God-man, to his Father. As man, Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8), and as man, “he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death” (Philippians 2:8). “The many will be made righteous,” says Romans 5:19, “by the one man’s obedience” — a human obedience, by virtue of the incarnation, he could not have rendered apart from a human will.

Cult of Will

Not only does dyothelitism correlate best with God’s triune nature, our human nature, and the nature of the atonement, but in locating the will as a function of the “nature,” rather than the “person,” dyothelitism guards us against the modern “cult of will.” Oakes warns, “When personhood is identified without further ado with the will, then the cult of will in Friedrich Nietzsche and his postmodern successors inevitably follows” (164). Oakes points to Bathrellos’s “extremely thought-provoking observation that so many of the ethical outrages of today can be traced to the . . . error of identifying nature with person.” Says Bathrellos,

The tendency to identify personhood with nature or natural qualities and especially with the mind . . . seems to occur quite often in the history of human thought. It is remarkable that in our own day some philosophers of ethics give a definition of “person” based on mental and volitional capacities, and in doing so make it possible to justify, for example, abortion and even infanticide. (14)

However far-reaching the implications of Christ’s two wills, and full humanity, we as Christians are worshipers first and foremost. We declare, as the cardinal confession of our faith, “Jesus is Lord” — and when we do so, we submit to a Sovereign not only infinitely high above us as God but one who has drawn near as our own brother and friend, and went so low to serve and sacrifice himself for us. In addition to his divine will as God, Jesus has a human will, like us, with which he sympathizes, strengthens, and saves.

Audio Transcript

Happy Monday. Today is Labor Day for many of us, a day when we rest from our work and think of just about anything but work. But here we are, talking about work, and we’re doing it because a number of you have emailed over the years wanting to know about work in eternity. Here’s one version of that email, from a listener named Steve.

“Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast! I have a question about work in heaven — or work in the new creation, to be more exact. First, will we work in the new creation? If so, what types of vocations will be needed? Does the Bible give us any hints here? And if we work, do you think this future vocation will resonate with or consummate some gifting that we always felt drawn to express here on earth, whether or not we could make money doing it here? And if you answer yes to all of this, put on your hat of prediction: What will you be doing in eternity?”

Let’s start with what we know for sure about the eternal future that all of us who are in Christ will definitely enjoy.

Jesus said that we will be with him. We will see his glory. We will have the capacity to love him with the very love that the Father has for him (John 17:24–26). The apostle John tells us “we shall see him” and “we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). That includes both sinless purity of heart and the glory of our new resurrection bodies, according to Philippians 3:21. And then in Revelation 21:4, John tells us that God “will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.” And then Psalm 16:11 twists that around and makes it positive: in God’s presence, we will have “fullness of joy” and “pleasures forevermore.” Now that is for sure.

Six Pointers for Work in Eternity

Now, the question is, Will work be part of our experience of that eternal joy in God’s presence? I think the answer is yes. But I say that not because the Bible has decisive statements to that effect, but because there are significant pointers in that direction. So, I wouldn’t elevate this conviction that I’m going to argue for here to a top-level doctrine, but rather call it a reasonable, probable hope. And if not this, then something way better. I mean, if it turns out that it’s not what you thought it was, it’s going to be better, because we know there will be no sorrow there, no regret, no frustration, no disappointment with God’s decisions about what our happiness should look like.

So, here are my six pointers, and then I’ll end with a caution. These are pointers for why we can be relatively confident there will be work for us to do in the age to come, in our eternity with God.

1. God is a worker.

God himself is a worker, and we will be more like him then, not less than we are now. Genesis 2:2: “On the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.” And Jesus said in John 5:17, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.” So, God is a worker.

2. God created us to work.

God created man to be a worker before the fall into sin. The curse that fell on man after the fall was not work, but futile work, miserable work, sweaty work that makes us hate it, that makes us want to play instead of working. But God made man from the beginning to work the world, to shape the world.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

And then, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15).

3. Parables point toward future responsibility.

The parable that describes how Jesus settles accounts with his servants at the second coming suggests that, now that Jesus has come, they will have work given them to do. In Luke 19:17, the master says, “Well done, good servant! Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities.” Now, whether that’s parabolic or metaphorical, it may well point to the fact that we will be given responsibility in the age to come.

4. We are born again for good works.

According to Ephesians 2:10, “We are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” When Paul identified a purpose for the new creature in Christ — us — he said the purpose was work, “good works.”

5. Prophecies of the new creation include work.

Isaiah 65:17–25 describes the new heavens and the new earth to include work.

They shall build houses and inhabit them;     they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. . . .     My chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.They shall not labor in vain     or bear children for calamity. (Isaiah 65:21–23)

Now, the reason I say this is only a pointer, not a decisive statement — even though it may look like that — about work in the final state, is that there is serious disagreement about whether this passage in Isaiah 65 is a description of our final state, because it speaks of bearing children, and Jesus said that in the final state there would be no marriage and, presumably, no bearing of children (Matthew 22:30). And in the age to come, we’re not going to experience death. And yet Isaiah 65:20 says, “The young man shall die a hundred years old” in the new creation.

We know there is no death in the age to come. So, the disagreement is whether these kinds of statements here in Isaiah 65 are somehow metaphorical for eternal life in the age to come — I have never been able to understand how death is a symbol for life — or whether this is a description of a millennial period after the second coming, which is much higher in its blessing than now but not yet the final stage of the new heavens and the new earth. And that would be my view.

“Work itself will be so profoundly satisfying and sweet and enjoyable that nobody will say, ‘I need a weekend.’”

But in either case — whether those are metaphorical statements and we will be working in the final state, or whether this is a next stage of redemptive history in which, yes, there will be work, and maybe pointing to the fact that there’s work in the final state — it seems to me that we can’t settle that with enough certainty to persuade all the evangelicals who love the Bible. I mean, I’ve got a lot of good friends that disagree with me on this. So, I don’t call those verses in Isaiah 65 a decisive, precise statement that there will be work in the final state, but it seems to me it points in that direction.

6. All futility will be gone.

When you take sin out of the heart and out of the world, which will happen in the age to come, the line between work and play becomes almost invisible. What is play when all our work will be totally enjoyable? I mean totally. There is no work now that is totally enjoyable. All work has some element to it we find frustrating or disappointing or futile or discouraging.

Perhaps (this is speculation) there will be sweet weariness of mind and body, the new body getting weary in the age to come such that it needs something different from its usual occupation — namely, rest and play. I don’t know, because work itself will be so profoundly satisfying and sweet and enjoyable that nobody will say, “I need a weekend. I’ve got to have some play time,” because everything will be as happy and satisfying as play. But there may be a difference.

Future Beyond Disappointment

And that word perhaps — I mean, I’ve been using the word perhaps all along — leads me to wrap up with a caution about making more precise statements about the age to come than the Bible gives us warrant to make. There are cautions in the Bible that remind us that the glories of the age to come are going to be beyond our present comprehension and imagination.

In 2 Corinthians 12:4, Paul said he saw things in heaven that no man can utter. In 1 Corinthians 2:9, Paul says that “God has prepared [things] for those who love him” that are beyond human imagination. They’ve never entered into the heart of man. He tells us that our resurrection bodies will be spiritual bodies (1 Corinthians 15:42–49). Well, who can say all that is involved in a spiritual body?

John speaks in Revelation 21:23 of a world in which there will be “no need of sun or moon . . . [because] the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.” Well, who can imagine a world with no sources of created light, but only God’s light? And in Revelation 21:18, John says the city, New Jerusalem, “was pure gold, like clear glass.” What’s that — gold that is clear as glass? Jonathan Edwards wrote an entire sermon on that text, Revelation 21:18, and here’s the title: “Nothing on Earth Can Represent the Glories of Heaven” — because there is no such thing on earth as gold that is clear as glass, and that’s the way it’s going to be like.

So yes, I think we will work in the final age to come. Whether we will do what we were gifted for here, or whether we will have wholly new giftings, a thousand times greater, or what kind of work John Piper will be doing, I leave in the hands of God, who planned the universe for the happiness of his people in himself. We will not be disappointed.

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