Can God's Plans Be Genuinely Thwarted?

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to her! How often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!" (Matthew 23:37). Jesus weeps over a city that refused him — and the Greek verb for his own desire, thelo, is the very same verb used for the refusal that stood against it. Two wills, in open collision, in the mouth of God himself.
Scripture is not shy about this pattern; it repeats it constantly. Isaiah 66:4 depicts Yahweh lamenting that his people "did that which was evil in my eyes, and chose that in which I didn't delight." Ezekiel 3:7 has God mourning that his people "will not listen to me." Psalm 81 records, "my people would not heed my voice… so I gave them over to their own stubborn heart." Luke records the Pharisees rejecting "the will [Greek boule] of God for themselves" (Luke 7:30). First Timothy 2:4 and 2 Peter 3:9 both affirm that God is "not willing that any should perish" — and yet, plainly, verifiably, some do perish, having refused him. None of this language makes sense if God's desires are simply identical to whatever occurs; a God whose will was never actually resisted by anyone could not coherently be described as grieving, longing, or waiting for a response that never came.
The resolution is a distinction Scripture itself insists on: what God ideally desires, and what God's unfolding plan then does in response to creatures' real, freedom-exercising choices. His overarching purpose for history is never in doubt. But specific desires along the way — for this city, this generation, this heart — are repeatedly, genuinely rejected by the very people he made to receive them. That grief in Jesus's voice over Jerusalem is not theater. It is what real love sounds like when it has been told no.