If God is sovereign, all-knowing, and good, then whence evil? How are we to think of evil without impugning either the integrity of God or his capacity to change things?
The Bible as a whole, and sometimes in specific texts, presupposes or teaches that both of the following propositions are true:
1. God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions in such a way that human responsibility is curtailed, minimized, or mitigated.
2. Human beings are morally responsible creatures—they significantly choose, rebel, obey, believe, defy, make decisions, and so forth, and they are rightly held accountable for such actions; but this characteristic never functions so as to make God absolutely contingent
There is no sense in which the Scriptures picture God as contingent. He talks with people, he responds to them; he can even be said (in almost forty cases) to “repent” of his decisions (KJV), that is, to change his mind or to relent in his declared purposes. But in no case is human responsibility permitted to function in such a way that God becomes absolutely contingent: that is, God is absolutely stymied, thwarted, frustrated, blocked, quite unable to proceed with what he himself had absolutely determined to do.
To put it bluntly, God stands behind evil in such a way that not even evil takes place outside the bounds of his sovereignty, yet the evil is not morally chargeable to him: it is always chargeable to secondary agents, to secondary causes.
On the other hand, God stands behind good in such a way that it not only takes place within the bounds of his sovereignty, but it is always chargeable to him, and only derivatively to secondary agents.
In other words, if I sin, I cannot possibly do so outside the bounds of God’s sovereignty (or the many texts already cited have no meaning), but I alone am responsible for that sin—or perhaps I and those who tempted me, led me astray, and the like. God is not to be blamed. But if I do good, it is God working in me both to will and to act according to his good pleasure. God’s grace has been manifest in my case, and he is to be praised.
When the Bible speaks of God’s permission of evil, there is still no escape from his sovereignty. A sovereign and omniscient God who knows that, if he permits such and such an evil to occur it will surely occur, and then goes ahead and grants the permission, is surely decreeing the evil.
But the language of permission is retained because it is part of the biblical pattern of insisting that God stands behind good and evil asymmetrically (in the sense already defined). He can never be credited with evil; he is always to be credited with the good.
He permits evil to occur; the biblical writers would not similarly say that he simply permits good to occur! So even though permission in the hands of a transcendent and omniscient God can scarcely be different from decree, the use of such language is part and parcel of the insistence that God is not merely transcendent, but that he is also personal and entirely good.
That God’s permission of evil does not in any way allow evil to escape the outermost bounds of God’s sovereignty is presupposed when we are told, for instance, that the Lord persuades the false prophet what to say (Ezek. 14:9), or that his wrath incites David to sin by taking a census (2 Sam. 24:1). When the Chronicler describes the same incident and ascribes the effective temptation to Satan (1 Chron. 21:1), this is not in contradiction of the passage in 2 Samuel (for the biblical writers, including the Chronicler, are far too committed to compatibilism to allow such a view), but in complementary explanation.
One can say that God sends the strong delusion, or one can say that Satan is the great deceiver: it depends on whether the sovereign transcendence of God is in view, or his use of secondary agents
It is utterly essential to doctrinal and spiritual well-being to maintain the diverse polarities in the nature of God simultaneously.
For instance, if you work through the biblical passages that bluntly insist God in some sense stands behind evil, and do not simultaneously call to mind the countless passages that insist he is unfailingly good, then in a period of suffering you may be tempted to think of God as a vicious, sovereign thug.
If you focus on all the passages that stress God’s sovereign sway over everything and do not simultaneously call to mind his exhortations to pray, to intercede, to repent, to examine yourself, you may turn into a Christian fatalist, and mistake your thoughtless stoicism for stalwart faith. The same lesson can be configured in many more ways: provide your own examples of distortion.
The mystery of providence defies our attempt to tame it by reason.
I do not mean it is illogical; I mean that we do not know enough to be able to unpack it and domesticate it. Perhaps we may gauge how content we are to live with our limitations by assessing whether we are comfortable in joining the biblical writers in utterances that mock our frankly idolatrous devotion to our own capacity to understand. Are we embarrassed, for instance, by the prophetic rebuke to the clay that wants to tell the potter how to set about his work (Isa. 29:16; 45:9)? Is our conception of God big enough to allow us to read “The LORD works out everything to its proper end—even the wicked for a day of disaster” (Prov. 16:4) without secretly wishing the text could be excised from the Bible?
We voice our “Amen!” to many truths written by Paul. Can we voice our “Amen!” to this? “One of you will say to me: ‘Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?’ But who are you, a mere human being, to talk back to God?” (Rom. 9:19–20).
This side of glory, at least, there is no other answer. Paul is prepared not only to live with it, but to tease out its implications: “ ‘Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, “Why did you make me like this?” [Isa. 29:16; 45:9].’
Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for disposal of refuse?
What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction?
What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory …?” (Rom. 9:21–23).
These thoughts are from D. Carsdon
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