God and Evil

God’s relationship to evil is frankly rather frightening, if you are honest enough with yourself to carry certain notions, preconceived or otherwise, to their logical conclusions.  What I mean is this.  It is rather easy to say “God is good” and “Sin is bad”.  It is also quite comfy to belt out the familiar Christian refrain of “God is sovereign”.  But if we are to ever attempt to put all three of those disparate elements together, and if we are serious enough in our attempt to understand the Lord, then we have a terrible philosophical, logical, and theological problem on our hands.  Because if God is good and sovereign, and if sin is bad or evil, then how can God be sovereign over sin yet still be good?  Alternatively, if God is not sovereign over sin and evil then how is He sovereign?

Just to be clear, a lexical definition of sovereign is: supreme in power; possessing supreme dominion; superior to all others.  The word itself implies a complete and total power over all else.  So again, how can God be that in regard to sin, yet not be affected by sin Himself such that He is not also evil?

The way I see it is this.  God is completely and unilaterally sovereign over every living thing.  His sovereignty covers the big picture as well as the microscopic details of life “under the Sun”.  I like Isaiah 46:9-11 to give a picture of God’s umbrella sovereignty: “For I am God, and there is no other; declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure”; calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of My purpose from a far country.  Truly I have spoken; truly I will bring it to pass.  I have planned it, surely I will do it.”  For the other end of the spectrum, that of fine details, I think Proverbs 16:33 is supremely powerful in its simplicity: The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.  A lot is essentially an ancient equivalent of modern dice.  So Solomon is telling us that every time the dice are rolled, the pips that come up are determined by God.

Charles Spurgeon said it this way:

I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less than God wishes – that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens – that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their courses. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebud is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence – the fall of . . . leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.

What is fate? Fate is this – Whatever is, must be. But there is a difference between that and Providence. Providence says, Whatever God ordains, must be; but the wisdom of God never ordains anything without a purpose. Everything in this world is working for some great end. Fate does not say that. . . . There is all the difference between fate and Providence that there is between a man with good eyes and a blind man.

Now then, if all of that is true, then God must be sovereign over death, evil, sin, etc. or He is not fully and completely sovereign.  I believe this is borne out by passages such as Romans 8:20: for the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope.  He directly and intentionally placed the entire created order under a curse of vanity, purposelessness, emptiness, unreality, ineffectiveness, and instability as a punishing sentence for Adam’s sin.  In other words, God is the one who introduced evil and corruption into the rest of creation.  What Paul is describing in Romans 8 is not a situation where Adam pulled the cork on a genie bottle, so to speak, and corruption just flooded out into the rest of the world.  God’s decree, because of Adam’s sin, was that the rest of the world would be subjected to death, hopelessness, and futility.  Animals would now eat each other, disease would now run rampant, the whole nine yards.  God caused all that to happen, Paul is saying.  Yet we know that God is good (Hosea 14:9), light (1 John 1:5), and completely separated from sin (Habakkuk 1:13). 

The only possible reconciling of these seemingly competing themes that I can make work in my mind is what I mentioned in the previous post.  First, that God’s perfect justice was being satisfied by doing this.  He as the ultimate arbiter of what is right or wrong, has the complete prerogative to decide what is the best punishment for the clay He has shaped.  This of course was His masterstroke point against Job in the last four chapters of that book.  Second, because God is truly and perfectly good, we can only accurately define evil as being when a creature destroys that which God has created.  We cannot say that God is evil for destroying that which He created.

Yet, we still have a problem.  If God is truly sovereign, and He is, then He is also sovereign over the actions of those creatures that commit the acts of evil that cause destruction to His “property”.  This logically implies that He is in full control of what they do and when they do it.  This does not make Him culpable, however, because each creature is responsible for its own actions (I am particularly fond of the first “song of woe” found in Habakkuk 2:6-8 to convey this point).  Yet at the end of the day, God has permitted those actions to occur.  This, I believe, was the case with Satan and Job.  I find it to be very clear in Job 1:12: Then the Lord said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your power, only do not put forth your hand on him.”  Then in 2:6 we find: So the Lord said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your power, only spare his life.”  I think the implication of this is that God specifically knew exactly what Satan was going to do to Job’s children.  This is why he adds the additional caveat of “spare his life” when it comes to Job himself.  That detail is conspicuously absent from the first chapter’s exchange. 

If we take the approach that Satan went out and did what he did completely outside of God’s allowance it doesn’t work for me.  Because how can God be truly sovereign over something if it transpires outside of His purview, or approval, or whatever word we can think of to attach to it.  Even if God did not commit the killing Himself, He certainly condoned it if for no other reason than His perfect knowledge must have made Him aware of it before Satan did it and He could have stopped him.  The fact that He did not implies that He let it happen with full knowledge, awareness, and even approval.

So God does not commit evil directly.  But I believe Him to be fully in control of it.  Evil dances like a puppet at the end of God’s strings, being used for his purposes as He chooses, in order to increase His own glory.  I have stated it this way in the past: God ordains evil.  I know from experience that that statement causes people’s toes to curl up in their shoes, and I understand that.  But I think if we look at the definition of ordain, it fits.  To ordain something is to order or decree it officially.  I believe that is what God does with evil and even sin, because otherwise I just do not see how He can be sovereign over them.  If that sounds extreme, then consider Jonathan Edwards’s take on this philosophical conundrum.  He articulates it even more bluntly that I am trying to do:

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God's glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all. . . .

Thus it is necessary, that God's awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God's glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all.

If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God's holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God's grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired. . . .

So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature's happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect.

Here is John Piper’s attempt to clarify this issue…

What I have seen over 18 years of pastoral ministry and six years of teaching experience before that, is that people who waver with uncertainty over the problem of God's sovereignty in the matter of evil usually do not have a God-entranced world view. For them, now God is sovereign, and now he is not. Now he is in control, and now he is not. Now he is good and reliable when things are going well, and when they go bad, well, maybe he's not. Now he's the supreme authority of the universe, and now he is in the dock with human prosecutors peppering him with demands that he give an account of himself.

But when a person settles it Biblically, intellectually and emotionally, that God has ultimate control of all things, including evil, and that this is gracious and precious beyond words, then a marvelous stability and depth come into that person's life and they develop a "God-entranced world view." When a person believes, with the Heidelberg Catechism (Question 27), that "The almighty and everywhere present power of God . . . upholds heaven and earth, with all creatures, and so governs them that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, all things, come not by chance, but by his fatherly hand" – when a person believes and cherishes that truth, they have the key to a God-entranced world view.

One thing is certain.  This concept of God’s relationship to evil, whichever way you wind up going with it, is neither easy or painless.  To arrive at a logically coherent and Scripturally sound conclusion is to stretch one’s brain far past the breaking point.  My prayer to the Lord this day is that I have represented Him as accurately as I am able to.  Above all else, what I do not want to do is give anyone a distorted view of God.