Ethan’s Dad: Those who read the last post know that I now want to embark on a deeper exploration of what we Christians really mean when we say “God is in control.” I have had much of what follows written for a while, but I have hesitated in committing it to this space because, frankly, this whole area just isn’t easy, and the last thing I want to do is make any Christian feel stupid for holding to a different understanding of it. But Andrew Peterson says in his book Adorning the Dark that in the creative process intention matters more than execution, by which I think he means you should not let the fear of expressing your thoughts imperfectly keep you from expressing them at all. With that in mind, I am going to press forward, in the full knowledge that the waters into which I am about to wade are much more vast than my mind is capable of navigating with any degree of precision. I do so anyway because, for me, what happened to Ethan demands that I confront it.

I mentioned in the last post that the callousness of the statement “God is in control” is one reason you should not repeat it to a person who has just suffered a tragic loss. Another reason is that it isn’t true — at least not in the sense that many Christians mean it when they say it. Rather than be pejorative, I will illustrate the viewpoint to which I am referring by quoting from a book I read called You Can Trust God to Write Your Story by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and Robert Wolgemuth. I use this book not because it is unique in its view; on the contrary, there are many works that express the same notion. This just happens to be the latest I read which espouses this view.

The authors begin one chapter in which they discuss their view of what “God’s providence,” i.e., control, means by quoting with approval from someone else:

“‘How unspeakably precious and sweet it is when we can believe that God our Father in heaven is absolutely directing the most minute circumstances of our short sojourn in this wilderness world. That nothing, however trivial, takes place, whether it relates to the body or the soul, but is under His control, that is ordered by Himself.'” Mary Winslow

Later, they pick up this theme with the following explanation:

“The word [providence] also speaks to His wise, sovereign rule over every detail of His creation. Now, this is admittedly a subject that can stir up animated arguments. But there are basically two options. Either 1. God sovereignly causes, and or permits, everything to happen that happens in our lives and in this world, or 2. God stands by and watches passively and powerlessly unwilling or unable to do anything about what happens. … Where would we be without the certain knowledge that He’s got the whole world in His hands and that every detail of our lives and days is ordered by our all-wise, all-knowing, loving God? … To be helpless victims of chance, tossed about on the storms of life; that would be forever disconcerting and tragic. Thank God, it is not the case.”

As this excerpt shows, when some Christians say “God is in control,” they mean to be precisely that black-and-white about it: that literally EVERYTHING in our lives is absolutely controlled by God. To these people, when Jesus said, “There isn’t a sparrow that falls to the ground apart from God’s will” (Matthew 10:29), Jesus was actually saying that God caused the sparrow to fall.

What is entirely left out of that explanation (and essentially makes no express appearance in You Can Trust God to Write Your Story) is the existence of evil. “When the enemy comes like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will lift up a standard against him.” (Isaiah 59:19). “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8). Evil is real; Satan has genuine power; the whole world has an unnatural aspect to it. To minimize, ignore or even deny this is to contradict a clear message from the Bible.

To me, you cannot have an honest discussion about God’s providence unless you frankly face the existence of evil in this world. Glossing over evil shortchanges God’s justice, Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross, and people’s pain.

If what I have just said is true, then why would some Christians hold to what I would call the robotic view of God’s providence? I believe it is born from a good intention: to acknowledge God as all-powerful. But the view is driven by a false dichotomy. As the passage from the Wolgemuths’ book above indicates, such Christians think you must pick between a God who stages every minute of life like a marionette player controls puppets or a God who lacks the ability to do anything in the face of natural chaos. If that is really the choice, then it’s no wonder they pick the first option.

But the logical conclusion of this view of providence, to put it in stark personal terms, is that God killed Ethan. I reject that notion as an outrageous and unnecessary slander of God. Ethan died because we live in a sinful world in which life is sometimes senselessly cut short. However, if God controls absolutely everything, then the presence of sin in this world cannot be explained.

By definition, sin is rebellion against God. It is the reason humanity is condemned by God and it is the reason Jesus had to come and be the perfect, sinless sacrifice to save us from eternal damnation. It is one thing to say that God planned Jesus’ redemption of our sin from the foundation of the world; it is entirely another thing to say that God wills us to sin. The former is true because God knows everything that will happen before it occurs and so He planned a way to rescue us from ourselves. The latter is not possible because God cannot desire or will us to do that which is against His will, i.e, to do evil. The reason we can be condemned for our sinful actions is because we bear responsibility for our own choices. But that is not possible if there is no real choice, if God actually plans and controls every minute detail of our lives. The only way Jesus’ sacrifice has eternal meaning is if there is real choice: choice for humanity to follow or reject God, and choice for Jesus to lay down His life or not. Otherwise, the Garden of Gesthemene is a joke: what kind of struggle is Jesus having in the Garden if He has no choice in the matter? Jesus prays: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42). Luke goes on to obverse that “being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” (v. 44). Isn’t this what true obedience to the Lord involves: foregoing our own desires and submitting to His will? That type of obedience isn’t possible if the only will in existence is God’s.

I completely understand why people have a difficult time comprehending how it is possible for God to be all-powerful, but that He allows things to happen that are not what He desires, or to put it another way, God’s sovereignty and our liberty coexist. One verse that well-illustrates this paradox quotes Peter in his speech at Pentecost to a large crowd of Jews saying: “This man [Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men [the Romans], put Him to death by nailing Him to a cross.” (Acts 2:23). There is no doubt that the crucifixion of Christ was a wicked act perpetuated by those who willingly succumbed to evil desires, and therefore deserved condemnation for for their deeds. But of course it had been God’s plan for forever that the Messiah must suffer and die. The one does not negate the other. This is why Jesus would say on the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34). Those people were in need of forgiveness because what they had done was wrong, outside of God’s will for them, even though the crucifixion was part of His plan, and, in fact, was the very reason Christ could seek forgiveness for them.

As head-scratching as this paradox may be, if faith teaches us anything, it is that the truth is not limited by our understanding. Indeed, throughout the story of God’s redemption of humanity, simplicity and incomprehensibility co-exist. We know that humanity was given a choice, but we do not fully know why God offered one. We know that God came into our world as a human baby, but we don’t completely understand how God could be fully human. We know that Jesus came to save us, but we cannot fully comprehend why He would be willing to do such a thing given who we are in comparison to Him and our repeated rejections of God. We know that Jesus died on a cross, yet we cannot fully grasp how the eternal God could cease to live. We know that in His death Jesus was separated from God the Father, but given that Jesus is fully God we cannot conceive of what this separation could entail. We know that Jesus rose from the dead, but in our own experience we have never known or seen anyone come back from death. At a certain point, we have to accept these things on faith even though we cannot fully understand or explain them.

So, is it really asking too much to believe that it is possible for God to know all and to be able to orchestrate the grand design of His will without His controlling every single thing that occurs in this world? In other words, I am simply saying that God allows things to happen that are not within His immediate will. If this wasn’t the case, why would Jesus command us to pray “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? (Matthew 6:10).  When we pray this, we are asking that this present evil age would pass away and that all creation would come into conformance with His will (and that we would be His instruments for ushering this new creation into existence).

Those things outside of His will do not catch God off guard; they do not throw Him for a loop and force Him to drastically alter His ultimate plan for humanity. But those things do grieve Him. God certainly desires that people would not make the wrong choices He knows are coming. It hurts Him to watch us experience the tragedies that are inflicted by the cruelties that mar this fallen world. Such hurt and pain, and the desire to see us make better choices — to follow His will more closely — would not be possible for God if all of what occurred was controlled and purposed by Him.

To be a Christian is to believe that there is immense evil in this world and in us which requires a Savior beyond ourselves to rectify, and that Jesus is that Savior because He is is God in the flesh, who bore our sins on the Cross unto death, and then overcame death by rising again, thereby confirming that He is greater than the evil in this world. Thus, God is, indeed, sovereign over evil, but He is not a party to it.

There is no perfect way to explain how this could be, but one way to think of it is the idea of relinquishment of control. Jesus repeatedly called Satan the “prince of this world” (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11). In one of those passages, Jesus says “the prince of this world is coming. He has no power over me.” (John 14:30). In Job 1:12, God tells Satan: “Everything [Job] has is in your power, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.” God didn’t tell Satan what to do, but only the limit of what he could not do. Thus, although God’s Power is clearly greater, and the power Satan has is dictated by what God allows, Satan has real power and control in this world. I believe that the same is true for people. God has granted us a certain amount of control over our own lives; it obviously is not ultimate control because we are subject to so many other forces: natural, satanic, and heavenly, but there is control.

As human beings we cannot help but ask: but why would God allow such horrendous evil? Why must some children die so young? Why are there viruses that wreak havoc without warning?

I cannot give a truly satisfying answer to that perpetual question. But one possibly helpful analogy, though not a perfect one by any means (no analogy related to God can be), is democratic government. In that theory of government, the people have ultimate political power to govern how they live their lives, but they cede some of that power to a central governing authority so that certain tasks, like security for society, can be better accomplished. Well, it just might be that the reason God relinquishes some of His authority to Satan and to human beings is because it is the best way to achieve some of what He seeks to accomplish with His creation. If we return to that passage in John that I quoted earlier, after Jesus observes that Satan has no power over Him, He continues: “But [Satan] comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me.” (John 14:31). So, Satan had a role in testing and torturing Christ, and those actions would illustrate Jesus’ love for God the Father and for us. What if God’s willingness to cede control, which allows for the existence of evil, helps manifest His love for us and our love for Him?

In fact, at least in this existence, there cannot be love without choice. God chose to create us; He did not need us to sustain His existence. He desired our existence: creating us was a labor of love. Love, by its nature must be freely given, and freely received. And if love is a choice, then there must be an alternative. So, there can be no choice if there is no evil.

Because God loves us, we must trust that there is a purpose behind this evil. I don’t mean a purpose to the evil thing itself, but a purpose to the experience of suffering. As in, there must be something we are meant to gain from this painful life that will make the next one more meaningful than it otherwise would be. After all, surely you have wondered why God doesn’t just skip this part and take us all to Glory so that we can avoid this whole mess. This chaos causes us immeasurable pain, and seeing us suffer grieves Him more than we can know, so that seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through given that He is all-powerful and could just hit the fast-forward button, if you will, and take us to our true home. But think about what else we would miss if He did that — if he removed any experience of evil from our lives. We would miss the full extent of His love demonstrated through Christ, and we would miss countless opportunities to display love to those who are suffering (I miss too many as it is) and so to experience love at a level that is otherwise not possible.

And I think there must be even more that we would miss without experiencing evil that we cannot comprehend on this side of Heaven. The Apostle Paul hints at this in 2 Corinthians 4:6-7 when he says:

“God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made His light shine in my heart to give me the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But I have this treasure in an earthen vessel to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from me.”

Would we truly understand that we need God, and how much we need Him, if there was no evil? God knows that our greatest joy comes in being with Him because we were made for Him and in His likeness. But in order for us to come to that understanding, perhaps it takes really strong medicine, a cure that from our perspective feels far worse than the disease. It is a little like a parent telling his or her child what the wise choice in a situation would be, but the parent knows he or she has to let the child make his or her own decision, so that he or she can truly learn why the wise choice was the best one — even if it means watching the child choose poorly. Maybe God has to allow evil to unfold so that we learn what life without God really means.

As I said at the beginning of this post, these reasons absolutely should not, dare not, cause us to minimize evil and suffering in our own lives and in the lives of others. But in the long term, we have to trust that even this pervasive evil and suffering is ultimately, eternally for our good because God is all good and all creation was first good before it was marred by evil.

So, is God in control? Yes, but at the same time He allows us to decide whether He should be in control of our lives. What we do, because of sin, is do things our own way. In His grace, hopefully at some point we notice that we are not really in control of a lot (hello coronavirus) and that even in the things we do control we tend to screw up. That way, it becomes painfully obvious that we are in need of a Savior. If we accept Him by understanding that He is able to accept us, even with all of our flaws, because of Jesus’ perfect sacrifice, and we truly desire to live for Him, then the rest of our time on this earth is about continually relinquishing control of our lives to His Spirit’s leading. For our goal is to be “crucified with Christ, so that we no longer live, but Christ lives in us.” (Galatians 2:20). In a very real sense, then, God relinquishes some control to us in order for us to learn that it is best to relinquish control to Him.

Relinquishing that control does not mean you will have no more trouble. Jesus makes no such promise; instead, His promise is that “in this world you will have trouble, but fear not because I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33). In other words, do not believe the lie that because bad things happen, He will not make it right in the end. He will because He has defeated sin and death. We have to have the faith to wait, to persevere, to see what He already knows.