The Deeds of the Wicked and the Sovereignty of God
This article is a long-long-long-overdue response to a critique of one of my articles on The Six Points of Calvinism. I could have replied in the comment box but I didn’t want either the question or answer to get buried in the comments. These are things I’m sure many people have questions about. Hopefully, by making the discussion more visible it will be of help as you think through the issues yourself.
God the Author of Evil?
There are two objections I want to address related to this topic, one broad and one more narrow. The first is this:
Does God cause an evil thing to happen for some purpose we may never know about or understand, or do evil people do bad things and God makes good come out of it?
The person raising this issue favors the latter view, that evil people do wicked things and God makes good out of them. This commenter is quick to qualify that he doesn’t believe God is fixing a mess He didn’t expect. God is not making lemonade out of unforeseen lemons. Rather, God knows what wicked men will do and plans to make good out of it. So in theory God’s sovereignty and omniscience are not violated–He’s still in control and knows all that will happen–but His hands are morally clean of the wicked acts that people commit.
At the root of this question is an age-old debate over whether or not Calvinism (so-called) makes God the author of evil. If God has exhaustive sovereign control over all things such that nothing happens that is outside His sovereign decree, doesn’t that mean God is guilty of all the evil acts of men since He effectively makes them do those things? If the one raising the objection rejects the Reformed position, he is left with two alternative conclusions: God is neither good nor holy, or there has to be some caveat or nuance to our understanding of God’s sovereignty. This latter option is where many Christians go, ending up with some version of “God could make us do what He wants, but He gives us free will so we are responsible for all our actions.” What if we do something contrary to God’s will? Some would say we’ve put ourselves outside of God’s will, and if we want to receive His blessings, we need to determine what God’s will is and get back in line with it. If you’ve committed sin, determining God’s will is fairly easy and you know what to do: repent and don’t do the sin anymore. But often the choices we make are not so obviously contrary to what God might desire for us: We pick the “wrong” job, or we go to the “wrong” school, or we marry the “wrong” godly person. I’ve seen people become stymied in their walk with the Lord over trying to discern God’s will, afraid of making decisions in case they choose to do something God didn’t want them to do.
Our commenter friend avoids that pitfall by trying to affirm both God’s sovereignty and our free will: God is sovereign and He knows both what He wants to happen and the choice you would make. Because God allows you your free will, He lets you make that wrong choice. But don’t worry–He knew that’s what you would do, and He’s already put in place a plan to make good out of your bad choice. God will clean up your mess (or put in a “fix” as an old pastor of mine used to say) and everything will be okay in the end.
From our friend’s perspective, this is a preferable view because a) it absolves God of any responsibility for our sinful acts, and b) it respects God’s sovereignty because He will still accomplish His purposes despite what we’ve done.
There are two major problems with this position. The first is that it doesn’t really resolve the question. While it does address God’s culpability for our sin, it just replaces one moral dilemma for another: Why didn’t God stop you from sinning in the first place? I’m sure the response would be, “That would violate my free will, and He doesn’t want to do that.” This seems reasonable if the sins we’re talking about are personal offenses between you and God. But what if your sin hurt a lot of people? What if the sin we’re talking about is adultery or murder? What about abortion? God may not be guilty of pulling the trigger or making you pull the trigger, but He is guilty of not stopping you from taking someone’s life. If God didn’t want the drunk driver to hit and kill the child, or the terrorists to kill thousands on 9-11, or Hitler to exterminate millions of Jews, why didn’t He stop them? God may not be directly responsible for those crimes, but is He not equally guilty of not intervening when He could, saving countless lives He supposedly didn’t want to be extinguished?
Our friend might respond: Well, God did intend for those people to die, but He didn’t mean for it to happen because of someone’s sin. So God would have let them all die naturally, assuming the timing of their deaths was not important to His plan and purpose? Or would God have killed them by earthquake, fire, tornado, or some other “force of nature” or accident–which would be nobody’s fault (except we believe that God is Lord of all nature–remember Noah?). It seems to me, the more you try to resolve the obvious conflict between the sovereignty of God and man’s free will, the closer you move to the Reformed (or “Calvinist”) position. Unless you are willing to say that God is not actually sovereign, that He has no control over the winds and waves or the will of man, then you are forced to admit that God is ultimately sovereign, even when it comes to ordaining the wicked acts of evil men.
That’s the first of the major problems with our friend’s position. The other is this: That’s not what the Bible teaches.
God, Evil, and Scripture
To me, one of the most compelling aspects of the Reformed perspective is the fact that it is woven into the very fabric of God’s revelation to us. There are, to be sure, certain texts we can use as “proof texts” where the Reformed view of God’s sovereignty is more clearly presented than in other passages (e.g., Genesis 50:20; Exodus 7:3; Proverbs 19:21; Ezekiel 36:27; John 6:37; Acts 4:27-28; Romans 8:28-29; Romans 9:16, 18). But the thing that strikes me is how inescapable the Reformed view of God’s sovereignty is throughout Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. God constantly presents Himself as in charge and in control:
I am Yahweh, and there is no other, the One forming light and creating darkness, producing peace and creating calamity; I am Yahweh who does all these. (Isaiah 45:6-7)
By me kings reign and rulers mark out righteousness. By me princes rule, and nobles, all who judge rightly. (Proverbs 8:15-16)
Yahweh will keep you from all evil; He will keep your soul. Yahweh will keep your going out and your coming in from now until forever. (Psalm 121:7-8)
Blessed be Yahweh, the God of our fathers, who has put such a thing as this in the king’s heart, to beautify the house of Yahweh which is in Jerusalem. (Ezra 7:27)
“But I will show you whom to fear: fear the One who, after He has killed, has authority to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear Him!” (Luke 12:5)
And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43)
“Do not fear; I am the first and the last, and the living One; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive forever and ever, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.” (Revelation 1:17-28)
Biblical arguments against God’s exhaustive sovereignty tend not to come from things God says about Himself, but rather from stories told from a human perspective. For example, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where Abraham appears to negotiate with God over how many people to save (Genesis 18:16-33). Or perhaps the story of Jonah, where God threatens the Ninevites with judgment unless they repent, so they repent and God “relents” from the evil He said He would bring upon them (Jonah 3:10).
The problem with trying to understand God’s sovereignty based on such stories is they only tell you part of the story. What you don’t know is the extent to which the actions of men influenced God’s decision. Perhaps God already decided the course of action He would take but used these means of bringing His will to pass because He knew it would bring Him glory and benefit His people in some way. In fact, since God has revealed to us the extent of His sovereignty in the things He has declared, we can safely presume He knew the hearts of the people of Sodom and Ninevah. They responded exactly as He knew they would because He had ordained it beforehand in accordance with His will for His people (Romans 8:28). When we encounter the actions of God in the narratives, we can turn to the declarative revelations of God to help us understand the bigger picture.
Does that mean God is the author of evil? In Scripture, “evil” describes the intentions of the heart (Genesis 6:5; Mark 7:21), people’s words (Mark 9:39; Titus 3:2), or their actions (Judges 2:11; 1 John 3:12). The adjective can also be used to describe people as a whole, perhaps incorporating both the disposition of the heart and their actions (Deuteronomy 1:35; Matthew 5:39). Satan himself is described as “the evil one”–the epitome of evil residing in one creature (Matthew 13:38; John 17:15; 2 Thessalonians 3:3; 1 John 5:18-19).
We first encounter evil in Genesis 3. The serpent is described as “cunning” but he is clearly understood to be an evil influence given that he tempts Eve into disobedience. Further, he is identified elsewhere in Scripture with Satan, the very embodiment of evil (John 8:44; Revelation 12:9). The question of where Satan comes from and how he became “evil” is not one we can venture into with any certainty. He has clearly been around since the dawn of time, a period in history for which we have very little documentation, and what we do have has come to us by means of divine revelation in Scripture. If God hasn’t revealed it to us, we can only guess and surmise; we cannot state anything for certain.
Scripture tells us that God is good and holy (1 Samuel 2:2; Revelation 4:8) and that He is incapable of doing evil (Job 34:10; Psalm 5:4)–it is contrary to His nature to say, do, or be anything other than just and righteous (Revelation 15:3; 16:7). God cannot author evil because He is not evil and there is no evil in His heart to produce anything that would be evil. So however Satan became evil, it can’t be because God decided with evil intention to bring an evil creature into His creation. However, that doesn’t preclude God, from a pure heart and righteous intentions, creating a creature to rebel against Him and bring sin into the world so He can reveal His love and grace in a way He couldn’t have otherwise. Again, that’s speculative, and we should not draw too many conclusions from this because we have no revelation from God on the subject, and we don’t know the mind of God to be able to judge why He would do such a thing.
We can say for certain that God uses the evil deeds of wicked people to bring about His purposes. He is not the author of those deeds–wicked people don’t need to be coerced into doing evil. However, God can take those wicked actions and use them to accomplish His purposes, such as saving many from starvation (Genesis 50:20), leading His people out of slavery while mocking false gods (Exodus 7-14), or sending His only Son to die on a cross for the salvation of His people (Acts 4:27-28).
Ordaining the Act, Not Just the Outcome
“But,” I can hear our friend object, “why is it necessary for God to ordain the evil we do? Can’t He just leave us alone to do whatever evil our free will desires and just turn the outcome to fulfill His purposes?” Why should God get His hands dirty? We can sin perfectly well on our own without Him telling us what to do.
Like it or not, this is not the way God operates according to Scripture. God turns even the very hearts of kings wherever He will (Proverbs 21:1), and the will of the Lord is always accomplished (Proverbs 19:21). So it’s important to acknowledge God’s sovereign hand in all aspects of our lives if for no other reason than Scripture tells us God directs our paths.
It’s not enough that God ordains the outcome: the act matters too. Our actions don’t exist in a bubble; they have consequences. Sometimes we know and can anticipate the consequences of our actions, but many times we are oblivious to the effects our actions have on the world around us. Of all the many ways we can sin against God, within His eternal purposes, the way we sin at any one particular moment in time matters. There are many ways Jesus could have been killed. He could have been stoned, hung, assassinated, thrown to wild animals, beaten to death by an angry mob–as noted before, the human imagination has almost limitless invention when it comes to wickedness. But God ordained it had to be by crucifixion for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fulfillment of prophecy (e.g., Deuteronomy 21:23; Galatians 3:13; Numbers 21:9; John 3:14; Luke 24:25-27).
Does this make God responsible for the sin He ordains? No. We are all willing actors, so the sin is our own. God does not need to force us to commit sin. Unlike us, God operates with pure goodness, justice, and righteousness. Everything that He ordains, even sin, is for our good and for His glory. And as evil as some of those acts may appear, we can take comfort in the fact that because a good, just, and righteous God ordained them, they have purpose and meaning, and will accomplish something far greater than our minds can comprehend in His eternal plan.
The second more narrow objection I want to discuss has to do with the purpose of prayer and evangelism. However, I’ll leave that for the next article.
Was this helpful? Any questions? Feel free to engage the topic in the comments–just be respectful.
