I have been having an interesting discussion with a friend about how much responsibility God bears for the bad things that happen to people. I have been talking about this with many people and studying the Scriptures for decades; I even wrote a paper on it in Bible college. My friend has said previously that he believes God is in charge, but not in control, which allows him to think that God does not have responsibility for troublesome circumstances. This is difficult for me to square with the way God’s total sovereignty is revealed by His actions recorded in Scripture.
Perhaps the clearest statement of God’s sovereignty in all
things is the shocking (to some) statement in Isaiah 45:7 where God tells the
prophet, “I form light and I create darkness; I make peace and I create evil; I
am Yahweh; I do all these things.” God stakes His very identity on the fact
that He “creates evil.” We must first understand that the word “evil” here does
not encompass moral evil. The Hebrew word speaks of calamity, disaster or
unpleasant circumstances. To the surprise of many, God does not shrink for
owning responsibility for these things which, in context, are His way of judging
His people for their unfaithfulness.
One response to this is to read Isaiah 45:7 as if it reveals
the Old Testament God, whereas Jesus reveals a different sort of God in the New
Testament. This argument suggests that Jesus never created any “evil” while He
was on earth. Rather, the Son was just, merciful, kind and good all the time,
which appears to be the case on the surface. Certainly, Jesus did have a few
harsh things to say to the religious hypocrites of His day, but He didn’t call down
lightning or send fiery serpents to plague them, at least not during His
earthly ministry.
After the Cross and the establishment
of His church, I think God’s unchanging nature is revealed anew. When the church
was only a few weeks or months old, Ananias and Saphira felt the up close and personal
judgment of God; they lied to the Holy Spirit and POW!, POW! Two dead. (Acts 5:1-11)
Then there is Paul on the island of
Cyprus telling the crooked sorcerer, Elymas, “O you who are full of all deceit
and of all unscrupulousness, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness!
Will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord! And now
behold, the hand of the Lord is against you, and you will be blind, not seeing
the sun for a while.” (Acts 13:10-11) ZAP! One struck blind.
That kind of harsh treatment did
not stop there. A few years later, Paul told the Corinthian believers that some
of their number had “fallen asleep,” a euphemism for death, because they
partook of the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner. (1 Corinthians 11:30) There
is also the writer’s clear implication in the book of Hebrews that God uses
unpleasantness to chastise His children. The verb, disciplines, used in Hebrews
12:6 is in the present, active, indicative tense. That tense is always used of a
person’s direct action. Some may want these unpleasant occurrences to be a case
like Job’s where God allowed Satan to trouble Job by giving permission as
opposed to taking direct action. That position is difficult to support in the case
of Ananias and Saphira or Elymas, and there is no clear ground for claiming the
permissive, passive nature of any of God’s discipline.
This leads many to question the
goodness of a God who can serve up badness to His own people. The answer is
found in the Hebrews 12 passage. There are two good reasons for accepting that
God “creates evil” in believers’ lives. First, the Hebrews author says it
proves God’s love, the opposite of what some would think. Quoting the Old
Testament in the New, bringing solidarity between the two, the Hebrew passage
says, “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, or give up when you
are corrected by him. For the Lord disciplines the one whom he loves and
punishes every son whom he accepts.” (Proverbs 3:11-12; Hebrews 12:5-6) To add
emphasis to the point, the writer continues, “But if you are without
discipline, in which all legitimate
sons have become participants, then you are illegitimate and not sons. Now
all discipline seems for the moment not to be joyful but painful, but later it
yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness for those who are trained by it.”
And there is the second reason God brings trouble into our lives: to give us “peaceful
fruit.”
I agree that God is good all the
time, and yet I will not shrink from saying that the troubles that come our way
may be God’s doing so that He might conform us into the image of His Son. I
remember that His
ways are higher than mine. Romans 8:28 may properly be translated to say
that God works all things in His loved ones’ lives [even the bad things] to
accomplish His good purposes. Good can come from “evil.” The Cross of Christ is
the ultimate, deliberate creation of evil by God. The goodness that came from
that evil cannot be overstated. The entire sweep of redemptive history reveals
a God who uses disaster, calamity and unpleasantness to bring about the salvation
of the human race. Because of His love for us, Jesus faced the cross that His Father
ordained because God so loved the world. When it comes from God’s hand, even “bad”
can be good; it just depends on how you define “good.”
Related articles: Finding
God in COVID 19; The
Winnowing Fork of God; Today’s
Chaldean Chastisement
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