Austin's Blog

First, the Bible holds two twin truths together: God’s exhaustive sovereignty over all things and man’s responsibility. Scripture teaches both the exhaustive sovereignty of God and the ultimate responsibility of man, oftentimes in the same passages (Gen. 45:5-8, 50:19-20; Psa. 105:16-25; Lev. 20:7, 22:31; Jud. 14:4a; 2 Sam. 24; 1 Chron. 21:1-7; 1 Kings 8:57-60, 11:11-13, 29-39, 12:1; 2 Chron. 10:15; Isa. 10:5; Jer. 29:10-14). I think the way the Bible talks about agency is layered. We often think of agency (e.g. how something comes about) as like a pie where God has His slice and we have ours’. If He takes His slice away, that’s what is His and the other slice is mine. The reality is a better metaphor is a layered cake. Within any decision, there are various agents who have a role: God, human beings, angelic beings, demonic forces/Satan, natural and physical features of the world, and more. When you pull a slice of the layered cake out, within it are different levels or layers of agency–all real and all a part of what happens within the world. 

Second, another hard yet strangely hopeful thing the Bible teaches is that God is sovereign over evil within the world (Gen. 50:25; Exo. 4:21, 7:3, 9:12, 10:20, 14:4, 8; Josh. 11:20; Judg. 3:12, 9:23, 14:4; 1 Sam. 2:25, 16:14; 2 Sam. 12:11-12, 15-18, 16:5-8, 11,; 1 Kings 11:14, 23, 22:23; Job 1:12, 15, 17, 19, 21-22; Isa. 10:5, Isa. 45:7, 63:17; Jer. 25:9, 12; Ezek. 14:9; Amos 3:6; Lam. 3:38; Acts 2:23, 4:27; 1 Thess. 2:11-12; 1 Pet. 2:8). The reason why this strangely gives me hope is that if God is sovereign over it, there’s a purpose and a point. It isn’t meaningless or pointless. I may not know the purpose of God within the specific suffering we’ve endured in losing Gabriel, but I know it didn’t catch Him off guard or somehow happened apart from His wise, gracious, and loving plan. 

Third, I will readily admit that sometimes God’s sovereign plan looks at odds with His love. I’m called to trust and obey even when I can’t understand. In a moment of crisis, the “however” or “therefore” of God is not to be believed more than the “love” of God. Easier written and said than acted upon, which is why God gives us the grace of lament in the meantime. We are never called to defend God as if he needed any outside standard or person to lend Him credibility but simply trust, obey, listen to, and walk with God. 

Fourth, every lament in the canon is built upon God’s active agency within the world. You don’t lament to a God who isn’t in control. Why bother? If He is simply catching up or responding to things without being sovereign over things, why would anyone bother lamenting to Him? You lament only to One who is all-wise, all-good, and all-sovereign. Take special note of the lament psalms, prophetic complaints, the book of Lamentations, and other portions of Scriptures, especially the verbs. Much is attributed to God’s role in the world and His people often argue that what He does, is doing, or hasn’t done fails to live up to His character. For an interesting exercise in this, print off the book of Lamentations and highlight the verbs. Notice how often actions, even hard and heavy ones, are attributed to God.

Fifth, Genesis 50:20 does not teach God turns evil into good or brings good out of evil. Those are biblical teachings throughout the canon, of course (e.g. Rom. 8:28-30). The passage says, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Joseph’s brothers possessed an evil intention in harming him (Heb. “you devised evil against me”). God had a concurrent intention all along in the whole episode (Heb. “God devised it for good in order to do, like this day, to preserve alive a great nation”). The difference is His intention was a good one and not an evil one. There’s two agencies within the verse: one human, which is evil, and another divine, which is good. The verse isn’t saying the brothers had an evil intention that God brought good out of but that they willed evil and God willed good simultaneously. We need to be careful readers of the Scripture and not put words into the biblical authors’ mouths. 

New Testament scholar D.A. Carson notes, “We shall best understand what Joseph says if we carefully observe what he does not say. Joseph does not say, “Look, miserable sinners, you hatched and executed this wicked plot, and if it hadn’t been for God coming in at the last moment, it would have gone far worse for me than it did.” Nor does he say, “God’s intention was to send me down to Egypt with first-class treatment, but you wretched reprobates threw a wrench into his plans and caused me a lot of suffering. What Joseph says is that in one and the same event the brothers intended evil and God intended good. God’s sovereignty in the event, issuing in the plan to save millions of people from starvation during the famine years, does not reduce the brothers’ evil; their evil plot does not make God contingent. Both God’s sovereignty and human responsibility are assumed to be true.”

Sixth, we ought to resist other theological and philosophical commitments that mute or explain away very clear, direct sayings of the text. For example, people will have a commitment to a certain view of creaturely freedom, a certain expectation about how God ought to act or will act, or even a commitment to a view of divine eternity or timelessness that will be brought in to explain away a passage. We all have precommitments and preconditions when we come to the text of Scripture. The task before us is to not allow those to change what the text is actually saying, even if we don’t like the conclusions. The context of the passage determines the meaning. 

Seventh, God is sovereign over our lives, including our births and the very day of our deaths. It isn’t just that He knows when we are born and die. It is that He ordains or determines those realities. Job 14:5 says, “A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.” Deuteronomy 32:39 says, “See now that I myself am he! There is no god besides me. I put to death and I bring to life, I have wounded and I will heal, and no one can deliver out of my hand.” 1 Samuel 2:6 says, “The LORD brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and raises up.” Psalm 139:16 says, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” There is an appointed time to be born and even to die (Ecc. 3:2; Heb. 9:27). God confesses His rightful ownership over all people in Ezekiel 18:4 saying, “Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul who sins shall die.” He holds the lives of all creatures in the palm of His good and wise hands (Job. 12:10). Other verses could be listed here. 

This comforts me. I think all of these phrases are true: “The Lord gave, and the Lord took away.” “Our child’s days were known to God.” “Nothing about their life or death was outside the Lord’s hands.” “God did not lose control, even though we lost everything.” “We don’t understand why God chose this, but we trust who He is.” The Bible never says the following: “God needed another angel.” “The death of my child is good.” “God had no role in this.” “Satan did this alone.” When we say things like, “God had nothing to do with this!”, we are saying what happened was random, meaningless, and escaped God’s tender and fatherly rule. Everything is Father-filtered and that should create immense comfort. 

Eighth, some will simply argue that God does not foreordain, predestine, or determine certain realities but only or merely knows them. He just knows when we are born and when we will die. The question is what is God’s knowledge based upon? God knows what will happen because He ordains it to be so. Take for example, Isaiah 46 where God declares, “9-Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. 10 I make known the end from the beginning,  from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.” God declares His exhaustive knowledge of the future and connects it with His action. I will do all that I please. His knowledge is intricately bound with His actions and will. Furthermore, say God simply knows everything and He also cannot be wrong. He cannot hold a false belief. What does this mean? Whatever He knows will come to pass irrevocably because He can’t be wrong. It can’t fail to happen. It is just as determined in this understanding as the previous one where He actually ordains whatsoever comes to pass (Eph. 1:11). 

Ninth, oftentimes bereaved parents will ask did God take my child? There is a visceral reaction to the verb “take” among many grieving people. Suffice it to say that the “taking” language is biblical language in some sense. Genesis 5:24 says, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” Job 1:21 says, “And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” Notice verse 22 where the author says Job did not sin in this testimony. Isaiah 57:1-2 says, “The righteous man perishes, and no one lays it to heart; devout men are taken away, while no one understands. For the righteous man is taken away from calamity; he enters into peace; they rest in their beds who walk in their uprightness.” I’m unsure if we would even be wrestling with the language of God “taking” our children if the biblical authors didn’t explicitly use the language first. 

Tenth, we struggle to go here for various reasons. We want to protect God and His character, which I think is an admirable goal. Yet, the Bible never protects God by denying His power. It protects God by declaring His goodness. We also collapse causation into culpability. We think, “If God had a role in causing something, He is morally culpable for it.” There’s tension here but I think the Bible teaches God can ordain things, even difficult ones, use secondary causes, and be completely perfect, wise, and good. I don’t fully understand this and human analogies fail but it is all over the canon. 

Eleventh, what are we to think of Satan? Scripture teaches that although Satan is called “the ruler of this world” and “the prince of the power of the air” (John 12:31; Eph. 2:2), his authority is real but limited and never independent of God. In Job’s suffering, Satan could only act within boundaries the Lord set (Job 1:12; 2:6), showing that even the enemy’s attacks require divine permission. At the cross, Satan and wicked men acted freely and wickedly, yet Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23; see also Acts 4:27-28), proving that God’s sovereign purpose overrules every hostile power. Therefore, while Satan may be an instrument of harm, no suffering or death escapes the Lord’s hand, for “all souls are mine” (Ezek. 18:4) and “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom. 14:8).

Twelfth, Jesus doesn’t correct strong sovereignty language. He seems to intensify it while also holding out immense compassion. He is Compassion Incarnate, after all. In Matthew 6, sparrows don’t hit the ground, hairs don’t grow on our head, and flowers don’t rise and then crumble apart from God’s loving control. Therefore, we shouldn’t be anxious. Moreover, Jesus lived and spoke with a divine sense of mission, especially when He discussed His death. “No one takes my life from me.” “I lay it down of my own accord.” “This command I received from my Father.” 

Thirteenth, despite everything said about God’s sovereignty, death is still treated as an Enemy in the canon (1 Cor. 15:26). It is never talked about like it doesn’t matter. At the tomb of Lazarus in John 11, Jesus doesn’t say, “This wasn’t supposed to happen.” He showed strong emotion and did something about it. He affirmed that “this is terrible and I am here to do something about it.” God being sovereign over death does not make death good. The Bible never teaches everything is actually good, especially the things that knock the breath out of our lungs and crush us. It does teach God is good, good can be brought out of evil, and evil remains evil even if God uses it for His own ends. 

Fourteenth, many are not comforted by God’s sovereignty. They can read these fragments and think, “I could never trust a God who would or could do…” Let me just encourage you to remain talking with the Lord at his table. Don’t walk away. Let the Word increasingly wash over every thought, idea, and synthesizing of all these realities. Moreover, we aren’t justified before God by a full and expansive knowledge of all these things. A child-like trust in Jesus is enough. A child doesn’t have to understand all of his father’s actions, words, and attitudes to trust him. We are called to trust and obey, even when we don’t understand. Thank God there’s no theology test before we enter Heaven. Trusting in Jesus alone and relying on His work alone are sufficient. 

Fifteenth, I don’t have this all figured out. However, in my best moments, I do want to spend the rest of my life attempting to learn more about God. Much of what we know, think, and believe right now will be corrected, refined, deepened, and widened when we stand before Him. Like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Or elsewhere in the same book in chapter 2:9 when he spoke on Heaven: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.” 

Some will say, “I don’t want to put God in a box.” That’s fine. Nevertheless, we are meaning-making creatures and naturally attempt to synthesize what we know and experience about God into a consistent, cohesive fabric of faith. tattered though it is. We should avoid stopping the conversation about what God has said about Himself because we feel like we’ve boxed Him into something. I mean, heaven and earth cannot contain our God (1 Kings 8:27; 2 Chron. 2:6, 6:18), let alone any “box” we might put Him in. Oftentimes, the “box” worry is just a subtle way to stop the conversation when uncomfortable ends have been reached. We are all making boxes. Just recognize that the Lord will exceed our wildest expectations and ideas in the End. 

Sixteenth, the ways of the Lord are said to be “past finding out.” Romans 11:33-34 says, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?’” Job says in chapter 9:10 that God does great things beyond searching out, and marvelous things beyond number. The Psalmist says God’s greatness is unsearchable (Psa. 145:3) and Isaiah says His understanding is beyond measure (Isa. 40:28). Much of these great realities are beyond us. We can never have the fullest understanding. Yet, we are called by God to know Him and His ways. Just because we cannot know everything does not mean we cannot know the things He has revealed. We can spend a lifetime discussing these topics and will spend an eternity appreciating their significance, profundity, and depth. Let’s press in and on to know the Lord.