God’s Providence III

Good and evil coexist all the time and everywhere. This paradox reveals God’s providence as he swallows evil aims—both demonic and human—with his own good purposes. Evil may be a flood for now, but God confronts it all in Jesus. He who is greater than all turns every evil to good in his purpose to end evil forever. And with that all who love him will share in his eternal life. It’s a huge truth all believers are invited to learn and embrace!

God’s surprising plan

God’s work of dual agency is key. He allows sinners their sin while he also calls believers to give thanks in everything; and to enjoy his profound peace, even in the face of evil. The lesson is that with God as our loving lord, our fears fade. We have his promises to confront and overturn sin for all who respond to him and embrace his Heart-to-heart transformation.

Here’s an analogy. Youngsters may be lightly burned by touching a pan just off a hot stove. We put his or her hand under a faucet of cold water, apply some salve, maybe a bandage, then offer an embrace until the crying ends. It’s bad—a painful moment—yet it brings a crucial and enduring lesson for life about hot surfaces. A simple but profound bad experience that is good.

How far does the analogy take us? Should every action that damages or destroys others be justified and dismissed because God makes everything good in the end? No! God as God will indeed confront and overcome evil. Yet with a crucial Bible caveat. God works things for good for those who love him. Not for those who ignore him. Exposed evil isn’t a path to universal salvation. God’s ultimate aim is very personal and focused: he invites the world he made in love to respond in love to his Son, his beloved Son. He invites love but doesn’t impose it.

This double reality of life is shared throughout the Bible. In the later chapters of Genesis, for instance, Joseph’s older brothers trafficked him into slavery to be rid of him. God, however, providentially meant their evil for good as he cared for Joseph’s family by moving Joseph into a premier status. Joseph understood: “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? 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” [Gen 50:20]. The same events revealed two opposite motives. Yet Joseph didn’t say his brothers were excused by God for what they had done in the past. Their need to repent for having hated Joseph was a separate conversation.

Job’s story is another example of providence. He was crushed by Satan, yet God meant Job’s experience for good. Satan, the evil instigator, gained permission from God to disrupt Job’s life. Despite Satan’s malignant aims God used, and still uses, Job’s life to display how his care is always active. As in Job 2:3—“He [Job] still holds fast his integrity, although you [Satan] incited me [God] against him to destroy him without reason.” Can this evil be considered good? Yes. In Job’s story believers learn that suffering isn’t always equated with divine anger. Satan’s aim was to prove that all humans are self-concerned and transactional—like Satan. God proved him wrong. As when Job declared, “Though he [God] slay me, I will hope in him…” [Job 13:15].

And the ultimate case of God turning evil for good is Christ’s death. Jesus came from heaven to live with us. Yet his own people killed him, as ordained by God. Jesus said as much: “it was necessary.” God used his crucifixion and resurrection to break death’s power [Lk 24:26 & 46].

As we noted already, this paradox of providence is crucial to faith. A great competition of good and evil has been clear ever since sin captured Adam and Eve in Eden. The devil was able to draw both spiritual beings and humans to be willing partners in opposing God. And this alliance seems to be winning throughout history, with God’s chosen people being overcome, martyred, or broken. Religious leaders in Jesus’ day—including the scholars, Bible conservatives, and politicians—united to kill him. God’s reputation has been tarnished even by religious people.

But as the book of Revelation discloses, God wins in the end. Evil will be fully confronted and destroyed when God sets up his eternal reign as promised in chapters 18 through 22. The bride and bridegroom are finally united. Then God will judge every remaining expression of evil.

God’s permission to rebel

But what of the ages between the Devil’s fall, Adam’s enslavement, and the final judgment? Was God still in control? In the last century tens of millions of human lives were lost—more than the total of all the prior wars taken together. Worldwide evil was rampant, yet God still ruled, as he always has. In Psalm two we find that God even “laughs” as the nations rage against him. He is neither surprised nor set back by angry rebellion, no matter how widespread the losses.

Our question, then, “Why sin?” isn’t offered an explicit Bible answer. But we still learn by faith all we need to know. God answers, throughout the Scriptures, “trust me!” And trace the evidence offered in the Bible that God has been winnowing the world to separate wheat from weeds. The Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Scriptures work both to form and then to distinguish real faith. He asks, “Who will love me as I have loved you?” Then a bold, faithful minority responds, “We will!”

Some may ask why God hasn’t confronted evil wherever and whenever it first appears in history? Why wait for a final judgment? And why, if he rules, does he allow so much collateral damage by allowing sin it’s extraordinary reach? At least two answers emerge in the Bible.

One is that God engages humanity as communities: as family movements. So that sin is not an individual event but the emerging trajectory of a community. The second is that God knows all of us, Adam’s offspring, are sinners. And that he wants all of us to recognize our own sin for what it is. Seemingly benign sins are deceptive, like a slow malignancy that only over time will display itself as deadly. God gives humanity all the evidence of guilt it needs—he is wholly fair.

God, for instance, told Abram, “…the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete” [Gen 15:16]. This set out sin in a community context and a finite set of souls known to God. Populations aren’t open-ended. Paul reinforced this lesson in Romans 11:25 by writing of the “fulness of the Gentiles” yet to be born. God also confronts whole communities when sin starts and spreads—as in Achan’s sin at Ai. It impacted all of Israel until it was confronted and resolved [Josh 7]. So the fact that evil always metastasizes needs to be learned. Faithless ways are never benign.

With this we also learn that the resolution to sin is community based. God’s providential love and saving power works in and through communities, not just in individuals. So we need time to see God’s dual agency at work. He allows evil to unfold, and in the process holds his opponents accountable for their aims. Yet at the same time he also draws out beloved children who were once sinners who then came to grieve and repent by seeing the Son as crucified and raised to life for them. This is his mercy of winnowing the world by his word—what Jesus addressed in his John 17 prayer. His plan is for the Son to have a cleansed, holy and blameless bride for eternity.

What about our free will?

To set one false option aside, the cliché that “God gave us all a free will” is no answer to the problem of sin. This actually assumes a perpetual dualism, supposing a realm divided between God’s will and human will. It might sound logical, but it excludes God from the vast realm of supposed human “free will.” As if a special zone exists called “human freedom”—a place God is forced to avoid. This is certainly what the devil posited when he promised Adam freedom to be like God. Satan’s promised realm? Death—a place defined by full spiritual and human autonomy. And where God, by his holy nature, was supposedly unable to enter or engage. Death, in other words, is not the cessation of a soul; but a realm where souls exist separately from God who “is life” in himself. It presumes that God owns life and Satan owns death. Yet at the cross and the resurrection of Jesus from death we found that God rules both realms.

This demonic fancy misses the reality that love defines morality, not acts of rebellion. God, who “is love,” works by heart-based means to engage human souls. And he unites himself in love to all who are his. And by this Spiritual union he entered death to rescue his beloved ones. So that as believers, our faith was awakened in a responsive love for God and endures the necessity of physical death while rejoicing in the certainty of eternal life. All who are “in Christ” are united in both his death and life. So, on the one hand, all those who prefer the unrepentant self-love of Satan remain in perpetual death. Their “will” merely revealed their greatest love—self. So, as Paul put it in 2 Thessalonians 1:9, eternal punishment amounts to God sending sinners “away from the presence of the Lord…” Giving them the independence they desire, away from God.

The key here is that the heart, as the Bible regularly asserts, is the basis for all of spirituality. It is where motives and moral desires operate. And where our competing loves wrestle each other for priority. As in, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” [Prov 4:23]. Or, as Jesus told his followers [Mark 7], everything we ever do “flows out of the heart of man.” So it’s the heart that links God’s providence to souls. He invites us to a “Heart-to-heart” bond of love. And we love because he first loved us [1 Jn 4:19].

So the difference of a supposed free will and our actual heart desires is that one pretends to be self-determined, while the other recognizes the power of external attractions. The fallen heart is captured by its main demonic attractions: status, comfort, money, power, sex, thrills, and more. True Christians love Jesus after God, in his providence, has opened the eyes of our hearts.

To say more, we see the role of hearts and love in the providential text of Romans 8:28, “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good…” [my italics]. So, too, is access to God’s wealth of self-disclosure in 1 Corinthians 2, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” [v.9].

If one ignores the heart’s role we will miss God’s love. The Bible is clear on this. It identifies three human responses to God. Those who are heart-dead. Those who are stirred and then oscillate—finding ideas of God attractive, but who aren’t captured by him. And those who are captured by his love and loveliness. Only the latter, lovers, belong to him. And they have eternal life because they “know him” relationally and want him above every competing love in life.

To ask, then, whether God is always “in control” of the universe has to be examined by love. And not based on a human free will either choosing to obey or to disobey God. The devil knew this as he tested Jesus with the claim that “all the kingdoms of the earth” have been “delivered to me…” [Lk 4:5-7]. Jesus didn’t deny it. In Eden Adam gave humanity over to Satan’s deceitful ambitions. John also said as much: “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” [1 Jn 5:19]. Yet Paul added a crucial heart-based caveat in his own affirmation of this worldwide slavery to Satan. He wrote of all humanity as those “among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” [Eph 2:2-3]. “Passions” and “desires”? Yes, heart-shaped lives. That’s how humans live. Not by a supposed free will.

So how is it that God is both “not in control” of humanity, but “fully in control” at the same time? Start by asking what God wants. If he’s merely a transactional being, looking for humans to obey Bible demands, then the Bible narrative is all about behavioral compliance and perpetual law-keeping. Yet this would have precluded the Samaritan woman of John 4! So if God’s aim is to engage and transform humans by creating new hearts that make them into a holy and blameless “bride” for the Son, then the main function of Bible history is to gather those who, after tasting sin and disobedience, repent and embrace Jesus. It’s the lady’s lesson in John 4.

The crucial benefit of encountering evil

In light of this ambition there is a benefit in exposing evil as evil. The devil—who is unable to create new realities, but instead twists God’s goodness into evil—tries to blind souls. To have them miss the difference between good and evil. God, then, exposes evil as wholly destructive. As the goodness of food is turned into gluttony; or when the brokenness of self-indulgence—as in sexuality without marriage—appears. As evil becomes obvious, repentance gains traction.

God, in his mercies, thus allows humanity to see the tragic outcomes of sin. That “the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth” [Gen 8:21], and that these intentions will only bear poison fruit. The analogy of moral immunization helps here. A partial exposure to a virus produces a reaction against the virus. These antibodies harden the body against the virus. So it is that limited exposures to the tragedy of sin alerts a soul to sin’s destruction. And here the Spirit of God readily meets those who repent. Not because they’ve “chosen” to repent, but because the Spirit brings God’s love to life through a person’s felt vulnerability to evil. Human weakness allows for God’s strength to emerge. This “good” is a cry for help borne of real repentance.

But why do some, and not all, respond? We don’t have a full answer from the Bible, but we have some clues. The Bible regularly speaks of evil working through pride. The accumulation of success is a barrier for all who seek to be like god, while not actually wanting the real God. So it becomes the poor, the weak, the needy, the simple, and the oppressed who run to God when they hear of his love. As in the parable of a feast with a call to “bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame” after wealthy and secure invitees spurn the host’s invitation [Lk 14:21]. Or as Paul warned the Corinthians, “…not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” [1 Cor 1:26-29]. Wealth and success don’t wholly block successful people from coming to God, but prospects for their response decline—as in the tragic case in Mark 10:17-31 of a rich man whom “Jesus loved.”

These clues tell us that the entry threshold for heaven is identity-based and limited to a relatively small number as the “narrow” way. It depends on whether a person has a humble, need-based identity—and is thus open to God’s love—or if the person is “boastful” and with that, ready to negotiate a status as a minority partner with God. So God, who searches every heart, draws in those in despair over their sin, but isn’t attractive to the self-sufficient [see Jer 2:12-13].

With such a heart-based criteria for “election” we can broaden the clue offered in a broad reading of Revelation 3:20 as an explanation for why huge numbers dismiss God. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” Repentance is a gift given to sinners, and not to self-perceived saints.

Providence, then, is God’s applied love. He allows every created soul a chance to taste and see his goodness. And, providentially, he secures for eternity all those who respond in love to his Son. But for those with a taste for the deceitful pleasures of self-regard, he gives them what they want.

So our providential God is good, fair, and wonderful!