Lavender & Lace

Meticulous Sovereignty is a theological system of belief originated by John Calvin (for whom Calvinism is named) that says that God is so sovereign that everything is guided by His hand: nothing happens without God’s approval. Even sin has a place in the world, and the sin that occurs is ordained by God and is necessary for God’s sovereignty to exist. If God doesn’t ordain sin and evil as He ordains good, then God is not sovereign (according to Calvinism).

I don’t agree.

You’ve probably heard statements made by notable evangelical leaders in the wake of natural disasters, such as hurricanes from Katrina to Sandy. If one affirms meticulous sovereignty, then one must also believe God decided, desired, and carried out the weather conditions, the speed and direction of the winds, the deluges of water, and precisely which homes would be destroyed and which homes would escape.

But during my time studying the Book of Job I actually became convinced of the opposite. It is obvious to me from that story that while God is aware of everything that goes on in his creation, he does not control it. He gives us a number of valuable insights including:

1. Evil is real. There is a prince of darkness who does his own bidding. An unseen realm that exists around us which we are often called to war against. “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
   Ephesians 6:12 
2. The world is wild and there are things that happen simply because it was created that way. Best illustrated in Job 40:15-24 when God introduces two mythological creatures that are wonderful and yet untamable. They are symbols of chaos in the universe.
3. We don’t hold ourselves accountable enough for the pain and suffering we cause one another. This is best illustrated by Jobs “friends” who come to his aid, whom God rebukes at the end of the story.

I’m fine with talking about God’s sovereignty so long as one doesn’t assume that sovereignty equals “meticulous control.”  God sovereignly rules with wisdom, and you only need wisdom when you problem solve, and God could only need to problem solve if he populated his creation with free agents who freely create problems. 

A wise sovereign God can’t be a meticulous controlling god.

This affirms the plausibility that there are mechanisms, or spiritual laws, that God created that govern both the heavenly realm and our realm, to which He also abides as well. And I don’t believe He abides in these laws out of His choosing necessarily–meaning that a real choice exists for Him to abide in them, but they exist because those mechanisms and laws reflect the love, character, and justice that actually make up His very nature of being. They are the expression of who God is. And since God cannot change, neither can nature of the fundamental laws of His Kingdom change since they naturally emanate out from who God really is.

These spiritual laws then somehow made it altogether entirely necessary (not optional) to bring salvation to the universe through the person of Jesus.

God is certainly more powerful than any evil.  He could stifle it at any moment with a word. I don’t think anyone is denying that. And I think we all agree that there’s a sense in which it is proper even to say that “evil is part of His eternal decree.” He declared the end from the beginning, and He is still working all things for His good pleasure (Isaiah 46:9-10), but isn’t there a difference in working evil out for good and unchangeably determining evil yourself?

Calvin says that if someone falls among thieves, or if a person dies because a tree or house falls on them, the events are meticulously ordained by God. That is, God causes every death, even deaths that many of us attribute to accidental causes. He quotes from certain Bible verses to make his claim, but he overlooks other verses. Take the following example from Jesus Himself in Luke’s Gospel:

There were present at that season some who told Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. ² And Jesus answered and said to them, “Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? ³ I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. ⁴ Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? ⁵ I tell you, no; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:1-5, NKJV)

Calvin says that every thing, down to the “minutest” detail (his words), is directly and immediately governed by God. And yet, the Lord says that those who suffered at the hands of Pilate (who were killed and their blood mixed with sacrifices) and those 18 persons who died when the Tower of Siloam fell suddenly on them, were not harmed because they were more sinful than anyone else at the time. In other words, God did not cast righteous judgment on these individuals. They did not die because of the righteous judgment of God. If they didn’t die due to the righteous judgment of God, then they died because of accidental death, random occurrences for which God is not the cause. This contradicts Calvin’s claims that, if a tree falls on a person, that tree is directed by God.

What is praiseworthy about God’s sovereignty is not that he exercises a power he obviously has but that out of his character he does not exercise all the power he could.

Because he gave us free will.

God’s decision to create people who make free choices does not downplay His sovereignty but rather affirms it. It is not His perfect will for evil to occur, but His permitted will, because relationship requires choice. God did not desire the world to have such evil, but in order for humanity to have the freedom of choice and relationship, they have to have the freedom to choose to move away from Him. That’s exactly what happened. The enemy is permitted to roam the earth tempting humanity until final judgment (2 Corinthians 4:4; 1 John 5:19; Ephesians 2:2; Revelation 19), and each person will answer for whether they follow Satan or Christ.

He is in control, but he does not control.

Think about that for a moment: the eternal attribute of God is His omnipotence, which refers to His eternally limitless power. Sovereignty is a temporal characteristic, not an eternal one, thus we can say God is all powerful, not because He is sovereign, but He is sovereign because He is all powerful…or at least He is as sovereign as He so chooses to be in relation to this temporal world.  

As someone put it, “Sovereignty is the expression of God’s power, not the source of it.” 

And just as in the case of any book, one has to read and understand the end of the book to understand the rest of the content that precedes it.

Trying to draw conclusions from the Book of Job without considering the effects that the revelation of the life of Jesus and His work on the cross brought into being would be similar to trying to understand the full plot and inner-workings of a movie when you’ve only watched the first few minutes of it.

If we believe that God is the only one responsible for all events, including allowing any act of Satan’s. This mindset then in turn paralyzes the power that Jesus gave us through our faith to overcome the evils of this world (I John 5:4) and instead locks us into a passive, inactive, abdicating, and non-aggressive stance to the troubles that become us. We, as Job and his friends did, continue to blame God for our troubles and pass them off as if He sovereignly ordained them for a mysterious, heavenly purpose. And in the process, we neglect to take the same attitude toward Satan and his evil works that Jesus and his disciples instructed us to take–which wasn’t to regard Satan as a messenger boy carrying out God’s dirty work, but was rather to fight him, to rebuke him, to resist him, and by all means to thwart his attempts to destroy our lives: Perhaps the reason is that it is always easier just to blame God for what happens to us than to take personal responsibility or to consider other alternatives.

If we pray for someone to recover from an illness and they don’t get well and end up dying it is much easier for us to say, “Well, I guess God took them into heaven…I guess God wanted them to die because He had a reason for it and knows better than us.“

But, it is much harder to say, “We don’t know why this happened exactly, but we DO know that God is a life giver and He isn’t responsible. Maybe I, or we, or the medical field somehow failed in the recovery process.  Or maybe something else that we don’t know about was going on. But let’s not blame God.”

It’s always easier to credit our unanswered prayers to a deity who we believe is able to do anything He wants to do at any time.

But, if we’ve seen anything from the life and work of Jesus, we should see that God’s desire is to bring life to His beloved children, not to take it. He gave His own life to save us, not to hurt us. He came to bring life, not punish, by destroying a rogue enemy kingdom. In light of this, are we going to think that after offering up Jesus for us all that God is going to just turn His back on us and cause us to suffer at His will? I think not. Not after the testimony of Jesus’s love has been demonstrated to us so strongly.

Although our cultural conditioning has lead us falsely to believe that the Judeo-Islamic-Christian God is able to do anything He wants at any time with any resulting negative consequences, I encourage you to take a new “wineskin” and pour Jesus’s work into it rather than interpreting His life and death from the old that was intended to pass away.

Let us also remember something about the ancient Mesopotamian religions. That they pursued appeasement because they considered themselves to be in a symbiotic relationship with the gods. The gods had created people to serve their needs; in response to such service, the gods protected the faithful people and provided for them (e.g., fertile fields). This perspective, called the Great Symbiosis, was the foundation of religious thinking in the ancient world. This symbiosis was benefit based: the gods reaped benefits from the labor of humans, and humans reaped benefits from the favor of the gods. This expectation was not based on the belief that the god was just, only that he or she was sensible. The gods needed what humans provided, and they in return were capable in most circumstances of providing protection. The system did not work this way because the gods were just, but because they were needy. The gods in the ancient world did not care about defending their character; they were only concerned to preserve their prerogatives and their executive perquisites. When a god did not receive the cultic rites to which he was entitled, his status was threatened, and his wrath and/or abandonment was predictable. Appeasement was a vital part of this system, and if Job had pursued appeasement, he would have shown himself to be a part of this system of thought. 

The truth is that if we read God’s responses in Job chapters 38-42 and the rest of the story, we see that despite all of God’s rebukes, He never offers up a conclusive reason for Job’s sufferings. God only emphasizes that Job and his friends’ understanding is feeble in light of God’s wisdom and power. God’s rebuke is that Job and his friends’ understanding of the circumstances are incomplete due to a lack of knowledge.

So how should we respond to suffering and evil? The same way Jesus did: heal it, fight it, rebuke it, and stand against it, knowing that suffering is not authored by God.

He is not the author of our problems; He is the solution.

A Christ who was sent by His Father to accomplish a deed that somehow, despite how we might think God’s omnipotence works, needed to be done in order to satisfy the conditions of the spirit and physical realms that God created them to operate in. 

And, so, it is my opinion that the very cross itself, the center piece of the whole of Christian faith, actually demands us to interpret God’s sovereignty in a manner that challenges our traditional view. The cross challenges us on how we ought to look at the relationship between God and Satan. 

At minimum, when we see the cross, it should tell us that there is something more behind the scenes at play between Satan’s existence and the accompanying problem of evil than having to surrender to the notion that God merely allows evil to take place in the word solely for His apparent beneficent, secret pleasure or redemptive purposes. 

Understanding the Book of Job, Satan, and God’s sovereignty MUST be viewed from the perspective of Jesus and the cross. The danger within the theology of meticulous sovereignty is that it shrinks God down and reduces Him to the size of a Mesopotamian statue of stone. A cold, empty god, who desires appeasement in exchange for blessing. But Jesus is the God who walked among us and suffered as we suffered. He knows the chaos of the universe and sits with us in dust and ashes repeating the words, “I’ve been there.”

So no, I’m not a Calvinist. I don’t believe God ordains everything that happens. Not because I don’t think that He can, but because I think that His purpose for redemption has always been greater.