God's Will — Counselor Blog

Dr. John I. Snyder

God has all power and all knowledge and is second to none. No equals and no competitors. The fact that evil is rampant in his creation is no surprise to him. It’s there only by permission. From
time to time, evil may seem to be running wild, but in fact it’s always on a leash. And we should be grateful that we’ve never seen how bad it could become.

Exactly why God allows evil in his creation, he doesn’t bother to tell us, and he doesn’t need to. He is God. We can’t understand everything about God, but we have enough information to satisfy many of our basic questions. In many cases, God chooses to let us go through whatever evil or trouble we may be facing at the moment. He could have prevented it and allowed us an easy skate, rather than the tough slog some have to endure. He could end it entirely but probably won’t until he’s through using it for his purposes.

AN INTRUDER IN GOD’S GOOD CREATION

If we take a close look at both the Old and New Testaments, we notice something interesting about evil’s presence in the world. It is considered an intruder into God’s good creation but is allowed to prowl about for a time, and with a considerable degree of freedom. Yet it’s always within bounds.

Sometimes it may look as though it exceeds all limits, and whereas good often seems to run out of steam, evil seems never to tire. But just when we think God’s hands are tied, he yanks the chain and brings it to heel. He is ruler of all. Evil is evil and good is good, but whereas God never uses good for evil purposes, he often uses or blatantly exploits evil for good purposes. He does this by turning it upside down and inside out.

The stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are wonderful illustrations of evil being exploited for good. One of the clearest pictures comes to us in the account of Joseph. Young Joseph is mistreated, violently abused, tricked, kidnapped, enslaved, falsely accused, and imprisoned. Yet every time he is kicked and abused, he is mysteriously bumped up one more rung of the ladder. He moves from the deep hole in the beginning of the story to the position of the prime minister of Egypt at the end.

God used all the evil directed toward Joseph as raw material to construct not only his preservation from starvation and death but also the rescue of those who abused him as well as the salvation of the entire nation he served. As Joseph says, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20).

This pattern presented early in the Bible became the blueprint for how God has chosen to deal with evil in his realm for the rest of history. He may permit a certain amount of wickedness to
occur, but he always reserves the right to twist and use it for his own purposes. We see the same design in the New Testament.

What we see in Genesis continues throughout early church history, through the centuries of the martyrs, in the subsequent eras of the church, and up to the present day. This is God’s will for the remainder of time until he brings down the curtain and calls humanity to final judgment. After every tiny scrap of evil is dealt with in the complete justice and fairness of God, he intends to recreate a new heaven and new earth where evil is no longer even a possibility—where only goodness and righteousness will exist.

The manipulation of evil for good ends is one of the most exciting aspects of God’s program on earth. He uses the bad things around us in ways we couldn’t possibly expect. He brings good out
of the bad not in spite of it but because of it.

THE GRAND MASTER

Let’s examine a very earthly and human analogy of this. For example, it’s common practice to exploit the intentions of others for our own ends in a variety of ways. Consider the game of chess. As the competition progresses, the better of the two players cleverly ascertains his opponent’s game plan. He has two options. He can block and frustrate the plan immediately, or he can so arrange his own strategy to account for it, to absorb it. In this way, while his opponent is cheerfully fulfilling his own scheme, he’s also unwittingly fulfilling that of the superior player.

Just when he thinks he’s about to proclaim victory, he’s suddenly checkmated. The game is over.

So it is with God. He’s the Grand Master of chess, who can at any moment impose his own plan over ours (or anyone else’s), so that no matter what, he can bring the game to his own decreed conclusion. We may deliberately live a life of rebellion and selfishness, discarding his will at every point, or we may live a life of Spirit-empowered obedience and self-sacrifice. Whichever
course we take, he wins in the end. By scripting his own plot to overarch ours, he allows us to fulfill our plans but ultimately to bring about his will. In this way, evil is both exploited as well as judged, good is rewarded, and God is the victor.

Of course, this is not a perfect analogy, since there are no exact earthly parallels to how God’s nature and sovereignty are involved in human life. God is entirely unique and profoundly mysterious. He is revealed to us only in part. As I said, this revelation isn’t everything we want to know, but it’s enough to grasp the basics of what he wants us to know. The main point of comparison here is that the superior being uses the activities of the inferior for his own will.

Over the years, our family has discovered that some of the best things that ever happened to us came as a direct result of the worst things that ever happened to us. If we take the apostle Paul seriously “that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28), then we’ll eventually see how God still writes his superior, more sophisticated script over all others.

No matter what evils befall us, good (even excellence) may be brought out of them. This is one of God’s favorite things to do. This point is too important to pass over lightly.

And we need to remember, just as it is Satan’s purpose to take all that is good and turn it toward evil ends, so it is God’s purpose to take all that is evil in the lives of those who love him and turn
it for good. The commandeering and exploitation of evil for good is one of the most powerful aspects of God’s strategies on earth. He skillfully manipulates the bad things around us in ways we couldn’t possibly expect or imagine.

A TRUTH WE NEED TO BE FIXED IN OUR MINDS

We need to fix this truth in our minds. Between now and the final act of history’s play, God has determined to allow evil to roam about on a chain, not free to do anything and everything it wants, but to do much that we wouldn’t want. Evil will always be an intruder and an invader. As long as we dwell on this planet, we’ll always live in occupied territory. Evil will be relatively free (within God’s prescribed limits), but it will always be under the ongoing judgment of the Ruler of all things. Each and every day he will choose to exploit what evil determines to do and to turn it toward his good purposes.

Again, evil will continue to accuse, blame, abuse, misrepresent the truth, destroy, and pillage, but it will remain on a leash. It will never be totally free and will do no more than it’s allowed to do. God defeats it handily, takes it prisoner, and redirects it to bring the good he intends.

Why do I repeat myself? Simply to underscore this critical point: whether people choose to do evil or good in this life, God has decreed that he will write his will into the script of human history and bring it to its conclusion in exactly the way he has purposed.

We can oppose God’s will and do the most terrible things, or we can do everything in our power to try to please him. In either case, he’s able to enter into our own worldly troubles and sins and
in some mysterious way bring out of them ultimate good—both his and ours. Without doubt, evil, and all those who love it and are given to it, will face judgment and destruction. But it is to
God’s glory that we turn from it and live.

Dr. John I. Snyder is author of Resenting God and Your 100 Day Prayer. As an ordained Presbyterian pastor, John has served congregations in the United States and planted churches in California and Switzerland. He is the advisor and lead author for theology and culture blog Theology Mix (www.theologymix.com), which hosts 80+ authors and podcasters and visitors from 175 countries. He received his Doctor of Theology degree magna cum laude in New Testament Studies from the University of Basel, Switzerland. He also has Master of Theology and Master of Divinity degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey.

Posted at: http://gcdiscipleship.com/2018/11/01/why-does-god-permit-so-much-evil/