Audio Transcript
We have a very heavy episode today. Before we get into it, I want to let you know that here at Desiring God we launched our Next Generation Vision to aggressively spread great joy in a big God to the next generation. We launched it this year to upgrade our technology and expand the distribution of our resources far and wide, all free of charge. As we close our fiscal year this month, this is an invitation to join us. Please consider giving a monthly or one-time gift to help offset the cost of free for thousands just like you. Go to desiringGod.org/give today. And if you already support us, thank you very much for making this ministry and this podcast possible.
Well, there’s a kind of news that will stop you cold, like what we read together in this email from a 17-year-old high school student. Her close friend, a teammate, and her friend’s mother were both brutally murdered. Here’s the question: “Pastor John, I’m a high school student. A girl who was my close teammate and her mother were recently brutally murdered. People say this was ‘her time’ or ‘God’s will,’ but I don’t understand how this can be true. The murderer’s actions were obviously sinful, violating God’s commands like ‘You shall not murder’ (Exodus 20:13). If their choices were evil, how could this tragedy be God’s plan? How does God’s sovereign will operate alongside human sin, especially when it leads to such profound suffering? How can I reconcile this and turn to the Lord for comfort and understanding in my grief?”
Sovereign over Evil
What I want to focus on here is this young woman’s last question, the very personal one — namely, “How can I . . . turn to the Lord for comfort and understanding in my grief?”
And the reason I want to focus there is because we’ve already dealt in several Ask Pastor John episodes with the larger theological question about whether God can do what he commands not to be done, and whether God can and does will that things happen which are sinful. We’ve dealt with that question several times: Is it sinful of God to plan, to will, that sin come to pass? For example, we recorded an episode called “Does God Decree Events He Doesn’t Want to Happen?” And the answer from the Bible is yes, he does.
The most significant example — and that this is relevant for her own personal situation I’ll try to show eventually — is from Acts 4:27–28, where Luke tells us that Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Gentiles and the mobs in Israel were gathered together to do what God “had predestined to take place” — and virtually everything they did was sin. It was evil to murder Jesus. Everything about it was sinful. And God willed that his Son be murdered so that we might be saved — even if we are murderers. It’s an amazing conjunction right there of the sovereignty of God and the saving love of God.
Another example is Job 1:17, where the Chaldeans attack and murder Job’s servants, to which Job responds in Job 1:21, “The Lord has taken away.” And the inspired writer of the book of Job, at the end of the book in Job 42:11, refers to Job’s losses, including the murder of his servants, as “the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.”
Planned and Governed
The Bible teaches that God is sovereign over every detail of the universe. Not a bird falls without his will (Matthew 10:29). “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he wills” (Proverbs 21:1). “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord” (Proverbs 16:33). We’re supposed to say, according to James 4:15, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” Everything that happens is planned and governed by the sovereign will of God (Ephesians 1:11; Isaiah 46:10).
This means that we will not be able to understand the Bible if we reject the reality that God can will that sin comes to pass without himself being sinful. We may not understand all the psychological dynamics of how he can do that, but that he does it is taught throughout the Bible.
“God willed that his Son be murdered so that we might be saved — even if we are murderers.”
So, it’s plain that the biblical phrase “will of God” does have at least two distinct meanings in the Bible. One is his sovereign will, by which everything comes to pass (Ephesians 1:11). The other is his revealed will, or his will of command, by which he tells us what we ought to do — for example, “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13). And the biblical teaching is that God is not sinful when his sovereign will decrees that a person act contrary to his revealed will.
Comfort in the Lord
Our young friend is asking, in view of her friend’s tragic murder, “How can I . . . turn to the Lord for comfort and understanding in my grief?” And here’s my counsel to this young woman.
1. Realize that this murder was evil and should be called evil and unjust. Don’t whitewash it. No theology of God’s sovereignty requires that you minimize the evil.
2. Believe that it was indeed contrary to God’s commandment not to murder. God’s law was broken.
3. “Weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15).
4. Grieve in your own heart, but not as those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
5. Embrace God’s promise for you and your friend’s family: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). Embrace that promise. He is near.
6. Embrace the promise that the Lord will strengthen you, help you, and hold you up in your sorrow (Isaiah 41:10).
7. Take hold of Romans 8:28 and, with all its mysteries, believe it. Take your stand on it as a solid foundation while everything is shaking. God works everything together for good, for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. God will in fact make this great evil serve some righteous and good outcomes, most of which you will not see until you no longer look through a glass darkly.
8. Take hold of the promise that even evils that result in death are seized by God and made to serve his eternal purposes of glory. “This light momentary affliction is preparing for [you] an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as [you] look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17–18). So, open your heart to eternity, and do not treat it as insignificant or far away. It’s not. God’s eternal purposes are precious and more important than his temporal purposes.
9. Take to heart that this eternal glory will include the end of all sorrow — totally. “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).
10. And finally, return to Acts 4:27–28, where God planned the murder of Jesus from all eternity. Remember, this was his Son. This was his Son. And he did it to save his enemies — namely, us. Amazingly, the clearest place in the Bible where God’s sovereign will decrees that his revealed will be broken is the place where he saves sinners for breaking his revealed will, and he does it by enduring our punishment for us.
