If God Is Sovereign, Why Is There Evil in the World?
Who Planned the Murder of Christ?
The evil Satan causes is only by the permission of God. And when an all-knowing, all-wise, all-powerful God permits something, he does so purposefully. What he permits is part of his plan. It would be unbiblical and irreverent to attribute to Satan (or to sinful man) the power to frustrate the designs of God.
The clearest example that even moral evil fits into the designs of God is the crucifixion of Christ. Who would deny that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas was a morally evil act?
Yet in Acts 2:23, Peter said, “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.” The betrayal was sin, but it was part of God’s ordained plan. Sin did not thwart God’s plan nor stay his hand. It accomplished his purpose.
Or who would say that Herod’s contempt (Luke 23:11) or Pilate’s spineless expediency (Luke 23:24) or the Jews’ “Crucify, crucify him!” (Luke 23:21) or the Gentile soldiers’ mockery (Luke 23:36)—who would say that these were not sin? Yet Luke, in Acts 4:27–28, recorded the prayer of the saints: “Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.”
People lift their hand to rebel against the Most High only to find that their rebellion is unwitting service in the mysterious and wonderful designs of God. Even sin cannot frustrate the purposes of the Almighty. He himself does not commit sin, but he has decreed that there be acts that are sin,1 for the acts of Pilate and Herod were predestined by God’s plan. If we are going to understand the Bible, we must embrace the counterintuitive truth that it is not sin in God to will that there be sin in the world.
Desiring God
John Piper
John Piper’s influential work on Christian Hedonism, Desiring God, challenges the belief that following Christ requires the sacrifice of pleasure. Rather, he teaches that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”
God Turns It Wherever He Will
Similarly, when we come to the end of the New Testament and to the end of history in the Revelation of John, we find God in complete control of all the evil kings who wage war. In Revelation 17, John speaks of a harlot sitting on a beast with ten horns. The harlot is Rome, drunk with the blood of the saints; the beast is the Antichrist; and the ten horns are ten kings who “hand over their power and authority to the beast . . . [and] make war on the Lamb” (Rev. 17:13–14).
But are these evil kings outside God’s control? Are they frustrating God’s designs? Far from it. They are unwittingly doing his bidding: “For God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by being of one mind and handing over their royal power to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled” (Rev. 17:17). No one on earth can escape the sovereign control of God:
The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;
he turns it wherever he will. (Prov. 21:1; cf. Ezra 6:22)
The evil intentions of men cannot frustrate the decrees of God. This is the point of the story of Joseph’s fall and rise in Egypt. His brothers sold him into slavery. Potiphar’s wife slandered him into the dungeon. Pharaoh’s butler forgot him in prison for two years. In all this, Joseph had done right. He had resisted sin. Where was God in all this sin against Joseph and in all his misery? Joseph answered in Genesis 50:20. He said to his guilty brothers, “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.” He didn’t say that “God used it for good” but that “God meant it for good.” It was part of God’s plan.
The hardened disobedience of men’s hearts leads not to the frustration of God’s plans but to their fruition.
Consider the hardness of heart in Romans 11:25–26: “Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved.” Who is governing the coming and going of this hardness of heart so that it has a particular limit and gives way at the appointed time to the certain salvation of “all Israel”?
Even sin cannot frustrate the purposes of the Almighty.
Or consider the disobedience in Romans 11:31. Paul spoke to his Gentile readers about Israel’s disobedience in rejecting their Messiah: “So they too [Israel] have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you [Gentiles] they also may now receive mercy.” When Paul says that Israel was disobedient in order that Gentiles might get the benefits of the gospel, whose purpose does he have in mind?
It is God’s purpose. For Israel certainly did not conceive of their own disobedience as a way of blessing the Gentiles—or winning mercy for themselves in such a roundabout fashion! Is not then the point of Romans 11:31 that God rules over the disobedience of Israel and turns it precisely to the purposes he has planned?
“It Was the Will of the Lord to Crush Him”
For example, the death of Christ was the will and work of God the Father. Isaiah writes,
We esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, . . .It was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief. (Isa. 53:4, 10)
Yet surely, as God the Father saw the agony of his beloved Son and the wickedness that brought him to the cross, he did not delight in those things in themselves (viewed through the narrow lens). Sin in itself and the suffering of the innocent in itself is abhorrent to God.
Nevertheless, according to Hebrews 2:10, God the Father thought it was fitting to perfect the pioneer of our salvation through suffering. God willed what he abhorred. He abhorred it in the narrow-lens view but not in the wide-angle view of eternity. When the universality of things was considered, the death of the Son of God was seen by the Father as a magnificent way to demonstrate his righteousness (Rom. 3:25–26) and bring his people to glory (Heb. 2:10) and keep the angels praising him forever and ever (Rev. 5:9–13). As Paul says, Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross was “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:2). It was fragrant, not abhorrent, as God saw it in relation to all things.
Therefore, when I say that the sovereignty of God is the foundation of his happiness, I do not ignore or minimize the anger and grief God can express against evil. But neither do I infer from this wrath and sorrow that God is a frustrated God who cannot keep his creation under control. He has designed from all eternity and is infallibly forming with every event a magnificent mosaic of history. The contemplation of this mosaic (with both its dark and bright tiles) fills his heart with joy as it reflects the entire panorama of his glorious attributes.
And if our Father’s heart is full of deep and unshakable happiness, we may be sure that when we seek our happiness in him, we will not find him “out of sorts” when we come. We will not find a frustrated, gloomy, irritable Father who wants to be left alone but a Father whose heart is so full of joy that it spills over onto all those who are thirsty and long to be satisfied in him.
Notes:
- For an explanation and defense of this statement, see John Piper, “Is God Less Glorious Because He Ordained That Evil Be?,” Desiring God, July 1, 1998, https://www.desiringgod.org/.
This article is adapted from Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist by John Piper.
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