by Jacob Ninan
You know the story of Joseph, one of the sons of Jacob in the Old Testament. Joseph was Jacob's favourite son, and that made the other sons very angry with Joseph. One day when he was alone with them, they wanted to kill him. But finally they sold him off as a slave to some traders. He ended up as a slave in Egypt, and then, because of a false allegation against him, he was put in jail. He had the gift of interpreting dreams and that took him to Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and Pharaoh made Joseph the prime minister of Egypt.
But there are some Christians who think of God as one who controls everything that happens on earth. According to one of them, God had a plan to take Joseph to Egypt and make him the ruler there. So, God made Joseph's brothers hate him, sell him off as a slave so that he could be taken to Egypt where he would be placed in jail and then meet Pharaoh finally. What a preposterous idea about God! But this is the kind of idea some Christians come to when they start believing that God is totally in control of everything that happens, and that therefore everything that happens is from God! They don't seem to realise that by this they are making God out to be someone like a puppet master who pulls his puppets by strings so that they will do exactly what he wants them to do! They apparently do not think fully through such ideas to realise that what they are saying is that God is also responsible for all the evil that happens in the world.
Thinking further along this idea, it would appear that people who do wrong have really no choice when they do it because God caused them to do it. And yet God punishes them for doing it! Don't you get furious with people who project God like this? How can anyone love a God like this? How can they trust in Him, wondering what He will make them do next? Can we really think that God is arbitrary in His decisions, haphazard in what He does, unjust, having no feelings for people who suffer, and even responsible for evil? This is a work of Satan infiltrating the minds of Christians by misquoting certain verses in the Bible, in order to malign God and to turn them away from Him.
In case you think I am exaggerating, let me give you some actual examples of what people think. I read in a famous book about a mother who was high on drugs and drowned her small children in a river, and afterwards, when she had become sober, got angry with God saying, "Why did You kill my children?" A young man came to me for counselling who told me he was losing his faith in God who had taken away his mother through cancer two years ago, and then broken up his relationship with his girl friend. He said he found it difficult to love or trust God any more. Then there was this woman who married the first man she came across, believing that it was God who had led him to her, and who was now suffering in an abusive marriage.
What is the concept about God behind such thoughts? Obviously they assume that God is sovereignly controlling everything that happens in their lives and therefore that He is responsible for all the bad things that come to them. These are not just some thoughts of random people but samples of a major problem among Christians. The Devil is behind such teachings.
God is holy, righteous, just, loving, kind, merciful, compassionate, etc. There is no evil in Him and He cannot do anything evil. When God created mankind, He created us with the ability to make our own decisions. That is part of being created in the image of God. All the problems we have on earth now are the result of man's sinful choices. We do wrong personally and get hurt, others do wrong to us and we get hurt, and all of us suffer from the common results of man's sins on the earth. How can we blame God for bad things that happen to us?
Yes, God had a good plan for Joseph's life, that he would be the one who would save the people of Israel from the famine that would come. God knew that Joseph's brothers were going to want to kill him, and so He saved him from that. He worked around what happened to Joseph to bring him to Egypt and to finally make him the prime minister at the right time. But God was not the one who made Joseph's brothers or anyone else to do evil to him. "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose" (Rom.8:28). Everything that happens to us is not from God. Everything that happens is not good. Many evil things happen to us. But God causes even the evil things to produce something good for us. The ultimate good that God has for us is that through all the challenges in life that we go through, we become more and more like Jesus in His character (Rom.8:29).
Many Christians have heard Jer.29:11, "'For I know the plans that I have for you,' declares the LORD, 'plans for prosperity and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.'" This is declaration about the intention of God's heart towards people. We can understand this better when we see that it was addressed to the people of Israel who were in exile in Babylon because of their leaving God and going after idolatry, and who had not repented yet. This good intention in God's heart is for all people. If any disaster comes to anyone, it is certainly not from God. God has no evil in Him (1Jn.1:5). Even when He sometimes punishes people, it is with a good intention that they will repent.
Sending Jesus, God's Son, into this world was the supreme demonstration of God's love for all people (Jn.3:16). Salvation is open for all people, but only those who choose to believe will actually experience. The fact that many people choose to refuse this salvation is not because of any fault on God's side, but only because they will not accept God's offer of salvation. Look at God's heart when He says that when wicked people die He gets no pleasure from that (Ezek.18:23). His heart's desire is that everyone would come to experience salvation (1Tim.2:4). People may imagine that God is not keeping His promise of sending Jesus again to this earth. But the reason for this apparent delay is that He is waiting for more and more people to come to Him (2Pet.3:9).
So, what do we mean when we say that God is in full control? He is the creator of everything, and all things exist and function because of Him. He is sovereign in that He can decide to do whatever He wants, and He is almighty in that whatever He decides to do, He is able to do. It is because of ignorance about this that some people wonder how He could have flooded the whole earth in the time of Noah, made a dry path through the Red Sea, stopped the sun in its position for Joshua to complete his battle, etc.
But at the same time we must not forget the fact that God has created us in His image, with a similar but limited ability to make decisions and do what we decide. We people have the ability to choose between what we know to be right and wrong. Of course, whatever we do, it will have good or bad consequences. Consequences will automatically follow our actions, and we have no ability to do something and then to avoid the consequences. When we do wrong, we suffer, and we also cause suffering to others around us. When we suffer, we can't put the blame on God!
When we say we can use our free will we are not implying that God is no longer sovereign. God's sovereignty is above us, and our free will is something of a smaller measure which we have been created with. It is wisdom to understand that it will be always good for us to align our choices to the will of God, and to deny our own desires in order to be subject to God.