This podcast is part 2 of our discussion of the Sovereignty of God with Jeffrey Johnson. If God is sovereign, then is he also the author of sin? Jeff writes, “This, my friends, is one of the most difficult questions in theology. If God is willing but unable to prevent evil, He is not omnipotent. If God is able but unwilling to prevent evil, He is not good. If He is willing and able to prevent evil, why is there evil?” These questions are the focus of our discussion. Find information here.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture and we're here today to continue a discussion really of Jeff Johnson's upcoming book on the sovereignty of God but we're gonna dial in on one chapter, it's chapter 9 and it focuses on God's sovereignty over sin. That's the question, is God sovereign over sin? Jeff, Jeff, will you ask, what about sin? If God is all-powerful, would he not be responsible for all the evil pain and suffering in the world?

And then you say this wisely, this my friends is one of the most difficult questions in theology. If God is willing but not able to prevent sin then he is not omnipotent. If God is able but not willing to prevent evil, then he is not good. If he is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why is there evil? So what sayeth thou?

I say that's a very difficult question. It's puzzled theologians and Christians since the beginning. It's been a puzzle. Job understood that, and that's the reason he was puzzled himself. I like what you said about our need, our need for God to constrain sin.

Moreover, we need God to be more powerful than the power of sin within us. Yeah, I think that's a big part of how to explain how God is sovereign over sin and remains all-powerful and all-good is that he is a God who judges sin and he's a God who restrains sin and his mercy. And Part of the fact that he's sovereign is not that he causes sin, but he restrains it to the various levels that he desires to carry out his divine purposes that are in accordance to his glory and his goodwill. So everything that God does is good. Everything that we do as fallen creatures is bad.

And I think that's the thing people don't understand is the fact that we are utterly, take God out of the equation, remove God from me, even as a Christian, take God out and I'm left to myself, then I am going to sin. I am not going to turn to God. There's none good, no not one. And so I'm going to sin, and it is God that restrains me and restrains all of us and restrains sin, but He permits it in his justice and judgment over sin. So it's quite complicated, but at the same time, it's quite comforting that there's nothing, even sin, that's outside of his control.

And you tie this doctrine to the goodness of God. You have to understand the goodness of God before you can understand how it deals with sin. So maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean, God is good and we're bad. If you don't have those categories at the beginning of your inquiry of this difficult question, you're going to get a wrong conclusion that God is good.

And so I spent quite a bit of the beginning part of the chapter proving that the Bible teaches us that is God is good and all that he does. And God's goodness over sin is executed in his judgment over sin and justice over sin. Imagine a just judge seeing some evil take place and the just judge says, I'm not gonna judge that, I'm just gonna let it go. Well, all of a sudden the judge is evil. So if God is good, he has to punish sin.

And then we have to ask, what does the Bible say punishment of sin looks like? Well, Romans tells us that the punishment of sin is God letting us go in our own way. And it's like, this is what you get, and here's your justice. I'm going to kick you out of the house. In the house, you've got comfort and you've got provisions, but if you're gonna act this way, then you're gonna be pushed out of the garden.

You're gonna be pushed out of the house. You're gonna be pushed out of my protection and provision, and you can have sin. And so it's God's justice over sin to allow us to spiral down into deeper sin. And then we might complain about that. Well, God, you could stop me from sinning.

No, this is his judgment over our sin by allowing us to fall, fall, fall, all the more deeper into a destructive behavior. This is the wrath of God revealed, Roman says, that He gave us up over to the passions of our hearts. And for that, He gave us over to the deterioration of our own bodies, and that it keeps on going and going, and there's no end to how far sin can take us. Jeff, you started the chapter with a couple of pages actually recounting Dawson's Ridge, which was a 40-some-odd-day raging battle, death and annihilation on both sides, rotting, stinking corpses piled up all around the few that survived around it. The thing I really appreciated about you starting the chapter that way is it just clears the playing field of anyone who just wants to turn the frown upside down.

Hey, turn the frown upside down, you get a smile, right? That's such a superficial treatment of pain and suffering in the world. So you sort of bring the reader face to face with this thing that just won't be held at arm's length by turning the frown upside down and makes you think deeply about horrific suffering and how it is that the good God of the Bible can preside over those things. Yeah, yeah. It's not sufficient, like you said, for us just to talk about me stumping my toe and how God is sovereign over a little pain on my little toe.

What about the death of a child? What about drowning incidents? What about the concentration camps in World War II? What about these tragic, awful things? It's hard to even ponder.

That's the reality of sin that we have to grip and put our minds around. How can God allow that? And it is difficult. These are difficult things. And I'm not under any assumption that I was able to solve all the mysteries on this topic in my chapter.

There are some things that's beyond my, I think beyond all of our abilities to fully grasp. But there are some things that are revealed to us in scriptures for our own comfort and for our own edification to kind of cope with how God is good over these awful awful calamities and our own personal experiences that can traumatize us. That God has a purpose. There's many, many reasons for these things, but one of them, he has a purpose behind all things. And that, if there's no purpose behind it, then all of a sudden when evil is meaningless, that's when there's despair.

And that's where there's hopelessness. But to see that God has a good, awesome plan. And I tell our congregation quite a bit, I use this something of this nature, I want to try to encourage our people that when we get to heaven there's not going to be one detail of our life, one suffering that we experienced that we would change. But maybe not till we get to heaven will we understand that. Not till we get to heaven will our tears be wiped away.

And I don't think that our tears being wiped away in heaven is just simply that we don't cry anymore. It's when we see the reasoning behind God's plan over suffering in our life and our loved ones, and then we see, wow, I wouldn't change it. I wouldn't go back and change one part of that because it worked out something so far. The glory that it worked in us and in God's great plan is so glorious that it makes the suffering look trite and small in comparison. You know you say that God is sovereign over the instruments of evil, and you give lots of examples.

I thought those were really helpful. And you say, God does not sin by letting us sin. Rather, God is upholding his justice and hatred towards sin by giving us over to sin. This does not mean that God is sinning, but that God is upholding his justice and hatred towards sinners. Yeah, that's God's justice.

And this is what Paul says, that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven towards all ungodliness and it gives this explanation of God turning this over. And you can look at America and the state that our country's in. How did we get here? Well, because of our sins and because God is just and God will not be mocked. We will reap whatever we sow, the Bible says.

So we get what we want. And as a country, we wanted this and now we got it. And God is too good to bless us for our sins and he's too just. So he sends us the very thing that we wanted and we can't complain about that. We can't go, well hey that's not fair.

No, we wanted this. We chose this. And God in His good justice, righteousness, says, this is what you get. You say, in all of this, God is sovereign over sin, but not the author of sin. So let's talk about that.

Yeah. I mean, James makes it clear that even our temptations, we don't need to blame God for. We got to see that we're the source of evil, God's the source of good. And so, we're not tempted. We're tempted when we're let away in our own desires, and that brings forth death.

But God is the Father of good gifts, and all that He can do and all that He does is good. And so He's not the author of sin. He's the author of goodness and justice over sin. And so that's just a very vital theological point that we all need to understand as we think through these difficult questions. I don't think you quoted Calvin in the book, but Calvin said something very much like that.

He said, you know, where does the wickedness of man come from that he should fall away from God? Well, it's not from creation because he created everything good. So you cannot tie it to the origination of God for mankind. I think the classic text, for me it's the most memorable and probably for most people comes out of Genesis chapter 50, where Joseph speaks of the sins of his brothers against him. So let me just read Genesis chapter 15 verses 19 and 20.

His brothers were afraid that after the death of their father, there would be retribution and Joseph actually comforts them by saying this. Joseph said to them, do not be afraid, for am I in the place of God? But as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring it about as it is this day to save many people alive. So there is this recognition first that God is sovereign and Joseph asserts that he is not in the place of God, but that God is...only God is in the place of God, and what his brothers intended for evil, God actually, his intent was to use it in his plan for good to save the lives of many people. Yeah.

And we see that that very attendant for good was preordained because God gave Joseph those dreams. Yes. You're going to be ruling over your brothers. So that was pre-planned. But what God didn't tell Joseph was, your brothers are going to sell you in slavery, you're going to have all these years of misery.

He didn't go through all the evil that would take place on Job. But after years, Job could look back and say, God's good plan was fulfilled for the salvation of him and his family and many others through working out through the sins of his brothers and the sins of Potiphar and the sins of Potiphar's wife and the sins of everyone involved. God was good while man was evil. Yeah, the kind of the core of this chapter that you wrote are these eight propositions of truth from Scripture that really ought to be framing our understanding of these things. If you get these eight truth propositions from the Bible fixed in your mind, then you actually can keep your wits about you when things like these battles in World War II are going on.

One of those is that, it's number three in the chapter, evil agents sin willfully. In other words, God's not making them sin. He's not restraining their evil, and those are completely different things. You know, Jonathan Edwards talks about that, and he gives a really interesting illustration. He says, to permit something is not to be the author of it.

And of course, Edward says it's a reproach and a blasphemy to God to say that he's the author of sin. But he gives an illustration, he says It's like the sun. The sun is the author of warmth and light for the world. But when the sun goes down, he is not the author of the darkness and the cool. He says the absence of something does not make, in this illustration, the Son the author of the cold.

And I just thought that was a helpful illustration. Yeah, it's a great illustration. In the section of the chapter where you just established the goodness of God, you said this, to charge God with sin is sin. So however we understand these things, we don't wanna be caught in the place where we're actually condemning God for not being good. The Bible only teaches one thing, and that is that God is good in all of His thoughts, in all of His words, in all of his deeds.

And to charge him with sin is a sin ourselves. I thought that was really helpful because it always helps me to reverse engineer things in this way, meaning start at the end state. The end state is we're free from all our corruptions, we're with the Lord in heaven, we're exponentially more wise than we are today, we know exponentially more today. What will be our conclusion then? Our conclusion then will be, God, you did everything perfectly.

It's perfectly wise. It's perfectly good. Okay, so the problem now with my understanding is I don't have the wisdom I'll have then. I don't have the knowledge. When I have both, I'll conclude, God, it was all just right.

You know, MacArthur, he says that sin cannot be a created thing. It's not part of creation. He says, sin is neither substance, being, spirit, nor matter. So it is technically not proper to think of sin as something that was created. And then he says this a little bit like Edwards Sin is simply a lack of moral perfection in a fallen creature And so then he goes on to say That's why fallen creatures have to bear responsibility for their sin.

Yeah, I think it's important to see that there's one source of goodness, not two. And that God is that source. And if he removes himself as the source of goodness and restrained, restraining grace, if he removes himself, and he does it for a just reason, for instance, you sin, my judgment for your sin, God would say is, I'm gonna remove myself. You don't want me, I'm gonna remove myself. By removing himself, which is the source of goodness and restraint, he does no wrong or evil or he's not pushing Adam or Eve or anyone else, any sin or inter-sin.

Sin comes natural to the person. And kind of the illustration in my head that's always been helpful is, if I held a two pound weight in my hand, the weight naturally on its own accord would want to sink or go down. I may want to choose to push it up and hold it up. And if God is the one who's holding all things in His hands, and you are the weight, and your natural potency and desires is to go down towards sin, God can hold you up in His goodness and restraint, and He does that all the time. Restraining grace keeps you and I and all of us from sins that we couldn't believe that we would do, but we would do in the right circumstances.

God keeps us out of those circumstances to restrain us. But all he has to do is say, I'm just going to lower my hand. By lowering his hand, the weight goes down. He's not pushing the weight down. He's just, injustice lets us go.

And we will naturally fall to our own demise, but we'll only fall to the measure that God allows us to fall. He remains sovereign over the degree that we fall. And there's a Bible verse that says that, the wrath of man shall praise me, and the rest I will restrain, or I'll pittle belt around, I'll keep from happening. So he's gonna use the devil, he's gonna use you and I, he's gonna use Adolf Hitler and everybody else to carry out his purpose and they'll do it, they'll carry out their sins on their own accord, and God in His sovereignty will control that exact measure that He restrains them. I was so thankful that you ended up in the chapter taking us to the cross because there has, in all of human history, there has been one innocent sufferer.

Now, there have been many who didn't deserve the suffering from the source that they got the suffering from, but that's not the same as an innocent sufferer. The innocent sufferer was the Lord Jesus Christ, who willingly took real agony and suffering on himself. He who knew no sin was made sin that we might become the righteousness of God in him. That is really where injustice and wickedness, God was willing to enter into that on our behalf. Right.

With that in mind, I know this sounds harsh, because we think of, We just naturally think of people as we love people, and we should. And there's the reflection of God's image in all people. So there's a value that people have because there's a reflective glory of God's image in all people. But you take that reflective glory away from man, and that man is so desperately wicked and evil. And he's all the more wicked because he reflects God and he's taking the reflection of God and defaming that reflection.

Man is so utterly wicked, there's literally no pain or suffering that is too harsh or undeserving of man. And I know that's hard for us to comprehend and to accept sometimes, But there's only one man that is holy, only one man that's innocent, only one man that should not have suffered. But like you talked about, did willfully, and he did it not unjustly because he took our sins and justly endured the wrath of God for us. Talk about the mystery of God's sovereignty over sin. There's the answer to it.

And that shows you how good God is. You know, there are statements in our confession, the Baptist Confession of 1689, that touches on this whole matter of the human will, the fallenness that we experience, and God's interaction. But in chapter 3 of God's decree in the first paragraph, we read these words. First of all, that God is both holy and wise, and he says, Whatever the confession is, whatever comes to pass, so as thereby is God neither the author of sin nor hath fellowship with any therein, nor is violence offered to the will of the creature." That's our will. He's not doing violence to our will, nor yet is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established in which appears his wisdom in disposing all things and power and faithfulness in accomplishing His decree.

I think that statement is helpful. There's also another statement in chapter 5 of the confession, but there's just such a rich heritage of language for all of these things. Gresham Machin answers this question, yes man is responsible for his wicked actions and no God is not the author of sin And then he acknowledges the difficulty. He says, how could a holy God, if he is all powerful, have permitted the existence of sin? What shall we do with this problem?

I am afraid we will have to do with it something that is not very pleasing to our pride. I'm afraid we shall just have to say that it is insoluble." And then he says, Is it so surprising that there are some things that we do not know. Because I think this doctrine pushes our minds to the edge where it's difficult to grasp all of it. Our minds are so constrained by our humanity that we don't understand everything about it, but we can understand a few things about it that we've just talked about it. But praise the Lord that God is sovereign over sin.

My sin and your sin, the sin of every person in the world, he's in control and he is gonna use that to sum up all things in Jesus Christ. And that will be the end of the matter. It's amazing that he uses our sins to draw us to him. Uh-huh, right. That's bringing good out of evil, truly.

In fact, most people who are converted, they come to this devastating moment where they realize I cannot go on anymore without God, and I want to turn from my sin, and then they do. And it's the sin that delivered them from the sin. It's amazing. Yeah. Well, Jeff, what a rich treasure.

And I hope everybody goes out and pre-orders your book on the sovereignty of God. It's a great book, so full of Scripture. And I'm confident I'll keep going back to the references in the book which I so loved. By the way, one thing I really liked about your book is that you didn't just publish the raw references. You published the words of Scripture with the references.

That helped me so much, and it so attracted me to the message there, and it just invigorated my soul, made me happier than I was before I wrote. Praise God. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you. And thanks for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast.

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