Death, Disaster, Disease, and God

Part one of three in a series on the sovereignty of God

By James Pruch
February 6, 2008 

What would it be like to worship a God who could get frustrated? What would it be like to worship a God who, when something bad happens, cries, “Ah! I didn’t see that one coming!” What would it be like to worship a God who was in control of about as much as humans are?

I believe that most Christians believe that God has some kind of providence and sovereignty over all things. On the other hand, I believe that a large number of Christians believe God is only sovereign in as much as he doesn’t interfere with our freedom or in as much that he doesn’t cause bad things to happen. God is sovereign, people say. But they may follow that up with, “He doesn’t hurt people or destroy things or make them choose him.” But what does that turn God into? Does that lower God to the stature of a human? If Satan-or something else-was the cause of evil or calamity or damaging weather or people turning away from Christ instead of God himself, then wouldn’t that be performing an act more powerful than God?

This idea permeates much of Western Christianity today. Most American Evangelicals today would say after a natural disaster, “God has a plan” but most wouldn’t say, “God caused this for some reason.” Similarly, when a family member gets cancer, the Christian will say, “God has a plan” but he will not say, “God gave you this for a reason.” Now, I want you to know that not everyone speaks this way, but God’s sovereignty does not seem to me to be a deeply cherished belief among twenty-first century Christians.

There is a school in Evangelical thought today that even goes a step further. This belief says that God does not even know what is going to happen in the future. It is called “Open Theism.” John E. Sanders, a major proponent of this theology, says:

However, in our view, God decided to create beings with interdeterministic freedom which implies that God chose to create a universe in which the future is not entirely knowable, even for God. For many open theists, the “future” is not a present reality-it does not exist-and God knows reality as it is.¹

This is an extreme belief and I would assume most Christians do not hold to this, yet fragments of this doctrine have been filtering through Evangelicalism for generations. My guess would be that many who read this article grew up in an environment where it was taught that God only controls to a certain extent and “allows” other things (namely “bad” things). I grew up in such an environment. But let me ask you this: Can the God who created the universe and owns everything in it be relegated to simply “knowing” certain things and simply “allowing” some things to happen? Wouldn’t an all-powerful, all-sufficient God have to do more than “know” what will happen? And, if you are an Open Theist, wouldn’t a God who is vastly superior to humans, whose standard is perfection (cf. Matt. 5:48), and whose decrees are lovely (cf. Ps. 19:7) be able to do more than just “predict” the future? Perhaps you are fine with that belief. Perhaps you are content with believing in a God who, on some levels, controls no more than you or I. Perhaps you are satisfied with worshiping a God who is Almighty over good and glorious things and one who is helpless over disasters and disease. I am not fine with that.

My contention is that the God of the Bible, Yahweh, is not a frustrated God who is surprised by anything that happens. He is not a God who ever finds humans or Satan doing something that is outside of his will. God is not a God who makes things up as he goes along, adjusting his plans according to the decisions and works of man. I am passionate about God’s sovereignty in the world and in my life and it is my hope that after reading this, you will be persuaded to be passionate about the sovereignty of God as well. The surety that comes with knowing God is in control of everything has been so warming and beautiful to me. I pray you will be able to share it as well. I think this deep truth of Scripture helps us experience the abundant life that Jesus promised in John 10:10.

Over the next three weeks, I want to look at what the Scriptures say about God’s sovereignty and omnipotence. Many people give their opinions and many others-some of whom are my close friends-talk of God’s sovereignty as if it is to be despised, loathed, and a doctrine created by men who want God to look like a deranged puppet-master. For me, it gives rest, peace, comfort, and joy. The first of these three articles will be on God’s sovereignty in natural evil, including death, calamity, and disease. The second will be on God’s sovereignty over moral evil. The third will be on God’s sovereignty in personal salvation. I will try to be as detailed as possible, but for a fuller discussion, I would suggest reading Wayne Grudem, “God’s Providence” in Systematic Theology and/or John Piper’s article, “Is God Less Glorious Because He Ordained That Evil Be?”

First of all, we need to briefly discuss what God’s will is. There are two wills in God. First, there is God’s sovereign will, which is unchanging, eternal, and happens the exact way God planned it. Second, there is God’s revealed will, which is what God commands (or what he plainly tells us we should do). We could use the Ten Commandments as an example of this. These laws can be broken, yet certainly God doesn’t want them to be broken. God’s revealed will falls under the umbrella of his sovereign will. This sovereign will controls everything, upholding the world and ordaining all things, including bringing life and death, sickness and health, and prosperity and calamity (1 Sam. 2:6; Lam. 3:37; Amos 3:6-13; Matt. 5:45; Heb. 1:3). God’s revealed will is what we can know-moral laws, instructions for godliness, etc. Obviously, it is God’s sovereign will that will be the focus of these articles. We will be examining Scriptures that talk about God’s control of all things in the universe, even down to the most insignificant sparrow that dies (Matt. 10:29).

Death
A few years ago, when the tsunami hit the South Pacific, I heard a person say that God had brought that to judge people, but it was also to wake up the survivors and others around the world. In response to this, I heard a friend say that God wouldn’t do something that violent-that he would not kill people like that. Last year, when a friend had cancer, someone said, “Satan caused this. God doesn’t give cancer; he only allows it to happen.” People will say, “Where was God,” when they get the phone call that a loved one died in a car accident. I believe that God is right there, weeping with them, mourning the loss of the family, yet at the same time, he wills the accident, the cancer, the tsunami to happen.

Because God is a dynamic, multi-layered Being who is able to feel far more emotions at one time than we are, the Bible says he ordains death to happen. In 1 Samuel 2:6, Hannah prays for a son and she proclaims, “The Lord kills and the Lord brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.” During Job’s life, he experienced physically devastating symptoms. In Job 1:20 he says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.” Then in verse 22, it says, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.” So, we see that it is not wrong to think this way. In Psalm 135:8, it is said of God, “He it was who struck down the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and of beast.” When someone dies-even by a murder, an evil catastrophe, or something else-though what happened may be wrong, God performs it in a way that is not wrong. Scripture never blames God for sinning when he uses a secondary agent to bring about evil and neither should we.²

Further, in Deuteronomy 32:39 God says, “There is no god besides me; it is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal, and there is no one who can deliver from my hand.” When Bathsheba became pregnant by David, God punished David by killing the child. Second Samuel 12:15 says, “Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s widow bore to David, so that he was sick…Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died.” Even James 4:14-15 says, “Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” These verses show that God is in control of everyone’s life-the smallest infant to the greatest businessman who plans six months ahead.

It’s evident that though God hates evil and does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezek. 18:23), he ordains that it be when and how he decides. God is the giver of life and he is the taker of it. He owes it to no one. Certainly this is not something that Satan or any other human has the power to do.

Disaster
Now, let us look at calamity or what we can also call natural disaster. This is usually accompanied by death, but what about the event itself? What about tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, or hundreds of others including animal attacks, droughts, or floods? Amos 3:6 seems very clear: “Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has done it?” It was God who brought the flood on the world because of wickedness (Gen. 6:9-7:24). It was God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins (19:23-29). In the same way, God brings weather-good or bad-to the earth. God says to Job in Job 38:35, “Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’?” Psalm 147:18 says, “He causes his wind to blow and waters to fall.” And if that wasn’t enough, from the mouth of our Lord Jesus himself in Matthew 5:45, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

In Psalm 135:7, David writes, “He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses.” In Deuteronomy 11:17, God warns his people to obey him. If they disobey, he will “shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you.”

Even animals are controlled by God. “And at the beginning of their dwelling there, they did not fear the LORD. Therefore the LORD sent lions among them, which killed some of them” (2 Kings 17:25). And in Daniel 6:22, God “shut the lions’ mouth” and they did not harm Daniel. God controls every living thing, even the smallest living organism, as Piper writes, “If God can shut the mouth of a ravenous lion, then he can shut the mouth of a malaria-carrying mosquito and nullify every other animal that kills.”³

Disease
Of course Job is the greatest example of this in the Bible. But even in Exodus 4:11, God says to Moses, when he was afraid of speaking to Pharaoh, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?” God is communicating his sovereignty over physical disabilities. John Piper helpfully comments on this:

In other words, behind all disease and disability is the ultimate will of God. Not that Satan is not involved; he is probably always involved one way or the other with destructive purposes (Acts 10:38). But his power is not decisive. He cannot act without God’s permission.⁴

Paul describes his bout with some kind of ailment in 2 Corinthians. He writes, “So to keep me from being too elated by the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from being too elated” (12:7). Is this out of God’s control? Did Satan pull a fast-one on God? I don’t think so for the fact that humility would never be a design of Satan. It was God’s plan and Satan was merely being used by God. John MacArthur once said that we should think of Satan as a servant of the Most High God. It may be hard to process that, but Satan can do nothing outside of God’s will. The reason we know this is because in Mark 1:27, Jesus casted out unclean spirits and the people said, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” Even the most horrific circumstance is not out of God’s power-he even holds Satan in the palm of his hand.

Charles Spurgeon, the great London Baptist pastor, summed this doctrine up beautifully:

I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less than God wishes-that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens-that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their courses. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebud is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence-the fall of leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.

A great comfort verse for me has been Psalm 115:2-3, which says, “Why should the nations say, ‘Where is their God?’ Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.” God’s sovereignty is not something to be feared. It is something to cherish and love! I pray that you would submit to the God who does all that he pleases. I pray that you would fall more deeply in love with the Almighty God who cannot be manipulated or persuaded to do man’s will. I pray that you would treasure the God who said, “For God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Numbers 23:19).

God will do what he has decreed. He will not change his mind. He is not a man and he is not even like man. He is so far and above what we are or ever will be. May you rest in that greatness and power! He is all-sovereign, all-knowing, and all-powerful. I hope you will embrace that.

“For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36).

Amen.

. . .

Part 2 – How Can a Holy God Ordain Evil to Exist?
Part 3 – God’s Sovereign Choice in Salvation

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[1] Open Teism Information. John E. Sanders, Accessed 2/6/08.

[2] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 325

[3] John Piper, “Is God Less Glorious Because He Ordained That Evil Be?”
[4] Ibid.