God in the Ups and Downs [Firebrand Big Read]

Photo by Pedro Velasco on Unsplash

Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The first line of the page reads: “This is an incomplete list of documented attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler.” Below that is a chart listing 24 failed attempts to kill a man with tens of millions of people's blood on his hands.

Meanwhile, on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln didn't especially feel like going to the theatre. Neither did his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln. Then, when they went to see the play anyway, the guards assigned to keep watch over their box were across the street at a bar. John Wilkes Booth, it seems, got lucky.

In both cases, it is hard for me not to wonder whether the world might have been a better place had things gone a little differently.

Perhaps cases like the above—and countless other examples from our own lives and from the lives of people we love—have caused Methodists to largely neglect the doctrine of providence. We refuse to accept the notion that God is the cause of everything that happens, and we are allergic to any account that might seem to suggest otherwise. We believe that God in his wisdom created agents with genuine free will, and we believe that we have good biblical reasons to support that view. But we have trouble squaring these convictions with a robust doctrine of providence; we are concerned to avoid even the appearance of pinning the blame for all the evil and all the accidents in the world on God.

Although we are right to be careful in this area, we avoid this hard conversation about providence to our own spiritual peril. If God is not somehow Lord of the various ups and downs of history and of our lives, then God is not Lord. If God has no real sovereignty over what Shakespeare's Hamlet called "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” God has no real sovereignty.

Christians—including Methodist Christians—have classically maintained a broad view of God's lordship and sovereignty. The Apostle Paul says, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28 NIV). Paul is insisting here not that God is the cause of all things, but that he works in them. Paul doesn't specify how this might work, but there are resources within the Christian tradition that offer some suggestions.

If God is going to work in all things, we should start by insisting that God must be supremely good, powerful, and knowledgeable.

I can imagine a god-like figure who is supremely good but lacking in power and knowledge. Such a figure would always operate with the best of intentions, but his results would be a mixed bag—sometimes they would work for the intended good, sometimes they might blow up in his face, and other times the results would fall somewhere in between those two possibilities. Equally, I can imagine a god-like figure who is both supremely good and supremely powerful but lacking in knowledge. I imagine this being's success rate would improve upon the first one's, but it must still fall short of perfection. Neither of them could work in all things for the good of anyone—they would be subject to the same randomness and unpredictability in the world and in the behavior of other free agents that we human beings are, even with their hypothetical perfect goodness and power.

The God we encounter in the Christian tradition is quite different. To perfect goodness and power, he adds perfect knowledge. According to at least one stream of the Christian tradition, this God doesn’t just perfectly know what happened in the past or what is happening right now everywhere—though both would be impressive achievements on their own. Nor does God merely know what will happen in the future—far more remarkable still. God also knows what would have happened.

The 16th-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina claims this is what Jesus means in Matthew 11:21 when he says, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes” (NIV).

Jesus spent much of his ministry in and around the Galilean cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida, but they ultimately rejected him. Jesus here seems to claim knowledge of how two of Israel's traditional enemies, the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, would have responded had Jesus focused his ministry there instead of in Galilee. Jesus is suggesting he knows how something that didn't happen would have happened.

I can wrap my mind around this a little bit by thinking about my children. Sometimes I can accurately predict how they will behave in situations that they've never been in. Maybe I can claim the same level of (imperfect) knowledge about a few other people that I know very well. But God must be able to work at a vastly greater level than that, having such knowledge of every individual, and even whole cities and, we should imagine, societies and species and universes as well. God has more than a hunch about these counterfactual happenings; he has such knowledge perfectly.

Where and how might such a perfectly good, powerful, and knowledgeable God act to bring about his good purposes in the world? There are at least four spheres in which such action can take place.

First, God can work in natural causes. The basic action in play here is allowing or permitting. God invented science and somehow sustains the natural world in existence and functioning. Second, and quite similarly, God can allow or permit the actions of other free agents. Most of the time we think of human agents here; however, this is also where we would account for the free actions of angels, demons, and the like.

Both of these first two spheres are extensions of what is classically called "general providence." Nature goes on, operating as it was designed to do, and God allows it to do so. God can work in such things for his good purposes. God is not the simple, efficient cause of such things, but God is able to make use of them.

We can even imagine how God could make use of the same event in radically different, person-relative ways. I can imagine a massive flood hitting a neighborhood, and many people experiencing it as a gratuitous and spiritually meaningless natural disaster. Perhaps one person experiences the destruction of all her worldly possessions as an invitation from God to be less tied to such possessions, another neighbor experiences it as God teaching him a hard lesson about humility, and still another neighbor feels the weight of the tragedy, but also finds an odd liberation in it, suddenly feeling free to move to another city to pursue some calling she had always found excuses to avoid. It is not that the flood was caused by God in a direct, intentional way, but having allowed nature to take its course, God is conceivably able to use it for a variety of purposes.

The same can be said for God working through free human agents. Often at this point the tradition feels obligated to supply some account of divine concurrence or double agency, whereby a person is not able to perform an action without some concurring act on God's part. This seems unnecessary and dangerously close to the edge of the slippery slope whereby God is characterized as the ultimate cause of all things, even the evil in the world. It is much more straightforward to think of God leveraging his supreme knowledge and power to work out his good purposes through other agents in a similar manner to how God works in nature.

To this point, we can consider the biblical story of Joseph, who goes from being his father’s favorite to being thrown into an Egyptian dungeon. The crucial action here isn't God's but that of his brothers, who wish him harm and decide to sell him into slavery rather than carrying out their original plan to kill him. After that, it only took a few transactions and one false accusation to put him behind bars. Later in the story, after a few examples of more direct intervention by God, Joseph himself draws the same distinction when, in the context of forgiving them, he says, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive” (Genesis 50:20).

It seems bizarre to imagine God thinking of killing Joseph, only to sell him into slavery instead. It is bizarre, because it was Joseph's brothers who did these things. I'll default again to Paul's language: Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, but God worked in it, as he works in all things, for the good of Joseph who loved him and was called according to his purpose. The evil intentions of his brothers didn't prevent God from drawing even their wicked actions into his perfect design; God can work in good actions as well as wicked ones.

So much for God allowing for the operation of both natural and personal causes in the context of his broader purposes. A third channel through which God works in the world is special divine action, divine intervention, miracles, and the like. God causes the sun to stand still in the sky, the Red Sea to part, or the tumor to go into remission. Dead three days, Lazarus comes forth, ordinary people speak the diverse languages of the ancient Mediterranean world on Pentecost, and the wicked city of Nineveh repents in sackcloth and ashes because of a sermon from a merciless prophet who hated them. God moves in some supernatural way, perhaps transgressing some law of physics, or perhaps simply speaking or acting in some other way. This is not merely God allowing someone or something else to act or concurring in the activity of some other agent; this is God himself acting.

Finally, a fourth locus of God's action is positioned subtly between God's mere allowing and God's active intervening. We can imagine God allowing a free human agent to exercise their freedom but suggestively prompting them to exercise it in particular ways that better serve his purposes. This is traditionally termed "special providence." Billy Abraham argues that a person's free intentions are radically underdetermined and open, providing space for God to suggest and persuade (but not compel!) a person to express their free intentions in ways that better serve God's design without interfering with their freedom.

Let's think about these possibilities more concretely, taking an apparently simple event. Suppose you flip a coin, and it turns up heads. There are several different things that might conceivably be happening with respect to divine action here. 

First, maybe God merely allowed the subtle natural (friction, air resistance, etc.) and human (e.g. the strength with which one sends the coin spinning into the air) forces to operate without interference of any kind. In effect, God allows randomness to do its thing—although even here we still imagine God knowing that the result would be heads, and he is prepared to work in that for the sake of his broader purposes. My hunch is that this is what happens most of the time with something like a coin flip.

Another possibility is that God directly intervened to make the coin turn up heads. God supernaturally interfered to ensure the outcome he desired, for instance, by altering the angular momentum of the coin as it spun through the air.

Yet another, subtler, possibility is that represented by special providence: you freely formed the intention to flip the coin, but there is more than one way to flip a coin. God might prompt you to use slightly more or less force than you would have used by default, for instance, ensuring the result was heads.

We can easily apply the same sort of analysis to a person who is running late and praying to God for a parking spot in an unusually busy lot. Maybe they find one through the operations of the normal course of natural and personal causes. Or maybe God directly interferes or operates through special providence. The same sort of thinking can be applied to the many apparently more consequential happenings of life: for example, tragedies, diseases, job changes, and the meeting and courting of a spouse. 

In any of these examples, we often lack clarity on which account of God's involvement is the correct one. Is God merely allowing this to happen, or is God somehow causing it to happen? Certainty tends to elude us here. In some cases, we might get a clue from the conviction that God doesn't act contrary to his own character. It makes little sense to me to think of God causing senseless violence or God causing someone to lose their faith, for instance. But beyond that, in many cases we just don't know whether God is causing or merely allowing an event to occur.

But we do know in all things God works for the good of those who love him.

Where does all this leave us? Perhaps with the figure of Job. God allows some truly horrible things to happen to Job, and Job never gets a clear answer as to why. But Job's initial response seems like a faithful one:

“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” (Job 1:21 NASB95).

On the one hand, we can respond like Job, remembering always who is on the throne. This is too often easier said than done. Violence and disease run rampant. Abuse and addiction abound, along with too many other dehumanizing forces to name. I don’t wish to minimize the reality or the significance of these aspects of life. Job himself knew deeply the sting of loss. Too many readers I’m sure do as well. I have tangled with more of such experiences than I wish.

The point here is simply that the life of faith is in part about seeing as. Living under the sovereignty of God means constantly looking at our lives for evidence of God's providence. We see our lives as a gift from a good God, a story written in no small part in God's own handwriting. But even where God’s handwriting seems absent, even when our story appears to be a tragedy or farce, even when we might most naturally be tempted to meaninglessness and despair, even when no vindication comes as it did for Joseph and Job, we can still look in hope for resolution, for meaning, and for vindication on an eschatological horizon. As people of Easter faith, the worst cross that the world, the flesh, or the devil can nail us to need not define us. 

In faith, a cross becomes a prelude to resurrection. And so, we can join our voice to that of the psalmist, whose most common form is to speak in the accent of lament. At times the psalms of lament even seem to flirt with despair, but they virtually never end there. Psalm 13 is instructive; after wrestling with the experience of God’s abandonment and hiddenness, his own depression and self-doubt, and the attacks and mockery of his enemies, the psalm ends with:

But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing the LORD’S praise,
for he has been good to me. (Psalm 13:5-6, NIV)

Believing that God sovereignly works in all things for our good, we might join in the complaints of Job or with those of the psalmist when things do not appear to be working to our good. This is also where petitionary prayer comes into the picture. We perceive a hideous gap between our good and our current reality, and we plead with the sovereign, provident one to bridge the divide.

Like Job and the psalmist, we experience life while expecting, perhaps even boldly demanding, God's redemption in this life or at least in the life of the world to come. But on the other hand, humility is the order of the day. Once again, Job's story can help here. Responding to Job's demand for answers, God refuses to give any. All Job gets instead is a two-part divine tirade about how much bigger God is than anything else Job can even imagine. As with his initial response to the tragedies that began the book in chapter 1, Job's reply to the divine tongue-lashing at the very end of the book is instructive.

Then Job replied to the LORD:
“I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:1–3 NIV).

We move through this life not always knowing what purpose might have been served by this or that event. But, by faith, we do know at least three things: first, God is somehow at work in all things. Second, God is working for our good – possibly in this life, but at a minimum God is working for our good in the life of the world to come. And third, our job is to do our best to live in wisdom and faithfulness under the sovereign providence of God.

Cabe Matthews is an ordained elder in the Trinity Conference of the Global Methodist Church, where he serves as Pastor of Campus Discipleship at The Woodlands Methodist Church in The Woodlands, Texas. You can find him on the web at www.cabematthews.com.