Episode Intro
If God is in control of everything that happens in the universe, where does that leave us as human beings? Do we have a say? Do we have any meaningful choice? Are we just robots? And if we make meaningful choices, where does that leave God and his sovereignty over the world?

In the last episode of Thinking Theology we saw how God upholds the world at every moment. God is in control of everything. He’s in control of the natural world, human events, individual life, human decisions, including faith and salvation. He’s even sovereign in some way over sin.

But where does that leave us as human beings? How do we fit into God’s sovereignty?

That’s what we’re thinking about in this episode of Thinking Theology.

Podcast Intro
Hi. My name is Karl Deenick. I write about theology and I teach it at Sydney Missionary and Bible College. Welcome to Thinking Theology, a podcast where we think about theology, the Bible and the Christian life, not just for the sake of it, but so we can love God more, with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.

Concurrence
The question of how human responsibility fits with God’s sovereignty is a tricky one. But there are helpful answers. The best short treatment of the topic is Don Carson’s chapter, “The Mystery of Providence” in his book, How Long, O Lord? What Carson does in that chapter is simply to show how the Bible simultaneously affirms two things: that God is absolutely sovereign and that human beings are morally responsible creatures with meaningful actions.

God’s Sovereignty
So, as we saw last time the idea of God’s complete sovereignty is clearly taught in the Bible.[1]

So Psalm 103:19 says,

The Lord has established his throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all. (Psalm 103:19 NIV)

Or Psalm 115:2 says,

Why do the nations say, “Where is their God?” Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him. (Psalm 115:2–3 NIV)

Or Ephesians 1:11 tells us that God,

works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will…. (Ephesians 1:11 NIV)

Or Romans 9:18 says,

Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden. (Romans 9:18 NIV)

From those passages and many others, we see that God is in control. As we saw last time, he’s in control of the natural world, human events, individual life, human decisions, including faith and salvation. And he’s even sovereign in some way over sin.

Human Responsibility
But the second idea, that human beings are morally responsible is also taught in the Bible.[2]

So Joshua says to the people of Israel in Joshua 24:14–15,

“Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:14–15 NIV)

Joshua calls the people to respond. He calls them to do something—to fear God.

Or Romans 10:9–10 says,

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. (Romans 10:9–10 NIV)

Or Ezekiel 18:30–32,

“Therefore, you Israelites, I will judge each of you according to your own ways, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall. Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, people of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign Lord. Repent and live! (Ezekiel 18:30–32 NIV)

The basic assumption of all those passages is that human beings are responsible and can respond in meaningful ways to God’s commands and pleas in meaningful way. God calls people to respond.

Both Ideas Together
But as Carson points out, what is even more interesting is how the ideas are sometime set side by side.

For instance, Proverbs 16:9 says,

In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps. (Proverbs 16:9 NIV)

We plan, we make meaningful decisions, but it is God who establishes our steps. It’s God who decides and determines what actually happens.

Or regarding the events in Genesis where Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery, Joseph says in Genesis 50,

Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. (Genesis 50:19–20 NIV)

The brothers had a plan, they devised it, they intended it, they executed it, but God stood over and above it, using it to achieve his purpose.

Or in Leviticus 20:7, God commands,

Consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am the Lord your God. Keep my decrees and follow them. I am the Lord, who makes you holy. (Leviticus 20:7–8 NIV)

You make yourselves holy, God says, but it’s God who makes them holy. Both are simply set side by side.

Again, in John 6:37–40, Jesus speaks about those who will come to him to be saved. He says,

All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. (John 6:37 NIV)

So Jesus says that every single one of those that the Father has given to Jesus will come to Jesus.

He also says later in verse 44 that,

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. (John 6:44 NIV)

So only those whom God draws will come. All those God calls will come to Jesus and only those God calls will come.

But then in the same breath he says,

For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. (John 6:37–40 NIV)

There, then, is the human side. It is those who look to Jesus who will be saved. In other words, Jesus simply puts together human responsibility and God’s sovereignty.

Likewise, in Philippians 2:12–13, Paul says to the Philippians,

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. (Philippians 2:12–13 NIV)

Paul says, “You work out your salvation, but it’s actually God who is working in you to will and to act.” Not just your actions but even your willing comes from God. And yet, the Philippians must still be at work, hearing and responding to Paul’s command.

Finally, in Acts 4 some of the early Christians are gathered to pray, they say,

“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed one.” Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed.

So the believers say that the rulers have plotted and conspired and acted to kill Jesus. But then they go on to say,

They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. (Acts 4:25–28 NIV)

The rulers plotted and acted but they did what God had determined beforehand should happen.

Teasing it Apart
Again and again in the Bible we simply see those two ideas reaffirmed: God is sovereign and we are responsible.

The problem comes when we try to solve the riddle by picking either one or the other.

So if we pick God’s sovereignty and lose human responsibility, we end up with what is called determinism. In determinism, everything is determined and human agency is more or less eradicated.

If we pick human responsibility and lose God’s sovereignty, we end up with what’s called libertarianism. In libertarianism God is at the mercy of our decisions.

Instead the view that the Bible consistently puts forward is what is often called compatibilism. Compatibilism simply holds the two together without necessarily trying to explain how they fit together.

Don Carson very carefully and helpfully puts together the two poles of compatibilism like this:

1. God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions in such a way that human responsibility is curtailed, minimized, or mitigated.
2. Human beings are morally responsible creatures—they significantly choose, rebel, obey, believe, defy, make decisions, and so forth, and they are rightly held accountable for such actions; but this characteristic never functions so as to make God absolutely contingent.[3]

In other words, God is completely sovereign and we are morally responsible, making significant and meaningful decisions, but our decisions and actions never curtail God’s sovereignty or make him dependent on us.

As Carson clarifies, it is not that God is not contingent or responsive to us in any sense:

He talks with people, he responds to them; he can even be said (in almost forty cases) to “repent” of his decisions (KJV), that is, to change his mind or to relent in his declared purposes.… But in no case is human responsibility permitted to function in such a way that God becomes absolutely contingent: that is God is absolutely stymied, thwarted, frustrated, blocked, quite unable to proceed with what he himself had absolutely determined to do.[4]

Carson also gives some helpful caveats for thinking about compatibilism:[5]

1. To say that God is sovereign and we are responsible does not mean we can explain how those two things work together. There remains a great deal of mystery.
2. If God is God and compatibilism is true, then it must be, Carson says, that God stands behind good and evil “asymmetrically”. That is, although evil does not take place outside God’s sovereign control, it is never chargeable to him. He is never ultimately responsible, rather it is secondary agents who are responsible. But when good takes places it always attributable to God. Good flows from God even though it might be worked out through secondary agents.
3. The biblical view of human freedom is not what philosophers call absolute power to contrary. That is, the power to make choices completely unconstrained by any external or internal constraints. Rather the biblical view of human freedom is what is called voluntarism. That is, the power to do what we want to do. The problem is not our ability but our desire. In the new creation we will completely perfected. But the freedom we have in the new creation will not enable us to choose evil. Rather, we will unavoidably always do good because we will always desire good and not evil.

Outro
It’s tempting to want to solve the apparent impasse by giving easy answers. So, for example, it’s sometimes suggested that God deliberately limits his sovereignty in order to validate human moral choice. But the problem is the Bible just doesn’t go there. It would be such a simple thing to say to explain away the problem. But the Bible doesn’t do that. It simply puts both on the table and asks us to live with the tension.

It might be tempting as well to think that this tension is a weakness in the biblical worldview. It only exists maybe because Christianity doesn’t make sense. But it’s worth noting that the question crops up in other places too, like science. For example, are your thoughts completely determined by the underlying chemical reactions and biological systems that make you up? Or do you have a mind that somehow controls your biological functions and chemical process? That question is very similar to the theological question.

How does our responsibility fit with God’s sovereignty? God is in control of everything and we are responsible, making significant choices and decisions. But our decisions and choices never function in a way that makes God absolutely dependent on us.

Well that’s it for this episode of Thinking Theology.

In the next episode, we’ll be thinking about human beings. What does it mean to be human?

Please join me then.

[1] See Carson, How Long, O Lord?, 180–81.
[2] See Carson, How Long, O Lord?, 181.
[3] D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil, 2nd ed. (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2006), 179.
[4] Carson, How Long, O Lord?, 181–82.
[5] For the full list and explanations, see Carson, How Long, O Lord?, 189–93.