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Part 7: Theological and Pastoral Issues

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the foreknowledge of God in this address from The Gospel Coalition.


What I’m going to do in this hour, with your permission, is to talk about three areas. The first of the three areas is the nature of God-talk. That is, the nature of accommodation in language and some things to bear in mind. That’s something that could easily occupy us for several hours, but I want to say at least a few words in this regard.

Secondly, I want to talk a little bit about God himself and some of the ways historically in which we have talked about him: the economic and immanent Trinity and notions of different wills in God and what bearing it has on such things as prayer and adoration and things like that. Finally, I want talk about some matters connected with theodicy. That is, suffering and evil and questions like that not merely from a theoretical perspective but how they might be considered pastorally. That’s where I’m heading. I’m not doing much more than priming the pump a bit in every case.

1. The nature of God-talk

There is a book by Janet Martin Soskice that is published by Oxford University Press (1989. It’s in paperback so it’s not as expensive as it otherwise would be. It is by far the most sophisticated treatment of metaphor I have read. There are several huge theories of metaphor, and her treatment is very, very good indeed.

Let me give you her definition of metaphor and then press on a bit to draw some further lines she draws. I don’t have time to run through the whole argument of the book. I do require all students in my PhD seminar on the nature of mystery read that book just as prolegomenon to the course. It has nothing to do directly with the course; it just helps for a little clearer thinking when you start coming to talk about things like metaphor and simile and type and things like that.

Found on page 15 of Metaphor and Religious Language, her definition of metaphor is “that figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another.” That stands over against other theories of metaphor. You will see why this is important in a moment. Just give me a little bit of rope first. For example, some theories of metaphor are substitution theories. In substitution theories, metaphor is another way of saying what could be said literally. That’s not quite right.

In this view, a metaphor is merely an added power of language, an ornament, not a constitutive form. For example, if you say, “Herod is a fox,” is that merely saying Herod is cunning? If that were the case, then cunning and fox would, finally, be exact synonyms. If “Herod is a fox” and “Herod is cunning” say exactly the same thing and nothing more, then cunning and fox are exact synonyms, and one is merely a more colorful way of saying the same thing.

The problem with substitution theory is it loses all the color. It loses the evocativeness. It loses the stimulation. It loses the flight of imagination. Listen to Soskice’s definition again. “Metaphor is that figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another.” It’s more open-ended than mere substitution. You will see this is important in due course.

There are some that are comparison theories. This holds that something like “Herod is a fox” really means, “Herod is like a fox.” To say, “This house is a beehive,” is really to say, “This house is like a beehive,” and everybody recognizes it is like a beehive, but this is still an ornamentalist view.

It fails to explain what is really interesting about the metaphor. It fails to mark the fact that a good metaphor doesn’t simply compare two antecedently similar entries but enables us to see similarities in what previously had been regarded as dissimilar, and this by a flight of imagination, of evocation.

A third set of theories comes under the category of emotive theories of metaphor. These deny all cognitive content to metaphor, all content of meaning. The impact is purely affective, but it is very difficult to formulate a convincing theory of emotive meaning that is bereft of cognitive content because the emotion depends on the cognitive content. It’s very difficult to separate those two. It’s virtually impossible, in my view, to conceive of emotive power apart from the cognitive content that elicits it.

Then there are incremental theories. These argue what is said by a metaphor can be expressed adequately in no other way, but still there are differences of opinion here as to how that metaphor achieves its unique task. I won’t even go through these. There’s an intuitionist theory, a controversion theory, an interactive theory. My point is, I think her definition is extremely powerful, and in all the other theories I have read (which is a lot) you can find too many counterexamples for them to hold. This one is flexible enough to preserve the cognitive power.

With that sort of background, what do we mean when we start talking about God? Let me begin tangentially. I want to come in from the side. Do you remember in the vision of Isaiah in chapter 6, the seraphic beings surrounding the throne cry out day and night, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty”? What does that mean? “Holy, holy, holy.”

Some people say the qadowsh word group has to do with separateness, so is that merely saying, “Separate, separate, separate, is the Lord God Almighty”? You sort of feel you have lost something there, don’t you? In many contexts, it clearly does have to do with morality, rightness in some sense. Are the seraphic beings merely saying, “Moral, moral, moral, is the Lord God Almighty”?

In fact, I would want to argue, regardless of the etymology, holy (the qadowsh word in the Old Testament) builds up in a set of concentric circles. It has a narrower function right at the heart and, then, it moves out and expands in its meaning as it is applied to other beings farther out. In the first instance, holy is almost an adjective for God. God is holy. God is God. There is no other. In that ultimate sense, only God is holy.

That has, no doubt, etymologically, overtones of separateness, because God is like no other. He is other than what we are. Although it is important to keep saying things like, “We have been made in the image of God,” and things like that, and he can refer to us functionally as his sons, nevertheless, it is important somewhere along the line to get this notion straight that God is other. He is not like us, only more so, a sort of souped-up human being. He is holy. He’s God.

The evidence on which that is based is vast. You start with creation. However you think God finally did it all, nevertheless, the Bible is pretty clear the creation was originally something that happened to introduce something that was not, whereas God always was. In other words, the entire created order is dependent; God is independent.

We say today he’s the God who is self-existent. We can’t say that with respect to the rest of the universe. The rest of the whole order of things, the whole universe as we know it, is dependent. It is God-dependent. It is God-existent. It is not self-existent. In that sense, God is unique. There’s only one.

In fact, the Puritans had another word they introduced into the discussion. He is the God of aseity. It’s a word we ought to reintroduce. Aseity, from the Latin a se, from himself. God is so much from himself that he doesn’t need us. Isn’t that what Paul says unambiguously in Acts, chapter 17, when he’s introducing God to the pagans?

Their visions of gods were that they were interdependent with the whole human created order, but he says God does not need us, as if he has need of anything. He is the God of aseity. In fact, it’s just the reverse. We have need of him. We’re dependent upon him for everything. God doesn’t need us. That’s what Acts 17 says.

Self-existence has to do with aseity in connection with origins. At the beginning, God always was self-existent, whatever beginning means in that sort of context. The entire universe is not self-existent. God alone is self-existent. But as the whole created order goes on, he is also the God of aseity. He doesn’t need us. He doesn’t need us.

Isn’t he the God who says in the Old Testament, “If I were hungry, would I turn to you for two bits to go to McDonald’s? The cattle on a thousand hills are mine. If I were hungry, would I turn to you?” He doesn’t need us. It’s not as if in eternity past before the created order there was God, pining away in heaven, saying, “I’m so lonely. I’ll have to make somebody to stroke me in worship or else I’m going to be lonely for all eternity.” He doesn’t need us. He doesn’t need us.

After you’ve said that, you don’t want to then go further and start inferring, which would be a wrong set of inferences from other things that are said about God, that God doesn’t care about us or that God doesn’t interact with us or that God is not personal or that God doesn’t love or that God is passionless in every sense. I’m not inferring any of those kinds of things.

I am insisting the very doctrine of the holiness of God is bound up with his uniqueness, and that uniqueness is bound up with his self-existence, his independence, his aseity. He always was in eternity past happy. Before time began the Father loved the Son; the Son loved the Father. It’s not as if the Deity was imperfect until he created us so we could stroke him with our praise choruses and he would feel better. He doesn’t need us. He really doesn’t!

Now don’t draw the wrong inference from that as if he doesn’t care for us or he doesn’t interact with us or he may not be made angry by us. I’m not inferring any of those kinds of things. I am saying, in the deepest level of his being, God is holy. Undoubtedly, in the language of Scripture, that can be portrayed as a brilliant, shining light before which even the angelic beings have to hide their faces and bow and cry, “Holy, holy,” but it’s all part of the imagery that gets across the notion that he is separate. He is distinct. He is unique. He is other.

That’s part of Christian monotheism. He’s not like the gods of the Greeks. The gods of the Greeks could use theos in the singular and theoi in the plural, but when they spoke of the gods in the plural it was a whole lot of individual gods who were all finite. They were going around raping people and killing and loving and hitting people over the head and bribing people.

The interaction with the Greek gods makes Peyton Place look tame. Then sometimes the Greeks could speak about god in the singular where clearly what is in view is a kind of pantheistic god, which isn’t the God of the Bible at all, so the Christians came along and they insisted with their deep heritage in the Old Testament and with the anointed apostolic preaching of Paul and of others in pagan contexts as in Lystra and supremely as in Athens, “God doesn’t need us. He made the universe and everything in it. He is sovereign. We depend on him.”

He’s getting all those points nailed down before he, then, goes on to start talking about who human beings are and what idolatry is. All of those things he gets in place before he starts introducing Jesus. It’s a frame of reference in which everything is understood. What that immediately does, of course, is as soon as you start stressing the transcendence of God, the otherness of God, there are dangers that notion could be shanghaid by neoplatonic categories.

Of course there are, just as there are dangers in our culture of stressing God’s personal attributes to the point whereby we make him, finally, reduced to finitude because all our experiences of the personal are in the domain of the finite. My wife is finite. My daughter is finite. My son is finite. You’re finite. Because all of our experiences of interpersonal relationships are in the domain of the finite; therefore, we say God is a person, and we say, “Oops!” Suddenly, we’re in danger of thinking of him as one more finite being, just sort of a little more pious.

That’s why classical theism at its best has always kept saying, “God is simultaneously sovereign transcendent.” That is, transcendent above space and time, unique, holy, other, different from us. Transcendent over there and sovereign over the whole show, on the one hand (sovereign transcendent), and personal, interacting with us as other persons who have been made in his image.

It’s within that framework it is entirely sobering to reflect there has arisen a Redeemer for fallen human beings rather than for fallen angels, for we (not angels) have been made in the image of God, and it is to us the Redeemer comes. I would want to argue that sort of approach to God, in the first place, is just elementary, Christian faithfulness. You can dicker over the fine points of the definitions, but that, it seems to me, is part of holding that God is holy so that it’s not just a formula you sing in praise choruses.

It’s recognizing his otherness, his transcendence, his utter glory. He’s the center of all things so that everything is dependent upon him and he is dependent on no one else. It is part of what it means to confess God as God, to confess God as holy. Yet, he is personal in his dealings and comes to us in words. Words? That, then brings us to how you talk about this God.

Have you ever wondered in your imagination as you’ve thought back after reading a passage like John 5:16–30 and see how the Son always has done even in eternity past what the Father commanded him to do? Then, in eternity past, God decreed certain things, and the Father sent the Son, and the Son obeyed.

Have you ever wondered what conversations were like between the Father and the Son in eternity past? You could hurt your head on this stuff. Did they speak English? How does a bodyless infinite person converse with another body-less infinite person of the same substance bound with human oneness? In words?

What does it mean that the Father sent the Son? Was there any point in eternity past when the Son didn’t know this and got his instructions one day? What was the nature of divine communication in intra-Trinitarian, preincarnate, premundane glory? I could give you a very sophisticated list of possibilities, but the short answer is I don’t have a clue. That’s the short answer, because God is transcendent.

It’s within that frame of thinking about God, then, the best treatments of how God has disclosed himself in words always stress divine accommodation. God disclosed himself in human words. Not in divine words but in our language, in Hebrew, in Aramaic, in Greek. Human words with particular idioms of particular time and places. This is part of what some have called the scandal of historical particularity.

God does not disclose himself in some vague feeling, a mystical glow that comes to different people in different times in exactly the same way. Rather, there is a scandal of historical particularity in God’s self-disclosure, so when he discloses himself in Hebrew, it’s not modern Israeli Hebrew. It’s classical Hebrew, because that’s when he did it, in the classical period.

When he discloses himself in Greek, it’s not Aristotelian Greek. It’s not Attar Greek. It’s Hellenistic Greek with a Jewish flavor. Surprise! Surprise! Because that’s the Greek that was spoken then. It’s part of the scandal of historical particularity. He did not disclose himself in mankind. He disclosed himself in a man, a human being, a Jewish human being living in the first century. It’s all part of the scandal of historical particularity.

What that does, what it keeps doing, is raising the question about how this transcendent, holy, other God communicates with us who have been made in his image who are locked in time, who are finite, who are very particular, and compared with him, extremely limited. Even the best of us only know a few languages. Even Gleason Archer, bless his socks, only knew 34. Compared with all the languages in the world, that’s a pretty small thing.

God could talk to him, no doubt, in 34 languages. If he had a thirty-fifth, dear Gleason wouldn’t have understood. What was going on, then, in this historically scandalous communication in Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek? What was God giving up? How was he accommodating himself to talk to us that way? What is communicated that way? When the Father talked to the Son in preincarnate glory, did he use Hebrew?

With all of our insistence on inerrancy and the truthfulness of Scripture, in all of our exaltation of the Word of God which is right … which is right … do not confuse questions of inerrancy, questions of truthfulness in this God-given revelation with any suggestion that somehow this Word reflects the mind of God exhaustively. God cannot disclose himself to us exhaustively, not because this is a limitation on God but because we are too limited to receive an exhaustive communication.

Even when God does say something, if you have an omniscient person conveying something somehow to another omniscient person, all that person is conveying presumably is being conveyed. They both know everything. I don’t even know quite what communication looks like there, but the point is all the connotations and the denotations and the asides and the assumptions are all there in the perfection of all of its wholeness and interrelations.

But God communicates something to us, and because God is the anchor of omniscience on any definition of omniscience you can be sure what he discloses is the truth, but it’s such a limited truth compared with all that God knows it’s already a massive accommodation just to communicate to us.

Then you add in not only our finitude but our sinfulness and you realize how immeasurably gracious and glorious this God is in disclosing himself to us in words. Again and again and again, so many words in Scripture saying similar things because we’re so thick it takes us quite a while to understand these things. Then pouring out his Spirit upon us to open up our eyes so we will see things and understand things that otherwise, quite frankly, we wouldn’t. We’d be too obtuse.

That is the language we are now using to talk about God. Now you’ve come to the heart of the question of accommodation. We don’t have any other language. We only have human language. That’s all we have. I don’t have access to God-talk directly. In fact, in the past there have been many, many people of liberal persuasion who have argued, in fact, infallibility can’t be true, inerrancy can’t be true, because as soon as you make something into a human document, “Well, to err is human,” so that any revelation from God has to embrace error.

Many people have argued that in the past. My response to that would be to say, “When you say, ‘To err is human,’ you are not saying everything human beings say and do is automatically erroneous. All you are saying is that it is the common fate of humankind to err, partly because we are finite, but even more, because we are sinful.

But that does not mean everything we say is necessarily erroneous, and if God is so superintending what he gives even through human hands, then for all of its finitude of expression, for all of its particularity of form, nevertheless, it can be true, and it is anchored in God’s omniscience. That’s why it is so important to anchor it in omniscience.”

I don’t think there’s any real satisfactory answer to postmodern epistemology which keeps stressing again and again and again that we can only interpret things in our narrow frameworks; therefore, our narrow frameworks mean, finally, we can’t get anchored into an ultimate reality because my narrow framework is different from your narrow framework. It’s certainly different from the narrow framework of some brother who speaks only Swahili in East Africa.

But if beyond all of that we say there is an infinite God who does know everything, who talks, who deigns to talk to us in accommodated language, we can be sure his language is truthful. It anchors us. There is a way out of the morass of postmodern epistemology precisely in Christian revelation. That’s another question I can’t afford to explore here, but you see how important it is, finally, to this whole notion of how limited our knowledge and our talk about anything is, let alone our God-talk.

Now we come to talking about God. God has disclosed himself to us in words, our words. On the one hand, Scripture says we are made in his image, and on the other hand, it uses all kinds of mortal expressions to talk about the immortal. All kinds of limited expressions to talk about the omnitemporal, the omniscient, the omnipresent.

“Great is the power of the Lord! He can move mountains. He can assuage our fevered brows. He can beat whole armies. He can hold back the sea. He can make thunders roar.” What’s this but endless metaphorical ways of getting across the fact that God is so powerful he can do whatever he wants to do?

Occasionally, you get statements that are outside of this metaphorical domain that are sort of extensions of this that say, “He does whatever he wants in the armies of heaven and among the sons of men. Is anything too hard for the Lord? Why should you be surprised that God has raised this man from the dead? Do you realize with omnipotence there cannot be degrees of difficulty? Why should you be surprised?”

It’s wonderful, but so much of the expression is in terms of what we judge to be really spectacular. A really decent thunderstorm. “What a great display of power.” But for God it’s a thunderstorm, for goodness’ sake on a minor planet in a rather dinky solar system in a rather small constellation in a very big universe. It’s a thunderstorm. Meanwhile, we’re told, “By his Son he upholds everything in the universe by his powerful word.” Do you see why you need accommodation?

It turns out almost everything we say about God (not everything, but so many things we say about God) are in terms of categories we’re familiar with. That’s how we communicate with ourselves. We don’t have access to infinite talk; we have access to human talk, and by this human talk we are talking about the infinite, the holy.

So much of what Scripture says in that regard about God’s knowing, God’s seeing, God’s acting, whether it’s riding upon the wings of the dawn or the winds of the storm or putting a muzzle on Leviathan or spreading the constellation Orion in the sky or speaking and the world was formed …

Even speaking and the world was formed … I don’t want to minimize for a moment that God speaks, and yet that in some ways itself has to be analogical language, because when I think of speaking I think of speaking with my mouth which is physical or speaking, perhaps, metaphorically through a book which I write or speaking, perhaps, through an Internet chat room, which I’m still tapping out on a keyboard using finite language.

What kind of speaking did the Almighty do that brought the universe into being? In some sense, it’s metaphorical language. It’s a figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive of another, and the other here is us. It’s human speaking, human hearing, human knowing, human loving, human wrath, human laying bare of the arm.

Yet, we know the language has to be metaphorical because the Bible itself keeps stressing that God is other. He’s not a human being. He’s not a man. He’s not created. He’s not dependent. He’s the God of aseity. He’s transcendent. He was there before we were. He speaks and brings all things into existence. He’s spirit. He doesn’t have a body. We’re forced to recognize this is the way we must think about God.

To come at this question, then, of anthropomorphism and anthropopathisms and uphold the view that by refusing to see them as anthropomorphisms we are interpreting Scripture more simply and directly is, I would want to argue, not an appeal to a simpler Biblicism but to a massive and even grotesque reductionism.

2. God proper

Historically, there has been a tendency to make a distinction between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity. Likewise, there has been a tendency to distinguish different wills of God. Historically, this has been done in different ways. Sometimes we’ve distinguished effective will and prescriptive will or secret will and revealed will or will of decree and will of command or decorative will and preceptive will. In the past, those are the categories that have been used again and again and again.

What are we to make of these things? Begin with this notion of the different wills of God and then move to the larger question of the immanent and economic Trinity. All of these categories are a bit dangerous, let me hasten to add. They are all a bit dangerous, and they are also all a bit inevitable.

It’s a bit like what I was trying to do the other day by talking about the different ways the Bible speaks of the loves of God. I frankly don’t think you can avoid the fact the Bible speaks of the love of God in different ways, but I don’t want to end up saying God has different loves that he turns on and off on a sort of choice switch system.

Rather, it’s God is love, and then in the perfection of all of his other attributes in connection with different sorts of relationships he has with the created order, that love manifests itself in quite distinctive patterns you can identify in Scripture inductively. I would say something similar about the way the Bible speaks of the will of God.

This is not, I hasten to add, a peculiarly Calvinistic trick, although it is sometimes presented that way. Here is I. Howard Marshall, not usually recognized as a right-wing Calvinist. “We must certainly distinguish between what God would like to see happen and what he actually does will to happen, and both of these can be spoken of as God’s will.”

The reason for that is, I think, partly bound up with what I’ve just been talking about, accommodation to human language. Those are different ways we use the word will. Let me come at this tangentially again, come at it from the different ways the Bible speaks of kingdom: kingdom of God, not simply the kingdom of Israel or, today, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia or something like that, but the kingdom of God.

The full expression, kingdom of God, only shows up once in the Old Testament, although God as King is very common or God reigns is extremely common or something like that, but when it shows up it’s God’s kingdom rules over all. It is his providential sovereignty. It has the notion of reign, and his reign rules over all.

In that sense, you’re in the kingdom whether you like it or not. You can’t not be in God’s providential kingdom. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, which is a parable of the kingdom, likewise, the kingdom there is made up of wheat and tares. You don’t have to be born again to get in that kingdom. Everybody is wheat or tares. You’re in the kingdom whether you like it or not.

Then, in John 3, for example, you have to be born again to get in the kingdom or to see the kingdom, so people rightly recognize in that use of kingdom, it is that subset of God’s total sovereignty under which there is life or something like that. You have to be born again to get in that kingdom. It’s a different use of kingdom quite. You don’t say with respect to God’s providential reign, “You have to be born again to get into it.” You’re either in it or you’re not. You either exist or you don’t. But with respect to that reign under which there is life, you have to be born again to get into it.

Then throw in eschatology. Sometimes the kingdom in view is the kingdom in its consummated form when God’s will is no longer contested. Now God’s will is contested. In the new heaven and the new earth it will not be contested. In that sense, the kingdom has not yet dawned. It is still to come. We still pray, “Your kingdom come …”

Of course, God’s reign in these various ways is necessarily related to God’s will. The reign of God is nothing other than the will of God exercised in power. That’s all it is. Thus, you see the different ways of talking about the kingdom of God, which are not flagged by some sort of syntactical device or some different word … You learn these things simply from the context from listening closely to the text. In exactly the same way, God’s will is not flagged by some special word.

On the one hand, you get a passage like 1 Thessalonians 4, where God’s will is your sanctification. Have you ever spoken to a young peoples’ group where they want to know about the will of God? You go through a stage in life where everybody wants you to go and address some group or another and talk about God’s will for your life. What they mean by that is a personal guidance system, a map to the future. That’s what they mean.

For a few years in my sheer perversity whenever I got invited to speak on that sort of subject, I would go and speak from 1 Thessalonians 4. “I would like to tell you what God’s will is for your life. I am certain I know what God’s will is for you and you.” Then I’d read the text. “This is God’s will, even your sanctification.”

On the other hand, sometimes the Bible can speak of God’s will in terms of God’s decree. What God wills, in that sense, happens. The question is … Does the Bible speak, then, of two wills of God? Or, better yet … Does it have two or more ways of talking about the will of God so that in some senses the two wills of God may compete or mean slightly different things?

That’s precisely the point where the openness of God people have real problems. That’s where they say, “You can’t allow that. It makes for a schizophrenic God. You can’t have God revealing something he desires over here and then doing something else over there. That becomes kind of descriptive of a deceptive God somehow.

If, therefore, you have these texts which say he’s not willing that any should perish, that means if you absolutize that and put all the will-of-God passages into that way of speaking, then clearly he’s doing everything he can to bring that about, and if not everybody is saved, the only possible answer to that is, ‘Well, he’s done the best he can.’

But there are other factors: the freedom of the individuals understood in a libertarian sense and the opposition of the Devil, although he’s going to lose, finally, because God is such a great chess master. Nevertheless, God’s will, his unique will, his univocal will, his unreconstructed will is still to save all men and women without exception.”

But there are certainly different ways of talking about the love of God. Some passages in the Bible do speak of God’s yearning that all be saved without exception and other passages speak of God selectively loving certain people. They’re both there, and is it not the case the same can be said with respect to the will of God? Let me list several domains in which the Bible, in my view, unambiguously talks about the will of God in more than one sense.

The death of Christ. “It pleased the Lord to bruise him.” It was the will of God that Jesus die; yet, the Bible still speaks of the evil of all those involved in bringing it to pass. Jesus can denounce Judas as the son of perdition. “It would have been better for him not to have been born,” precisely because he is so evil in the whole thing.

In one sense, the whole cross is evil from beginning to end, and the mystery of providence is precisely in this evil God brings forth his work. He stands over against it and condemns it even while it is his will to bring it to pass. Is that any different in principle from what God says through Joseph in the Old Testament? In the selling of Joseph, “It was your intention to do evil, but God intended it for good.”

In one sense, God’s will is to condemn everything that has been done and to condemn those who have done it in connection with the death of Jesus. That’s his moral stance, but it is his decorative will equally born out of high moral stance that the Son should be crucified so we might be forgiven.

The war against the Lamb in Revelation 17 is depicted that way, especially in the Greek text. Go and study Revelation 17:17 in Greek, not in our versions. The hardening work of God. Many other things. Listen to what Marshall says again. “We must certainly distinguish between what God would like to see happen and what he actually does will to happen, and both of these can be spoken of as the will of God.”

We are mandated to conform our lives to the preceptive will of God. We must do what he commands, what he mandates, what he holds up as our goal, what he establishes as law to the preceptive will of God, but because we still live under a providential structure, assuming we are not in the open God camp, we still live under his decorative will. That sort of thing, I would have thought, becomes very obvious when you look at, for example, the book of Job, which leads me to the third category.

3. Questions of theodicy and prayer

Consider Job. What makes Job such a hard book to read? What makes Job’s experiences so difficult for him to live through? What should Job’s miserable comforters have said to Job if the openness of God theologians are right? How should Job have responded to them?

The point is the book begins by setting up the reader in a way that Job himself is not set up. Job does not know what’s going on in the background. The reader knows. The reader knows God has, by his permissive will, granted permission to Satan to go so far in crushing Job and no farther. Was it God’s will or not?

Well, it was God’s permissive will, but God’s permissive will in this case was doing exactly what God in the perfection of his knowledge, however you understand perfection of knowledge, knew would happen if he granted this permission to Satan. If he gave this permission to Satan, God himself knew what Satan would do, so by granting permission God knew it would be done, and he did it anyway.

It still is worth insisting, because it is permissive will in the whole narrative, God is somehow sovereign over it, and that is what is giving Job problems, even though at the level of tracking out the actual evil, it stops back with Satan. The reason why Job is so upset is because he doesn’t think he has done anything to deserve this. Yet, he still recognizes God is sovereign.

If he had belonged in the openness of God camp, then when the miserable comforters came to him and said, “Job, for goodness’ sakes, God is just. Repent of your sins and God will turn around and bless you. You have to be a dirty sinner. That’s what’s explaining things.” What Job should have said was, “It’s all right, guys. I’m not bothered. I know God has done the best he can. This one got by him. Satan has won this one. It happens sometimes.” Isn’t that what he should have said? “He’ll sort me out in the end. He’s a just God. I’ll wait for him.”

Instead, Job is outraged at innocent suffering, at suffering that isn’t fair, and the reason he’s outraged is because he does recognize God is sovereign. If he didn’t believe in the sovereignty of God, Job would have no reason to be outraged. That’s what causes him such pain. It’s what brings Job to the very edge of saying, “God, it’s not fair. I wish I could stand before you and put you in the dock.”

Job is on the very edge of blasphemy precisely because he knows he doesn’t deserve this. And he doesn’t. The Scripture itself says he is tam. He is a perfect man, which does not mean sinlessly perfect. He doesn’t deserve this. Why should it happen to him and not the three miserable comforters or to all the reprobates, all those Chaldeans who have come in and swiped all his cattle? It has happened to him, and it’s not fair! But the only reason it’s an epistemic dilemma to him is because he does believe God is sovereign. That’s the only reason why it hurts.

At the end of the entire account when God responds, he does not say, “Job, let me give you an explanation.” That’s not what he says. What he gives him is five chapters of, “Job, can you make a snowflake? Did you set up the constellations? Where were you when I established the foundation of the earth? Come on. Stand up. Talk to me, Job.”

It’s really scalding language, isn’t it? “Job, where were you when the hippopotamus came along? Do you know how the animals go back and forth following their routes of migration? Do you know that, Job? Come on. Talk to me. Talk to me.” Five chapters of it. In fact, just before you get to the end and Job is already saying, “I’m sorry. Okay. I don’t understand everything,” God says, “I’m not finished yet. I have some more questions.”

At the end of the whole thing, Job does not say, “Ha! Now I understand!” What he says is, “I repent and cover my mouth,” because he knows there are going to be a lot of biggies he won’t understand in the face of such a God, and it’s within that kind of matrix and that kind of matrix alone that Job at his best insights can stand up and say things like, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” That is so diametrically removed from the theodicy being advanced by the openness of God people as black is from white.

It’s not just Job. Habakkuk has a similar problem, not at the level of personal catastrophe but now at the level of national loss. Why does God allow a more wicked nation to punish a less wicked nation, his covenant people at that? The only answer he has by the end is, “I went in to the temple of the Lord, and I worshiped.” That’s about it. There’s a little eschatological overtone. “It will get sorted out at the end. I saw at the end of the wicked is destruction.” He’s willing to wait.

Do you see what is being claimed by the kind of theodicy I think is endemic in Scripture? What is being claimed is that it is not only appropriate but biblically mandated to recognize the place of mystery in our approach to God. Let me repeat that. It’s very important.

It’s not only permitted, but it is mandated to recognize the place of mystery in our approach to God. Otherwise, you have five chapters of Job to rip out. When God finally answers Job, he does not come back to him and say, “Job, stop your bellyaching. I’ve done the best I can. I didn’t know it was going to turn out this way, and I’m coming in to spare you.”

Apparently, in any case, this suffering has gone on for such a long time that Job could at least come back and say, “Well, couldn’t you try harder or do it a little sooner? I mean, let me accept for a moment that you didn’t see what Satan was going to do,” which, of course, then takes away from what the text actually says in the first two chapters, but let’s assume God is now answering out of this openness of God frame of reference.

“Okay,” Job says. “I see you didn’t see what was happening. You didn’t foresee what Satan would do. I got clobbered because of it. We’re in a cosmic struggle here, and because of that, I really did get beaten up, but I’ve been beaten up for months now! Years! It would be nice if you sort of came in and did something about it.”

But that’s not what is going on at all. It’s not how God responds. It’s not how Job responds. No. The Bible not only warns us, permits us, but it mandates us to recognize the place of mystery in our approach to God. There are some things we do not know, some things this side of glory we will not know.

We do not know how God reigns, operating transcendently in our limited space-time continuum to bring about all of his purposes, to maintain his distance from evil yet sovereignly limit it, and bring about all of his good pleasures for the glory of his own Son and the good of his own people. We catch glimpses of it here and there. We do see bits and pieces of it, don’t we, but the fullness of it we will not see. Not yet.

But that doesn’t mean we’re sort of leaping out in blind faith. No, no, no. Our faith is entirely reasonable. It’s based on all God has disclosed of his character, all that God has said, all that he has done, supremely what he has disclosed of himself in Christ Jesus. How do you remain perpetually angry with a God who sends his own Son to die for you? That’s not an exhaustive theodicy, but it is a provision of plenty of good reasons to trust this God even when I can’t see all the rest of the answers. Lots of good reasons, but it still, finally, demands faith.

What we’re being invited to, it seems to me in the theodicy of the openness of God material, is not a theodicy that demands any faith whatsoever. It solves the problem of how to avoid ascribing any evil to God whatsoever by limiting the sphere and domain and extent of God’s sovereignty. That’s what it does, but the price is too high.

It’s too high because it doesn’t square with biblical evidence. Start with Job. It’s too high because it doesn’t even answer at the practical level, “Why doesn’t God kick in a little earlier when he does see what’s going on, whether in disasters in my life or in the Holocaust or anything else that goes on for a while?”

It’s too high because it also rips out all the comforts that are yours. If there is a limitation on the evil, if there are some things you do not know but there are so many things about God you do know, then you may be able still to trust what you do know of God and in the midst of the hurt and the pain and the death and the bereavement still to say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. I know that my Redeemer lives.”

In one of the breakout groups today one of the questions that was asked was, “What do you say pastorally when you come across someone who has just lost a baby?” Like the instance we just heard of. I knew a family in central Illinois a few years ago. There were seven sons. It was a family of hemophiliacs. Six of them had already died of AIDS from blood transfusions received in the 80s before the donated blood was screened, not because they had been promiscuous but from taking the blood supply. What do you say to them?

We have to come to grips with some of the tensions of life in a fallen world pastorally. It’s true about death, isn’t it? Pastorally, on the one hand, you want to say death isn’t the final thing, it doesn’t have the last word, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, to be with Christ is far better, and on the other hand, you want to say it’s the last enemy.

Death is simultaneously Satan’s last word and it’s God’s stamp: “Thus far shall you go and no farther.” It is evil. It is to be rejected. It is the effect of the curse. It’s part of the entailment of sin. It’s appalling. On the other hand, I’m going home through that door. How can I lie on my deathbed and be frightened of what comes next if I truly trust Christ?

Yet, we don’t want to give the impression that dying is a blast, that it’s great fun, that it’s God’s way out, isn’t it? How do you get that thing in tension? Now you have a great disaster in the church, some terrible, shocking thing. Do you say, “It’s God’s will”? Do you say, “This wasn’t God’s will; the Devil won that one”?

How you get it across is going to vary enormously, but on the one hand, you may want to say pastorally not very much and have a lot of hugs and tears and free meals. Then, when you start saying things, you might want to begin pastorally with some of the promises of God. “He will be with us to the very end,” and, “We may be able to comfort others with something of the comfort we ourselves have been comforted with,” from 2 Corinthians, chapter 4. We may remember something of the tears and agony of Christ. Yes, we may.

Eventually, as more explanations are called for, we do want to get across simultaneously this is an outrageously evil and disgusting thing that is part of the entailments of the fall. This is not a perfect world, and it’s not the final world, and in the new heaven and the new earth there will be no more tears, and there will be no more death, and there will be no more sorrow, for the old order of things will pass away.

That’s precisely why Christians keep saying, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus!” and we will say, “In everything, God works for good to those who love him and are the called according to his purpose. He will not permit you to be tempted above what you are able, but will, with the temptation, make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it.”

Don’t you ever think God is asleep at the switch, and in your pain, you will still say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” You follow Christ now, and I guarantee in five years you will look back on this bed of thorns and you will say, “Thank you, Lord God, for what you have brought me through to teach me the dimensions of your grace, that I may be a comfort to others.” I guarantee it! Isn’t that what you have to say biblically? All that is the pastoral application of elementary theology proper.

I’m always a bit nervous about giving family illustrations but I gave it in the breakout period so I’d better give it here. My daughter … Tiffany is her name. She is in her second year of college. She’s a nice kid. For many years, we lived one year in three in Britain, and her best friend on the American side was a girl named Melissa. When we were there a few years ago, Melissa was supposed to fly over to join us for the Christmas break from school.

Melissa was then 15, so her parents were going to ship her on a plane, and I was going to go down to Heathrow and pick her up. The two girls would have a whale of time. They were like that. They’d get off the school bus back in Libertyville and pop into our place, raid the fridge, go down the street, and raid the other fridge. They did everything together. Melissa wasn’t a Christian. Tiffany, at that point, wasn’t making a profession of faith either.

Two days before I was to pick her up at Heathrow, we got a phone call from the parents saying she might not be able to come because she had this terrible flu she just couldn’t get rid of. The next day they came back with a firmer diagnosis. She had leukemia. To make a long story short, despite the best efforts, eventually the doctors couldn’t hold out much hope. They were planning a stem cell replacement.

Tiffany flew back at Easter for three weeks and spent all the time she could by her bedside. She was the one who always cleaned out the trach tube and so on, bullied friends to go and see Melissa. She flew back to finish her year at school. She was under a lot of stress by this point. Melissa died in June, and we flew back in July.

Tiffany’s verbal. She’s honest. She cried a lot. She didn’t hide her feelings. She grieved properly. We talked it out. We participated in family memorials and all kinds of things, but I could see this was still hiding some deep hurt. In September, I heard her in her room one Saturday afternoon crying, so I tapped on the door, went in, wrapped her up in my arms, and I said, “Tell me about it.”

She burst into tears, and she said, “Daddy, God could have saved my best friend, and he didn’t, and I hate him.” What should I have said to my little girl? “Well, honey, you have to understand God did the best he could.” Does that sound biblical to you? Give me a break. It’s not even pastorally wise.

I held her and stroked her hair and said, “I’m so glad you’ve told me because God knows what’s on your heart in any case. You might as well be honest about it. Besides, you’re not saying much more than some of the psalmists say when they really get down in the dumps, too. You’re only within a whisker of a few things Job said, but before you write God off too decisively, I beg of you to remember two things. First, do you want a God like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp?”

The Aladdin film had just come out at the time with Robin Williams. He could do anything. A great barrel of fun and could do absolutely anything, but only at the behest of whoever was holding the lamp. “Do you want a God who can do anything but only at your behest? In which case, who is God? Or do you want a God who is so big that sometimes he’ll do stuff you don’t understand? You had better decide that, because somewhere along the line it has a bearing on whether you’re going to be God or God is going to be God.

The other thing is, before you’re prepared to write God off, don’t forget a little, bloody hill outside Jerusalem. You lost your best friend; God lost his Son. In fact, he gave his Son. He didn’t have to, but he did. He gave his Son. He chose to. Whenever you’re tempted to doubt God’s love for you, you measure reality by that bloody hill outside Jerusalem.” Doesn’t that sound closer to elementary Christian theodicy to you?

I’m going to close in prayer, and if you want to come back with me with questions and answers, I’ll raise the question of prayer, but I don’t want to cut out the opportunities for proper discussion in the hour that follows. Let me lead in a closing prayer. Then we’ll proceed to whatever arrangements have been made for the open discussion.

O Lord God, we earnestly pray you will help us to be comprehensively biblical, comprehensively faithful to your Word. Help us not to succumb to these blind spots, these narrow reductionisms that somehow bring you down to our dimensions, but grant to us instead such insight into your Word and, therefore, into your very being and character, admittedly given in categories that are so small and beneath you but are suitable for our small and fallen minds that we will come to see you a little more clearly as you truly are and worship you with fear and trembling, with reverence and contrition and joy.

We remember it is written, “The things that have been revealed are for us and for our children together, but the secret things belong to God.” So help us, Lord God, not to claim we know more than we do and to know when to say with Job, “I repent and put my hand to my mouth and worship.”

When instead we must understand and articulate and teach others precisely because you have disclosed it, give us not only a doctrinal grasp of these matters in days of flickering uncertainty about elementary doctrines, but pastoral intelligence, pastoral compassion, and pastoral empathy so that we ourselves learn the better how to comfort others with the comfort with which we ourselves have been comforted.

O Lord God, I do pray you will bless these men and women. Bless them with the desire for holiness. Bless them with a hunger for your Word. Bless them with imagination and grasp. Bless them with insight as to how to put things together and how to apply them to broken and hurting and sinful and rebellious men and women.

Give them perseverance in the midst of adversity, discernment in the midst of confusion, faithfulness in the midst of flickering faddishness. Give them long-term perseverance in the midst of short-term statistics. Give them, above all, the glorious sense of your presence by your Spirit so they know they are working and laboring with eternity’s values in view doing kingdom work because you are working in them both to will and to do of your good pleasure.

Give them tears, not too many, not over the wrong things, but tears of deep empathy and compassion, tears of sorrow for their own sins, going forth like the sower in the Old Testament sowing with tears. Give them an articulate grasp of the truth, for they must uphold it, they must defend it, and they must proclaim it.

Give them clear minds and show them what it means to love you with heart and soul and mind and strength. Give them such devotion to you that they do not see their jobs as professional vocations so much as spectacular privilege for service before the King of Kings who has made us and has redeemed us by the death of his Son.

Whether they serve in large, populous, acclaimed arenas or in small, isolated, unacclaimed villages, grant, we earnestly beseech you, to each one here such elementary faithfulness stemming from the sheer grace of Christ that on the last day, without exception, they will hear the Master say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Lord.” For Jesus’ sake, amen.

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.