My good friend Kellie...

...is an excellent writer. Especially on this point of the "Is God sovereign, or is He not?" topic. So I am just going to post something she wrote. It speaks for itself.


In accepting a reformed perspective on God's sovereignty, I have sometimes wrestled with the deepest objection of all. Why is it that God creates us from nothing, and then ordains the introduction of our rebellion into the world only to punish us for it afterwards? He is God after all. Why did He even create the possibility of sin, pain, and death? How can He create horrific suffering and not be cruel?

In my questioning, I recognize that I have no ground to argue that God is unfair. I grasp that He holds the cards, made the rules, owns the game table, and even the house in which life is played. I would venture to say that I have accepted His power, and loved Him anyway, because I know He has the RIGHT. His goodness is not governed by the ethical obligations we answer to as human beings. He is not bound to relate to us as we are bound to relate to one another.

Ultimately, I have made an intellectual peace with His authority.

I think though, that there is a deeper, more emotional reason for trusting God's authority than a simple and cold acknowledgement that He is always right. A new idea has dawned in my mind and it began one day with the realization that God did not merely inflict suffering on His creation when He introduced the potential for sin:

GOD INFLICTED THE SUFFERING UPON HIMSELF.

That simple realization is the difference between being told to run through a wall of fire to reach safety on the other side, and having someone hold out their hand to run through the fire with you.

To step back then and consider that God is not only experiencing the hurt with us, but that He is incapable of authorizing suffering for less than perfect reasons, shows me that arbitration is the farthest attribute from His character. We in our ignorance assume there is a better way for our God to order His universe. Have we ever contemplated that He, the essence that which nothing greater has been conceived, can therefore authorize nothing besides perfection?

It occurs to me that our world of weakness, fragility, and sin will one day be a monument to the infinite power of God's redemption. Without sin, our world would appear perfect only in our own eyes. Without sin, there would never be the need for all the attributes of God we've come to know and love; His healing, His forgiveness, His grace, His mercy. Through those attributes, God has allowed us to commune with His goodness in a deeper way than could ever be achieved in a sinless world.

God's cosmological plan for the universe with its creation, fall, redemption, and eternal destiny then, is perfect. For reasons beyond our comprehension, the precise ordering of our suffering in this world is perfect as it is woven into the fabric of redemptive history.

Yet once again, and arguably most important, I must return to the understanding over and over that our suffering is a suffering he has entered and embraced. He stared down the fires of hell and experienced the torment of the damned. What is His response to that evil? He cries out, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" and proceeds to silence the devil's demands forever. He then resuscitates the corpse of His once perfect creation one soul at a time, in down payment for the promise that one day, our world will be restored.

It is right for us to grieve and mourn the downfall of the lost, as God Himself wept over Jerusalem. It is right for us to hate the darkness and long for the day it will be conquered. Yet our consolation in grieving for the state of humanity is this: For the lost, He has never inflicted suffering on a single soul that He has not swallowed Himself. He uses the light to contrast the darkness, and in the end, wins the battle. And for the redeemed, as Spurgeon reminds us, "Remember this, had any other condition been better for you than the one in which you are, divine love would have put you there."