A God who can't? Why that is no comfort at all
I recently spent some time with a friend and colleague after our flights were delayed and we missed a connection. This gave us time to really catch up properly. And of course, as it usually does with me, the conversation quickly turned to theology. He grew up in a conservative church. Like me, he has spent years on the mission field in some of the poorest countries on earth, where we are surrounded by human pain and suffering. But unlike me, he has come to a very different understanding of it.
In God Can't, Oord argues that God’s love is “uncontrolling”, meaning that, because God respects creaturely freedom and does not override human or natural agents, He cannot prevent suffering or evil. Instead of presenting God as a sovereign ruler who ordains or allows suffering for His purposes, the book proposes a God who suffers with creation, works to heal when possible, squeezes good from evil where he can, and depends on human cooperation to bring redemption and salvation.
My friend was very emotional as he spoke of seeing the suffering and evil all around him and how God has not stopped it. In my friend’s thinking, God is perfect love and would intervene if he could, but since he doesn't, it must be because he cannot.
I understand this emotional response. After years in West Africa surrounded by suffering and pain and death, it’s extremely tempting to ask the question, Couldn’t God have prevented this? Shouldn’t He have? There’s something inside us that wants to protect God from being perceived as cruel.
I left this conversation feeling disturbed. Not because my friend had said anything terribly shocking, but because what he said is so common. More and more Christians are turning to a God of their own making, a softer God, a God who doesn’t govern suffering, a God who isn’t providentially in control of life’s worst moments, a God who is loving but ultimately limited.
It may sound compassionate because God is perfect love. But is this what it means to be perfect love?
Because if God can’t deal with suffering, then it is simply suffering with no reason, it becomes completely meaningless.
If God can’t stop evil, then evil wins whenever it wants; it has free rein to do what it wants.
And if God can’t act in our deepest moments of pain and hurt, what then is prayer actually doing?
If God cannot act against the suffering and pain in this world, that is no comfort at all. It is, in fact, terrifying.
Fortunately, this is not the God we see in scripture.
When we turn to Scripture, we see that the Bible doesn’t shy away from the sovereignty of God in all things. It is the opposite. It shouts it from the rooftop. It's almost on every page of the bible. But here are just a few examples.
Joseph, in Genesis 50:20, said to his brothers who had sold him into slavery, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Joseph could only say this because God was sovereign over the entire thing and Joseph knew it.
Job in Job 2:10, can only worship in spite of his suffering because he recognised the sovereignty of God over it; he says, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?”
In Isaiah 45:7, the prophet says that the Lord not only forms light but creates calamity, reminding us that God is sovereign over both good times and suffering.
The Apostle Peter, in his Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:23, declares that the cross, the most evil event in human history, carried out by “lawless men”, happened according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. Even the darkest moment in history occurred under the wise and holy rule of the One who governs all things.
If Christ’s suffering on the cross was outside God’s sovereign plan, then the cross could not be our salvation. The work of Christ on the cross saves only because God planned it from before time began.
The Bible flat out refuses to reveal a God to us who merely reacts to human decisions or demonic attacks. He isn’t scrambling around trying to make the best out of a bad situation. He isn’t surprised by anything that happens to us, good or bad. He isn’t just up there hoping things work out. He ordains, He directs, and He works all things according to the counsel of His will (Ephesians 1:11).
When I think about my friend saying that he has learned a lot from the book, God Can’t. It actually makes me feel sad. The book promises comfort to my friend and so many other people. It attempts to find a way to make sense of the pain and suffering we see all around us. But the book, like all other attempts to circumvent the sovereignty of God, only ends up giving comfort by suggesting that we live in a world where evil is simply random, and God attempts to react. It’s a world where ultimately suffering has no purpose.
That is not comforting. It is actually terrifying.
But if God truly can, if He is sovereign and in complete control over all things as the Bible clearly shows, then our suffering is not random, nor is it arbitrary.
Nothing we go through is pointless. Everything is in His omnipotent hand. No evil is outside His plans. Even if things don’t always seem good to us, we know, because we have a good God, that He is working all things together toward the good He has already secured for us in Christ: our final redemption and glorification.
Nothing in Romans 8:28 suggests that our life here on Earth will be pain-free or that some earthly good will always come from evil. I wish it did. But it doesn’t. In actuality, Romans 8:28 assures us that God is fully in control and working all things into the good we will ultimately see when we are in eternity praising Him. And that is the best good we can ever know.
God can and he does. We trust in that. And that is the greatest comfort there is.
Soli Deo Gloria
Wow. I think this is your best blog yet Steven. I’m grateful for the well thought out and biblical explanations you bring us.
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