Growing up, I learned in Sunday school that God created the world, so naturally he is in control of the world.  Whatever happens must be God’s will, even when we don’t understand what he’s doing. 

When tragedies come, we often hear Christians say things like:

“God’s ways are higher than ours”.

“We just have to have faith in hard circumstances”.

“God is still on his throne”.

“Everything happens for a reason”.

“God’s will is beyond our understanding, but all things will work together for good”.

“Providence writes a long sentence.  We have to wait to get to heaven to read the answer”.

“We have a good and benevolent God, but God allows things to happen sometimes that defy human explanation”.

In many churches, this is called the doctrine of God’s providence.  God is in ultimate control of all events, including even the smallest things.  Since God is sovereign and omnipotent, his plan and purpose for the world can’t be thwarted, so everything that happens must be governed by God’s will.  This doctrine is stated well by Greg Boyd:

“For the foundation of the classical-philosophical portrait of God’s relationship to the world is the conviction that whatever happens must somehow fit into God’s sovereign plan.  All things must ultimately follow a divine blueprint that is, in detail, foreknown and willed by God.”

Boyd, Gregory A.. God at War (p. 39). InterVarsity Press.

But what if that doctrine misinterprets the Bible?  It was a hard thing to set aside an idea I’d grown up with, but the more I studied the Bible the less it lined up with any version of the doctrine of God’s providence.  Contradictions piled up with every re-reading of the books of the New Testament. 

Jesus told us that he and the Father are one, that if we’ve seen him, we’ve seen the Father.  With that as our starting point, did Jesus ever respond to anyone’s suffering by reciting God’s sovereign will?  No.

When Jesus encountered illness, he healed the person.  He never said this is God’s sovereign will for you.  When Jesus encountered demon possession, he cast out the demons.  He never told the suffering person that even when we can’t understand why God does what he does, we must accept God’s sovereign will for our lives.  And when Jesus encountered death, he brought that person back to life.  He never told those left behind that their loved one had died according to God’s sovereign timing. 

I don’t believe Jesus ever said anything that could align with the modern doctrine of Providence.  Instead, Jesus worked to defeat evil wherever he encountered it, not to explain it away.

Hebrews 2:14 says that Jesus died to break the power of the devil.  But if the doctrine of God’s Providence is correct, and God is secretly in charge of events, how could the devil still have real power? 

1 John 3:8 says that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. But that implies that the devil’s work is opposed to God’s will, not a mysterious part of it.  But if God was ultimately controlling those enemies’ actions, were they really enemies?

Jesus said he was bringing the kingdom of God to stand against the kingdom of darkness. But if God was already ruling, what could that mean?

The Bible speaks often about spiritual warfare. But if God is in the background controlling the forces of evil, who exactly are we fighting against? 

I’m convinced that tragedies aren’t part of the providential will of God.  Good is good, and evil is evil, and I don’t see anything in the Bible that convinces me that evil is really part of God’s plan.  I don’t agree that if we could only see evil from God’s eternal perspective, we would understand that it is actually good.

Instead, I think we should consider tragedies evidence of the ongoing struggle between the Creator who made and loves the world and the dark powers that currently enslave the world.  The bedrock story of the Bible is God’s plan to redeem and restore all of creation, putting an end to evil, not his plan to use evil to accomplish his purposes. 

I discovered this way of thinking about spiritual warfare in books by NT Wright, at the Bible Project, and especially in God at War, by Greg Boyd.

To suggest, as the classical-philosophical tradition tends to argue, that the forces of evil always play into the hand of God, that God is secretly in control of the activity of Satan and demons, and thus that these evil forces always end up carrying out God’s sovereign purposes is to undermine completely the reality of this war and render wholly unintelligible the driving motif of the entire New Testament.

Boyd, Gregory A.. God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (p. 283).

Those sources come from a viewpoint that acknowledges that spiritual warfare is more than metaphorical, and more than a personal struggle against temptation.  There’s a real war going on in the spiritual world between God’s forces and Satan’s, and it has spilled over into our world.  Like it or not, we’re involved in the battle – Satan attacks us as proxies for a God he can’t harm directly.  This new way of thinking about spiritual warfare was one of the keys that helped me begin to answer some of my most foundational questions.

When I finally concluded that my real-life experiences and many Bible passages didn’t mesh with certain ideological perspectives, I found respected authors who recognized that sin and death are in fact monstrous evils which have no place in the world God intended for us.  Jesus came to rescue us from our corrupt world, and to lead us into his new creation where sin and death no longer exist.  In the meantime, all of creation groans and travails, waiting for that final victory.

The doctrine of God’s Providence as it is generally stated and understood today, and the reality of spiritual warfare can’t coexist.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t think that God ever exercises providence in his creation; it means that I think God’s ways are unknowable to human reason, given the free will of both humans and demons.