Oh What an Infinite Good He Planned through Your Fall!

We may content ourselves by saying over the sin of Adam and Eve what Joseph said over the sin of his brothers when they sold him into slavery: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen 50:20).

As for you, Adam and Eve, you meant evil against God as you rejected Him as your Father and Treasure, but oh what an infinite good he planned through your fall!  The Seed of the woman will one day bruise the head of the great Serpent, and  by His suffering He will display the greatness of the glory of the grace of God.  You have not undone His plan.  Just as Joseph was sold sinfully into slavery, you have sold yourselves for an apple.  You have fallen, and now the stage is set for the perfect display of the glory of the grace of God.

–John Piper
Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (2006, p. 85)

The Greatest Display of the Glory of God’s Grace

The suffering of the utterly innocent and infinitely holy Son of God in the place of utterly undeserving sinners to bring us to everlasting joy is the greatest display of the glory of God’s grace that ever was, or ever could be.

This was the moment — Good Friday — for which everything in the universe was planned.  In conceiving a universe in which to display the glory of His grace, God did not choose plan B.  There could be no greater display of the glory of the grace of God than what happened at Calvary.  Everything leading to it and everything flowing from it is explained by it, including all the suffering in the world.

–John Piper
Suffering and the Sovereignity of God, (2006, p.82)
read 8/3/08

The Law Cannot Make a Man Love Me But It Can Keep Him from Lynching Me

Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion. Well, there’s half-truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government.

–Martin Luther King
Address at Western Michigan University, 1963
From Between Two Worlds

The Church Must Love Through Word and Deed

Regardless of our political views, it is indisputable that millions of people who once looked to the government will now need service and aid from churches and other agencies.  The church will be forced by demographics to see what the Bible has always said.  Love cannot be only expressed through talk, but through word and deed (1 John 3:17).

–Timothy J. Keller
Ministries of Mercy (1997, p. 26)
read 9/15/08

Homeless Children

[Homeless children] are either desperate for attention, wildly aggressive or totally withdrawn.  They will bite and kick and then hug you, or they won’t talk at all.  Unless kids like this can be reassured the world is safe, they are likely to be criminals by 12.  By 14, they may kill.

–A pediatrician who tends homeless families
quoted in Ministries of Mercy (Keller, 1997, p.20)
read 9/15/2008

“Babae, Don’t You See?”

While I was praying, Stephenie had a massive cerebral hemorrhage.  We rushed to the hospital.  I rode in the ambulance while our son Jaime and Ginny and Mincaye followed us in the car.  Grandfather Mincaye had never seen this type of vehicle with the flashing lights, didn’t understand why strangers had rushed into the house and grabbed Stephenie and hurried off with her.  Now he saw her at the hospital, lying on a gurney with a tube down her throat and needles in her arm, and he grabbed me and said, “Who did this to her?”  And I saw a look on his face that I’d seen before, and I knew that he’d be willing to kill again to save this granddaughter who he loved.

I didn’t know what to say, “I don’t know, Mincaye.  Nobody is doing this.”

And just like that, this savage from the jungles grabbed me again and said, “Babae, don’t you see?”

No, I didn’t see.  My heart was absolutely tearing apart; I didn’t know what was going on.

He said, “Babae, Babae, now I see it well.  Don’t you see?  God Himself is doing this.”

And I thought, what are you saying?

Mincaye started reaching out to all the people in the emergency room, saying, “People, people don’t you see?  God, loving Star, He’s taking her to live with him.”  And he said, “Look at me, I’m an old man; pretty soon I’m going to die too, and I’m going there.”  Then he said, with a pleading look on his face, “Please, please won’t you follow God’s trail too?  Coming to God’s place, Star and I will be waiting there to welcome you.”

–Steve Saint
Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (2006, p.119-120)
read 6-18-08

The Death of My Dad

If God could plan the death of His own righteous Son, why couldn’t He plan the death of my dad?

–Steve Saint
Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (2006, p.117)
read 6-18-08

We Lack the Conceptual Wherewithal

Thus Scripture reveals that both human agency and divine agency are to be fully affirmed without attempting to tell us how this can be, because we have no way to understand it, no matter what Scripture would say: all of our analogies concerning different agents or different kinds of agency must be drawn from what holds between and among creatures, and so we necessarily lack the conceptual wherewithal to plumb how God’s foreordaining agency enables and yet governs our own free agency.  As David said, after confessing that God knew his every word even before it was on his own tongue, such knowledge is too wonderful for us; it is, quite literally, too lofty for us to attain (see Ps. 139:4-6).

–Mark Talbot
Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (2006, p. 70)
read 8-1-08

We Can Understand Why We Cannot Understand

“But,” you ask, “how can this possibly be?  How can Joseph’s brothers have acted freely and responsibly if what they did was what God had previously ordained?  How can Pilate and Herod and Judas and the Jewish people be properly blamed fror what God had predestined to take place?  How can God govern the choices of human beings without that entailing that those choices are no longer free?  How can the same event have two complete explanations?”

My answer is this: We cannot understand how these things can possibly be.  We cannot understand how some human act can be fully explained in terms of God’s having freely intended it without that explanation cancelling the freedom and responsibility of its human intenders.  We cannot understand how divine and human agency are compatible in a way that allows the exercise of each kind of agency to be fully explanatory of some object or event.  And yet — and this is the absolutely crucial point — we can understand why we cannot understand it.  It is because our attempts to understand this involve our trying to understand the unique relationship between the Creator and His creatures in terms of our understanding of some creature-to-creature relationship.  But these attempts, it should be obvious, involve us in a kind of “category mistake” that dooms us from the start… How the Creator’s agency relates to His creatures’ agency is to be categorized quite differently from how any creature’s agency relates to any other creatures’ agency.  This should be obvious merely by our remembering that God has created everything ex nihilo — out of nothing — while all creaturely creation involves some sort of limited action on some pre-existing “stuff”.

–Mark Talbot
Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (2006, p.69)
read 8-1-08

God Is the Primary Agent

So the biblical view is this: God has ordained or willed or planned everything that happens in our world from before creation, from before time began.  God is the primary agent – the primary cause, the final and ultimate explanation – of everything that happens, yet the causal relationship between God and His creatures is such that His having foreordained everything is compatible with — and indeed takes nothing away from — their creaturely power and efficacy.

–Mark Talbot
Suffering and the Sovereignty of God (2006, p.68 )
read 8-1-08