Suffering: Divine Sovereignty

As Christians it is impossible to think about suffering—its trauma, pain, confusion, and, in many cases, unfairness—without addressing the role of divine sovereignty.  Does God simply assign the suffering that comes our way?  Does God’s sovereignty negate human freedom?

Here is my attempt to outline some kind of answer.

The Christian faith teaches that we know about God because God has taken the initiative to reveal himself to us through a story, a true story.  God is the author of that story.  As author God has let us in on who he is and what he is doing in history.

Author implies control, of course.  In that sense God is like any typical author—Dante, for example, who wrote The Divine Comedy, or Shakespeare, who wrote Hamlet, or Jane Austen, who wrote Pride and Prejudice.  None of those famous literary works would exist if the authors had not written them.  Characters take on life—Beatrice, Hamlet, Mr. Darcy—and plots unfold—journey, tragedy, romance—because these authors shaped them according to their design.  As sovereign Lord, God does the same thing; he crafts the story according to his plan and providence.

But this story is like no other, for the author of the redemptive story, who stands outside it, chose to enter the story and play a role in it, too, outsider becoming insider, author becoming character.  God stepped out of eternity and into time; he became a human being whom we know as Jesus Christ.

You would think, of course, that God’s entrance into the story as a character would have an immediate and overwhelming impact, washing over the story like a flood that overwhelms and consumes everything in its path.  After all, we are talking about God here.

But the Christian story does not follow that plot.  Jesus Christ didn’t make an impressive entrance.  He came as an ordinary human being.  He had to learn how to walk and talk, how to work a trade, how to study the Torah, how to pray.  After three short years of public ministry he died a brutal death on the cross.

How God wrote himself into this story runs contrary to everything we normally believe about God.  God as a human being?  God born in a stable?  God working as a common laborer?  God suffering death on a cross?

As Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria from 328 to 373, wrote: “But now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us. . . .  He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own.”

Big became little; power became weakness; rich became poor; wise became foolish.  Providence chose personhood; power embraced pain; sovereignty gave way to suffering.  It is as if all the light of the universe was reduced to the radiance of one candle without suffering any diminution, without becoming less than it was before.

Christ followed that downward trajectory all the way to the cross.  Why such a death?  In the Confessions Augustine argued that Jesus Christ was the only person in all of human history who, as the Father’s Son and equal, did not have to die for himself but chose to die for others.  He made that decision out of pure love.  Sacrificing everything, Christ experienced death to overcome death.  “For our sake Jesus stood to God as both victor and victim, and victor because victim; for us he stood to God as priest and sacrifice, and priest because sacrifice . . .”

The resurrection proved that what Jesus Christ set out to do he in fact accomplished.  Christ’s death defeated every enemy.  Christ now rules supreme over the universe.  The main character in the story achieved total victory for all of us; then, leaving time, he entered once again into eternity.

There is a difference between what it means for God as the author of the story to dwell in eternity and what it means for God as a character in the story—Jesus Christ—to live in time.

God is present to all of human history as if it were a single reality; all times (in our world) are the present to him because he lives in the eternal present.  God is at the beginning and at the end; he is the Alpha and the Omega.  He stands outside the story, experiencing the whole of it as the author.

But as a character in the story he lived one day at a time, exercising human agency, as the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane illustrates so well.  “Let this cup pass from me. . . .  Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.”

Thus God’s experience of reality and Jesus Christ’s experience of reality are simply different, each meaningful in its own way.  Somehow the two—God’s transcendence over time and Christ’s confinement within time, God’s sovereign will as author and Christ’s role as a character—fit together into a seamless whole, neither undermining the other.  Eternity envelopes time, it does not nullify it; sovereignty embraces human freedom and action, it does not cancel it.

In the incarnation God demonstrates that he is FOR us, not against us, because he chose to enter the story as a character.  What the author willed in eternity the character chose in time.  What divine sovereignty planned one human being—Jesus Christ—carried out, exercising his freedom by submitting it to God.

What does it mean for us?  Nothing less than the world’s redemption.