God, Author of sin?—2LBCF Chp 5.4

Welcome to Truology, where we study Christian theology, philosophy, and apologetics. We do critiques on scholars, politics. We look into events in both classical and modern-day issues. We do interviews, debates, and much more.

Our goal is providing a Christian resource to edify the saints and to engage the community. But most of all, we want to glorify the Lord through our hearts, minds, souls, and strength. So, stay with us as we open up the Word of God and look into everything pertaining to life and godliness.

My name is Belushi Prevalon, coming to you from the Boston area. And right now, you are listening to Truology, the study of the truth as it is in Jesus. Welcome back to Truology, the podcast where we refuse to let the modern sensitivities rewrite historic confessions and where the truth is measured by the Word of God and not human intuition.

God’s Absolute Authorship Over All Things

Today, we're confronting the doctrine that causes many to flinch and even more to misrepresent. How can God ordain sin, even sinful desires, and still be guiltless? Isn't that a contradiction? Doesn't that make God morally responsible for evil?

No, not exactly. Especially not if you understand the doctrine consistently, as our forefathers did. We're focusing today on Chapter 5, Paragraph 4 of the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, which states, The almighty power, unsearchable wisdom, and infinite goodness of God so far manifest themselves in His providence that His determinate counsel extendeth itself even to the first fall, and all other sinful actions both of angels and men, and that not by bare permission, which also He most wisely and powerfully boundeth, and otherwise ordereth and governeth in a manifold dispensation to His most holy ends, yet so as the sinfulness of their acts proceedeth only from the creatures and not from God, who, being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or approver of sin.

Now, that's a mouthful, but it's also a masterpiece of doctrinal clarity. So, here's our job today. We're going to walk through this statement and what it means, prove it biblically, and most importantly, we're going to address and dismantle the biggest objection, which is, if God ordained my desires, then isn't He guilty for my sin?

Well, that's a good question. So, let's begin where all sound theology begins, with God's absolute authorship over all things. And really, that is the big truth. We're going to start by stating the doctrine up front, which is, God determines all things.

God doesn't merely allow history, He authors it. Every moment, every molecule, every motive. Now, if that sounds kind of shocking to you, that's because most of us were trained to think that God is basically like a cosmic lifeguard.

He sits back, He warns, He reacts, He tries to save, but He never really plans the storm. But, you know, Scripture actually gives us something much more bigger and far more determinative than that simplistic understanding of God.

This is not up for debate if you actually really believe the Bible. So, let me take a second and go over a few things that help you understand this. First, let's consider the fact that God's counsel extends to all events, even sinful ones.

Ephesians 1 .11 says,. Now, obviously, this is in context to our salvation, but the phrase, all things according to the counsel of His will, encompasses and includes everything that God is doing in the world to bring out that glory of our salvation.

Isaiah 46 .10 says,. Now, if we are to take the lifeguard view of God, we must conclude that this verse is false because if God is simply just a passive lifeguard trying to save and cannot ultimately save if your free will does not cooperate, then we must say and conclude that God has failed.

But according to this verse, whatever God wants to do, He, in fact, will accomplish it. He says, I will accomplish all my purpose. And obviously, this verse is in context to the children of Israel being sent to Babylon.

And God says that no matter where they're scattered, He will, in fact, gather them back. Is there anything too hard for the Lord? The answer is no. He will, in fact, accomplish all His purposes. Proverbs 16 .4 says,.

Now, this is, you know, broad wisdom literature, but that only helps our case because here we are getting the generic overview of everyone in the world, particularly the wicked here, and it says that they are purposed for something, the day of trouble.

There is nothing about a person circumstantially or personally that is by mistake or accident or only brought about by their autonomous free will. No, the Lord has purposed them for a specific end, and that, pertaining to the wicked, is the day of trouble or the day of judgment.

And we must recognize that God's counsel extends to all those events, including the sinful acts of wicked fallen creatures. Now, that doesn't just mean that God foreknows all things, as in He just passively sees the future.

It means that He willed them, designed them, ordained them on purpose, for a purpose. This isn't vague sovereignty. This is meticulous authorship. God isn't improvising. He isn't playing chess. He wrote the game, the board, the pieces, the moves, and the final checkmate is made by Him.

Sin Proceeds from the Creature, Not from God

Let's next consider the fact that sin still proceeds only from the creature, just as the Confession says, where it states,. Yet so, as the sinfulness of their acts proceedeth only from the creatures and not from God.

Now, this is the linchpin. Though God authors the story, the desire to sin arises from within the creature, not from God's nature, not from His heart, not from coercion, as some would like to say. And this is true when the Confession states it, because it is a summary of what Scripture teaches in James 1,.

Where it says,.

Okay, so far we have God as ultimate author, and we have the creatures committing the actual acts of sin. We are going to answer that objection, but let's next consider the fact that the Confession rejects bare permission and passivity with God.

You see, many want to protect God's innocence by saying, He merely permits evil, but doesn't ordain it. But the Confession rightly says that God does not relate to sin by bare permission. That term is actually a theological scapegoat that means almost nothing if you really think about it.

If God permits something that He knew would happen, that He could have stopped, that He designed the conditions for, then that's not neutral permission. That's deliberate ordination. You see, permission with foreknowledge, power, and design is in fact ordination.

There's no getting around that. The Confession says that God orders and governs sinful actions for holy ends, without Himself sinning.

How?

Well, that's coming up next. If you're tracking with us so far, you're probably asking the exact same question we need to answer here, which is, but if God ordained even the sinful desires, how is He not guilty?

That's where most objections arise, so let's go there now, and let's see if we can take this objection apart piece by piece. And the objection once again is, if God ordained my desires, isn't He guilty?

You see, this is the most emotionally powerful challenge that a Calvinist faces. If you've been Reformed for more than five minutes, you know that someone's hit you with this objection. They call us big fat meanies because we believe that God determined even sinful actions and that He predestinated some people to go to hell.

If God ordained that I would desire sin, how can He turn around and judge me for it, they'll ask. That makes Him the author of sin. This objection is the core of all resistance to biblical sovereignty.

You see, people can usually handle when you say God permits sin, but once you say that God ordains even the desires behind sin, their internal court of ethics screams, guilty! For them, it's a contradiction.

It's right there. It's an easy objection to make, but this protest only works when you confuse author-level causality with creature-level causality. So, let's clarify and dismantle this by drawing two sharp lines.

The first sharp line that we must draw is one that is fundamental to biblical Christianity, and that is the creator-creature distinction. You see, God is not a creature inside the creation. He is the author.

You cannot judge God's authorship by creaturely standards of responsibility. And yet, that is exactly what people do when they misrepresent Calvinism. You see, when people say, if God ordained my sinful desire, then He's the one who is guilty of it.

What they're doing is they're projecting creature categories onto the creator. So, how can we best understand this? Well, think about this illustration with me in reference to Shakespeare and Macbeth.

You see, Shakespeare writes a scene in which Macbeth murders King Duncan. Now, think about this. Who wrote the murder into the play? It was Shakespeare. But who committed the actual act of murder in the story?

It was Macbeth. So, who's guilty of the sin of murder? It is Macbeth. So, isn't Shakespeare guilty though? Of course not.

Why?

Because he is the author, not a character in the story. He wrote the sin to serve a larger purpose in the narrative. That's exactly what God does. Now, multiply the gap between Shakespeare and Macbeth by infinity.

That's exactly the gap between God and man. So, when God ordains that Judas will betray Him, it doesn't make sense for us to call God guilty. It makes Him sovereign. Because when Judas betrays Jesus, that is the outplay of what God has ordained to come to pass.

When we conflate God's divine authorship with creaturely behavior, we commit a category error. And I honestly believe this is exactly what Paul was trying to rescue us from when he wrote in Romans 9 .20,.

But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Wilt what is molded say to its molder, Why have you made me like this? We ought not to question God's ultimate purposes for us. It is completely in His prerogative to do with us whatsoever He wills.

Period. Full stop. Listen, if you can't understand this and be comfortable with it, then you can't be comfortable with God's love either. Because all of His attributes are unified and understood in His holiness in all His actions.

They cannot be separated. Let's consider our second sharp line. And that is that God ordains desires without being their moral source. Understand this. This is very important. Sin is defined by desire, not by determination.

Let's be absolutely clear here. God does not put evil in someone's heart the way we imagine. He doesn't inject wickedness into a pure soul. God creates the heart, the context, and the chain of causes that lead to the sinful act.

But the desire itself is the creature's own. You see, God ordains that people with corrupt hearts will act on those corruptions. He doesn't override the will. He doesn't design. All He does is design the heart, the context, and the moment.

That's not moral guilt. That is sovereign authorship. So, the next time someone says that God coerces people to sin, ask them, How could that make sense in light of God's metaphysical relationship to His creation?

And then just sit back and watch them struggle a little bit. And then explain to them that God doesn't grab neutral people and twist them into villains. He ordains that sinful creatures will willingly act according to their fallen hearts.

And that's exactly what Scripture teaches. For example, in Romans 9 .17, the apostle writes,. Now, this is in context in reference to Pharaoh. The phrase, I have raised you up, encompasses all of Pharaoh's life.

God purposed his entire life to be fit for destruction so that he can be seen as the glorious deliverer of his people from the land of Egypt. Consider also this, Proverbs 21, verse 1. His heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord.

He turns it wherever He wills. You see, God doesn't override the will. He authors the context that shapes it. He determines the things that will come to pass with the lives of human beings. He determines who you are, where you were born, what you experience, what you love, and how your heart will respond.

That is not coercion. That is sovereign authorship. Now, that's a theological answer, but sometimes theology clicks best through analogy. So let's see if we can illustrate this a little more vividly for you through some modern pictures that most of us can actually really relate to.

See, God is more like a game designer and not a puppet master. Provisionists often frame God like a puppet master or someone behind a joystick controller. They'll say things like, if God determines your actions, you're just a robot, aren't you?

Which honestly is completely inaccurate and only really plays on someone's emotions and capitalizes on people's ignorance. But you know what? Here's a better analogy. The open world game designer. Imagine that there is a developer who creates a vast open world RPG game.

This world has laws, terrains, rules, and even a story arc, which really makes a video game really fun in the first place for all my nerds out there. Every character has a backstory to them. They have personality.

They even have behavioral tendencies. Now imagine within this video game that one of the characters betrays another character. Now ask yourself, did the developer code the outcome?

Absolutely.

But did he force the character in real time though?

No.

The betrayal arose from the story. The character's traits, their environment. They're all designed. They're all intended. And we can even say theologically they're all ordained. Now imagine someone coming along and saying, oh, the developer of that video game is guilty of treason.

That would really be absurd, wouldn't it? But that's exactly what provisionists do when they say that God is guilty for ordaining sin in the first place. In contrast to the Calvinist viewpoint, in the provisionist world, the real controller behind your actions is actually a mythical, autonomous will floating outside the game, untouched by the character's own nature and context.

But in the Calvinist view, we say that there is no external will floating free. Only God's. The character's choices are real because they arise from who the character is. And God is the one who made him like that.

God isn't controlling your decisions like a joystick gamer. He's actually determining the person who desires to do them. Before we can really move on here, I really need you to understand this critique.

Calvinism removes this mythical idea of a free will. You see, within the provisionist system, this mythical idea of a free will seems to float outside of the story, untethered by your human nature, disconnected to your heart or any antecedent causes.

That's not biblical freedom, though. That's kind of like a form of Gnosticism in disguise. Within the Bible, biblical freedom is when you choose what you want to do. Reformed Calvinist thinking says that God ordains what you want to do, which is what makes things purposeful and meaningful in the first place as they outplay in time.

That is not robotics. That is consistency. So we've heard the theology. We've seen the analogies. Now let's look into what really seals the case, and that's scripture itself. Let's look through some biblical case studies where the very doctrine I've been talking about, which seems to sometimes just give people a knee jerk reaction as if it's some kind of contradiction, is actually really in the Bible.

These case studies that we're going to talk about are when God ordains sin and yet he judges it. We're going to begin with Genesis 50 with Joseph's brothers.

We read,.

You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. Now this was the same event, but it had two motives. The motives of the brothers was wicked, but yet God's purposes, what he meant, was for a redemptive end to save many people alive.

And Joseph didn't clearly stand there before his brothers to say, Oh, yeah, you see all these things that happen, God just passively sat back and allowed it to happen. No, he didn't say that. He said God meant it.

God had a very purpose behind the hatred and disdain that they had for him to the point at which they sold him into slavery and lied to their father about it. God purposed all of those events, their motives and the actions that they took against Joseph for his own glory.

This is in the scriptures. God ordains sin, and yet he absolutely is controlling the outcomes and plans that he has for them to be genuinely good. And in retrospect, we look back and say, Wow, God was in control all this time.

Joseph clearly understood that. Second thing we're going to look at here is Pharaoh in Romans 9,.

Where we read,.

For this very purpose, I have raised you up. Now, the Bible says that God hardened Pharaoh's heart, but yet the Bible also says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. So what was it? Is it either or? No, it's both and.

Both are true. God was glorified in hardening Pharaoh's heart. He wasn't simply just confirming him, but no, God was glorified in Pharaoh choosing to hate the people of God and Moses's commands from God that he hardened his own heart.

And yet Pharaoh was judged for what he wanted to do against the commandments of God. And yet God was sovereign to bring to pass his heart hardening. Third case study we're going to look at here is the Assyrians in Isaiah chapter 10, where God uses the Assyrians to judge the people of Israel.

Yet God judges Assyria for their prideful motives. Why is that? Because they didn't think they were actually serving God when they went to go, you know, ravage the nation of Israel. They were acting from their own ambitions.

Yet God's plan used their sin perfectly. And God can do that because like we've been arguing this entire time and like the confession clearly and explicitly and biblically notates for us, God can, he is perfect in all his ways and his wisdom and his providential outworkings are holy in their plan and outcomes.

We cannot fathom the way in which he can use the numerous amounts of people's actions in such a clean and perfect way to bring about the things that he desires to be glorified by. The last example that I have here is the crucifixion.

This is one that is near and dear to all our hearts. In Acts chapter 4 we read,. They were gathered together to do whatsoever your hand and plan had predestined to take place. Now the most evil act in human history, the killing of the Son of God, was predestined by the hand of God?

The murder of Christ was ordained? You see, God uses sin sinlessly because no laws apply to God. We can trust him because he is holy in his purity, his wisdom, and his providential dealings. The guilt for the murder still belongs though to the men who desired it and God used it to save the elect.

That's the final straw, honestly. You know, if you deny that God ordained sin and yet judges it, you ultimately are going to deny the cross. And that brings into question your affirmation and truth in the gospel.

And that is a scary line to be at. So let's not have a knee-jerk reaction when we hear Reformed theologians and Reformed confessions say things like God bringing all things, all things coming to pass by his hand and predestining wisdom and providential dealings with his creation.

But rather we should look at that and say, wow, God really is in control. And indeed he is God because he is able to do all these things and yet be sinless and guiltless for all that he does for his glory.

Why This Doctrine Matters for Salvation and the Cross

So what does this all mean for you? For us? For how we should really live and preach? Let's end with why this doctrine must matter for a second. In my final word here, what I want to say is why this doctrine is really worth defending.

You know, this is not simple philosophical trivia. It is the difference between a God who reacts and a God who reigns. A salvation that is possible and a salvation that is actually guaranteed. A gospel that depends upon the free will choices of man or a gospel that actually glorifies the grace of God.

If God does not determine all things, then the cross may have never happened because it's wholly dependent upon what man will do. If God is guilty of ordaining sin, then clearly he is not holy. But if the Second London Baptist confession of faith is true, and it is, then our God is way more glorious than we imagine.

And of course, we can say amen to that. Because God is not a puppet master. God is not a helpless observer. He's not passive. God is the author of all reality. God is holy, wise, glorious, and good. So, let's let God be God.

And let's let the scriptures speak. And let the confession stand. Well folks, that's really it for today's Truology episode. I hope this has really sharpened your understanding. And if it has and really challenged your categorical thinking, please share it.

Like, share, subscribe, even comment. If you wholly disagree with me, please tell me in the comments below. Let me know how much you dislike Calvinism and how we can help you get a better biblical view of how things are really to be understood from the scriptures themselves.

Don't apologize for God's sovereign and meticulous determinations in the realm of man's sin. We need to proclaim it. We need to exalt God in our understanding and who he is. We don't need to shy from that.

So guys, until next time, keep studying the truth. And may God bless you. Truology is a podcast that seeks to equip, effect, and engage the world through Christ and his wonderful gospel of the kingdom, against which he has promised that the gates of hell shall never prevail, but increase by his government, his law, and grace, till it be presented a glorious church without spot or wrinkle.

If there's any fear, threat, or worry, remember that the one that has called you according to his purpose and grace has also promised that all enemies will soon be placed under his feet. Now, I want you to believe that not because I said it or because it sounds really nice and spiritual, but primarily and wholeheartedly and only and biblically,.

Because it's the truth.