I am the Lord, and there is no other;
besides me there is no God.
I equip you, [Cyrus,] though you do not know me,
that people may know, from the rising of the sun
and from the west, that there is none besides me;
I am the Lord, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness,
I make well-being and create calamity,
I am the Lord, who does all these things.—Isaiah 45:5-7 (ESV)The Lord is in control in everything that happens—everything. This is not to say that God desires bad things to happen, as if he enjoyed them; but it is to say that nothing happens apart from God’s power and his sustaining will. There is nothing good that does not come from his hand, and there is no trouble and no disaster that does not happen on his sufferance. God could, for instance, have prevented 9/11; he could have given Osama bin Laden a fatal accident years ago, or changed Bill Clinton’s mind to green-light bin Laden’s assassination, or had him knifed in the back by some Afghan tribesman. He didn’t choose to do that. He could have prevented our current economic crisis—fairly easily, in fact; he didn’t choose to do that either. I don’t know his reasons, for these or for any other disasters, and I won’t presume to declare the mind of God; but whether he decreed them for judgment or permitted them for other purposes, the testimony of Scripture is clear that they happened only by God’s will. Indeed, Scripture is clear that nothing happens, for good or ill, that is not in some way an expression of the sovereign will of Almighty God.This is a hard word for us. That God sends good things—yes, of course. That only God deserves the credit for the good things that come to us—which is to say, that we can’t take credit for them ourselves—is usually not something we want to consider. Indeed, for many people, that’s a painfully hard idea to accept. But that God sends bad things—that’s something else again. Does that make God the author of evil?There are those who have believed so, and who have responded either by rejecting God or by rejecting the biblical testimony to his power and lordship. But the truth is, it doesn’t. God did not create evil—he could not do any such thing, because it’s completely contrary to his nature—nor did he ever desire that evil things should happen. However, when our first ancestors fell into sin, he chose not to obliterate them, toss out the world he’d made, and start over, but rather to put a plan in motion to redeem their sin; as a consequence, while he may at times prevent us from sinning and forbid disasters from occurring, there are other times when, for his own purposes, he doesn’t. The important thing is that there is no evil he permits in which he is not in some way at work in order to redeem it—and there is no suffering he allows in which he does not share, in the body of his Son our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross. God is not aloof from the pain of this world; in Christ, he has borne it all.(Excerpted from “God’s Mysterious Way”)
