“The Bible plainly teaches that God works His will just as surely through the free actions of personal beings including man as He does through the courses of the heavenly bodies or the silent ripening of the grain…God, according to the Bible, is master of the heart of man just as much as He is master of the impersonal forces of nature, and from man’s heart man’s actions come.
Even the wicked actions of men serve God’s purposes and it is by His works of providence that He permits those wicked actions to be done.
Just pass in review, my friends, the history of Bible times. Nation after nation rises on the scene – Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Rome. Wicked nations are these – cruel, hard and proud. Yet how does the Bible represent them? How does the Bible represent even the cruel devastations that they carried on amid the people of God? As defeating God’s eternal purpose, as contravening His governance of the world? No, my friends, the Bible represents those wicked nations as unwitting instruments in God’s almighty hand.
Take also the wicked acts not of nations but of individual men. Were they accomplished without the providence of God; did they defeat His governance of the world? The Bible tells us, No. ‘You thought’ – said Joseph to his wicked brothers – “you thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Gen. 50:20). Even the supreme crime of all the ages, the crucifixion of Jesus our Lord, was not brought about apart from the providence of God. ‘For truly’ says the Book of Acts, ‘ in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place’ (Acts 4:27,28).
No, my friends, there are no exceptions here. Everything that is done in the whole course of the world – by forces of nature or by the free actions of men good and bad – everything has God as its great Cause.
But though God brings all these things to pass, He brings them to pass in widely different ways. He does not bring to pass the free actions of personal beings in the same way as the way in which He brings to pass the ripening of the grain. He brings to pass the actions of personal beings in a way that preserves their freedom and their responsibility to the full.
Shall that be accounted a thing inconceivable? We persuade our fellow men, yet their freedom is preserved when they do what we persuade them to do. Shall not then God be able to do with certainty what we with our little power do with uncertainty? Does not God who made the soul of man know how to move it in accordance with its own nature so that its freedom shall not be destroyed?
Shall He not be able even to use the evil actions of men for His own holy purposes? The Bible tells us plainly that He does so use those evil actions. Even they do not lie beyond His governance as the great First Cause. Yet the Bible tells us with equal plainness that He is not the author of sin that sin is ever hateful in His eyes. Why He allowed sin to enter is the mystery of mysteries, but that He did so we are plainly told, and that He did so for some high and holy end.”
- J. Gresham Machen, The Christian View of Man
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