The perceived tension between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility can be reconciled by understanding the dual will of God. Christians believe that God has a sovereign (or transcendent) will which is basically everything that happens (Acts 18:21, Rom 1:10, 9:19, 15:32, 1 Pet 3:17, 4:19) and a moral (or immanent) will which is to obey God (Mark 3:25, John 7:17, Rom 12:2, 1 Thess 4:3, 5:18). These dual wills are not in opposition to each other, if you think of God’s sovereign will and his moral will as overlapping circles then the overlap is when we obey and the area of God’s sovereign will not overlapping with God’s moral will is when we sin. The area of God’s moral will not overlapping with his sovereign will are a missed opportunities to obey and the area outside both circles are missed opportunities to sin.
If you can hold these two together, you can hold God’s sovereignty together with human responsibility. For God is sovereign in his sovereign will, there is nothing that happens outside of it. And people are responsible in God’s moral will, our decisions and actions have real consequences. In this paradigm, human will (or free will if there is such a thing) is in the same dimension as God’s moral will. Our will can be in line with God’s will as revealed in the Bible, or opposed to it in a tug of wills. God’s sovereign will is seen in a different dimension, transcendent to his moral will and human wills alike. For linguists, his sovereign will is like the perfective aspect (bird’s eye view) of his will and his moral will like the imperfective aspect (street view) of his will.
Another way of seeing it is that the various parts of God’s moral will make up the whole of his sovereign will. So that when something happens in line with his moral will (like doing good – 1 Pet 2:15), it’s part of his sovereign will (Eph 2:10), but even when something happens in opposition to his moral will (like injustice – 1 Pet 3:17), it’s part of his sovereign will, ultimately for good (Rom 8:28). This is where it gets a bit tricky, for we know God’s moral will for the future but not his sovereign will for the future. And so people are responsible for the evil they commit, even though it’s not outside God’s sovereign will i.e. God uses our evil actions to achieve his good purpose (Gen 50:20, Acts 2:23).
Unfortunately we can never see God’s sovereign will beyond the present unless he reveals it to us (we can’t see the bird’s eye view of the street because we’re on the street). I think this is the heart of the perceived tension between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility (as it was for Job). It’s only with hindsight that we can see how God used events that are contrary to his moral will to actually achieve his sovereign will which is good (in some cases, that hindsight might not come until we’re in heaven). Until then we’re called to trust that God is powerful (in control of everything) and good (in everything that happens).
The problem of evil then is only a problem for those who demand hindsight in the present. Predestination is only an issue if God’s will doesn’t have a sovereign dimension as well as a dimension that we interact with. Free will only undermines God’s will if his sovereign will is seen to be exactly the same as his moral will, i.e. only if God’s will is one dimensional. The duality of God’s will is something that Christians have believed for centuries, and it’s the key to understanding one of the most difficult theological concepts – God’s sovereign benevolence. In this way, God’s sovereignty and goodness are seen as two sides of the same coin, his plan as two dimensions of the same will. Your will is free to be for or against God’s (moral) will, but never instead of God’s (sovereign) will, for he uses our morality in his sovereignty, i.e. he uses our will to achieve his.
