When it comes to creation, a number of Christians have sought to reconcile God’s creation in Genesis 1 with scientific observations about evolution, i.e. God creates a process of evolution which he sovereignly controls to bring about his intended creation ‘according to their kinds’. Whether you agree with evolution or not, the principle of God’s transcendence over nature can be accepted. How does God ‘send the rain’? By his sovereign control of a natural weather process. Natural processes in nature are not miraculous, but God is still sovereign over them. A number of Christians have also applied this principle to the ten plagues: whatever changed the Nile to blood brought a plague of frogs, this imbalance in the ecosystem brought a plague of gnats, which in turn brought a plague of flies etc. This doesn’t deny God’s agency (especially because it was predicted through Moses), but can even lead us to appreciate God’s sovereignty through the natural rather than the supernatural.
God’s hands are not tied, he is free to work by a visible hand of miracles or an invisible hand of providence. Only a belief in the god of the gaps (that science can’t explain) seeks to contain the works of God to the miraculous. If this is the case then God has been quite silent for a number of centuries, despite the claim of so many that God has worked in their lives. Of course God can and does do miracles, but he is not limited to only doing miracles. God can work through ordinary people and events to do the extraordinary e.g. reveal himself to someone by their reading of the Bible. Many Old Testament narratives (e.g. Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther) reveal God’s work in salvation history through people without supernatural intervention. God works out everything (both natural and supernatural) in conformity with the purpose of his will (Ephesians 1:11).
In this understanding of God’s transcendence, we can begin to approach the problem of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. How can people be held responsible if God is sovereign over everything (including people)? Because his sovereignty is transcendent to our responsibility, it’s not that the more sovereign he is the less responsible we are, but that he uses our choices (for which we are responsible) to bring about his sovereign will. God’s sovereignty and human responsibility are not in tension but in parallel. God’s will is achieved not instead of human will or because of human will, but through human will, i.e. God is sovereignty is achieved through the very thing that makes us responsible, our will. As people we can do things for God or against God, but never instead of God. God’s sovereignty and human responsibility are parallel such that they never meet in a point of tension where one must trump the other, but rather one (God’s sovereignty) is realised through the other (human responsibility).
At this point, many will be starting to feel uncomfortable with describing human will and responsibility in such mechanistic terms. If God uses our will to achieve his, doesn’t that mean that he is the agent and we’re the mechanisms? It’s starting to sound like an emphasis on God’s sovereignty at the expense of human responsibility i.e. that we’re just robots and therefore should be held accountable for the things that we do. However, this understanding comes from an oversimplification of the complexities of freedom. To have free will is not necessarily the same thing as being free. The Bible describes humanity as having free will (in that we’re responsible for our actions), but as slaves to sin (in that left to ourselves, no one would choose to obey God).
Augustine first distinguished between the freedom of humanity before the fall and their freedom (or lack thereof) after the fall. As a result of the first sin, man lost his liberty but not his free will. Fallen man is in the bondage of sin. He still has the faculty of choosing, a will free from coercion, but now is free only to sin, because his desires are inclined only toward sin and away from God. Viewed in this way, sin is wilful disobedience and therefore we are responsible for it. God is sovereign over our will in that he can move our will to obey (wilful obedience), or hand it over to its desire (wilful disobedience). Either way, God’s will transcends ours. It’s never God’s will or our will, but God’s will through our will.
Confusion often comes because we describe both God’s sovereignty and human responsibility in terms of will (God’s sovereign will and our free will). This often leads to a tug of war between God’s sovereign will and human free will, but this is an oversimplification of God’s sovereignty. Augustine wrote that what the heart desires, the will chooses and the mind justifies. Our choices and our will begin in our heart, but even the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases (Proverbs 21:1). Why does the heart want what the heart want? Do we have any control over the desires of our heart? Free will is often understood as being able to follow the desires of your heart. To be free is to be free to follow our heart, what we delight in. In this, we are quite different from robots following pre-programmed instructions. We have desires in our hearts that move our will. This I think, is what God transforms in us. He removes our hearts of stone and gives us a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26), but also tells us to set our hearts on things above (Colossians 3:1) and that if we delight ourselves in the Lord, then he will give us the desires of our heart (Psalm 37:4).
