We often struggle to understand the relationship of divine causality and human causality. When you do something, did you freely choose to do it or did God sovereignly cause you to do it? Several reconciliations involve God’s primary causality and our secondary causality, like God primarily sending the rain and the secondary scientific explanation of condensation. However, framing the two as one after the other reduces our decisions to be like that of a pre-programmed machine. Ironically, several secular philosophers have pursued this line of determinism, but the bible’s portrait of humanity is not at all robotic. We make free choices for good and for evil and bear the consequences. People are not robots but have real agency to which they are held accountable. People ponder the decisions they face and often change their mind after they have taken some action in one direction. Moreover, good is to be rewarded and encouraged and evil is to be punished and condemned.
How then do we reconcile God’s agency in his providence with our agency in our choices? One example that can help us is the dual authorship of the bible. The bible is very much a human text and has human fingerprints all over it, and yet “prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). This does not mean that the bible is one long dictation from God like the Quran (though some parts of the bible include dictations: “This is what the Lord says...”). Each book of the bible has distinct characteristics of its author, but the bible as a whole has the distinctive characteristic of being authored by God, “All Scripture is God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16).
The transcendence of God’s authorship in parallel with the bible’s human authorship can help us to understand the transcendence of God’s providence in parallel with human decisions. Just as we can understand the inspiration of scripture as the dual authorship of the bible, we can understand God’s sovereignty and human responsibility as the dual authorship of history. At one level, human history is a composition resulting from free human decisions, but none of it is outside of God’s sovereign will and plan. “In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). God’s sovereignty is not on the same existential plain (or in the same ball park) as our sovereignty (i.e. in a tug of war between primary and secondary causality), God’s is sovereign over our sovereignty. That is, God’s plan transcends our plans, it’s not an either or between God’s choice and our choice or even a one after the other, but one (God’s) through the other (ours).
Further parallels can be drawn between God’s dictation in the bible and his intervention in history. Just as the bible is made up of God’s invisible inspiration of the prophets and his visible inspiration in his dictation: “this is what the Lord says...”, so too God works in human history using an invisible hand of providence and a visible hand of miracles. Sometimes God achieves his purposes despite his creation (people or nature), though often he achieves his purposes through his creation. This does not reduce people to God’s puppets, for God brings good out of evil (Genesis 50:20; Acts 2:23) and even uses sin to achieve his glory (Proverbs 16:4; Isaiah 10:12-15; Romans 9:17). God cannot disown himself (2 Timothy 2:13) but he can and does use those who disown him to execute his justice (Romans 13:1-5).
Parallels can also be drawn between God using our evil to achieve his good and his word tearing down in order to build up. One of the most developed theologies of the word of God is in the book of Jeremiah. In Jeremiah’s call to ministry, God puts his words in Jeremiah’s mouth “to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:9-10). This dual intention of tearing down and building up shapes the rest of the book as the word of the Lord becomes a double edged sword that comes to many as the stench of death, before it is received as the fragrance of life. The canonical shape of the book thus makes clear that God “watches over” the sovereign word of God, first to pluck up and tear down, then to plant and to build. The dual theme of judgment and promise is reflected in the shaping of the canonical text. In Jeremiah we see a story arc of the word of the Lord to tear down (Jeremiah 1-25) and to build up (Jeremiah 30-52), pivoting on a narrative of sin and grace (Jeremiah 26-29).
Similarly, God has been sovereign over the narrative of human history which has taken the shape of fall (a tearing down) and redemption (a building up). This is not the best possible world, the best possible world is heaven, but we can only get there by going through earth. Only then will we be able to taste and see how good God’s grace really is, having experienced how devastating our sin really is. “For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Romans 11:32). “Scripture has locked up everything under the control of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe” (Galatians 3:22). Both human history and our understanding of God’s word have been darkened by our choice to live without God, and yet in history Jesus came as “the light of all mankind, the light shines in the darkness” (John 1:4-5), and illuminated our understanding of God’s eternal word, “for God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (Galatians 3:22).
