Taken From the book:

Suffering and the Sovereignty of God

by John Piper
(Page 69 onwards)
My answer is this: We cannot understand how
these things can possibly be. We cannot
understand how some human act can be fully
explained in terms of Gods having freely
intended it without that explanation cancelling
the freedom and responsibility of its human
intenders. We cannot understand how divine and
human agency are compatible in a way that
allows the exercise of each kind of agency to be
fully explanatory of some object or event. And
yet and this is the absolutely crucial point
we can understand why we cannot understand it.
It is because our attempts to understand this
involve our trying to understand the unique
relationship between the Creator and his
creatures in terms of our understanding of some
creature-to-creature relationship. But these
attempts, it should be obvious, involve us in a
kind of category mistake that dooms our
attempts from the start. A category mistake
involves attempting to think about something
under the wrong category. How the Creators
agency relates to his creatures agency is to be
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categorized quite differently from how any

creatures agency relates to any other creatures
agency. This should be obvious merely by our
remembering that God has created everything
ex nihiloout of nothingwhile all creaturely
creation involves some sort of limited action on
some pre-existing stuff.
When Scripture reveals anything about the
relationship between divine and human agency,
it merely affirms what Joseph declared in Genesis
50:20it affirms both divine and human agency,
with both kinds of agency referring to and
explaining the same event, but with each kind of
agency explaining that event in its own way.
Thus Scripture reveals that both human agency
and divine agency are to be fully affirmed
without attempting to tell us how this can be,
because we have no way to understand it, no
matter what Scripture would say: all of our
analogies concerning different agents or
different kinds of agency must be drawn from
what holds between and among creatures, and
so we necessarily lack the conceptual
wherewithal to plumb how Gods foreordaining
agency enables and yet governs our own free
agency. As David said, after confessing that God
knew his every word even before it was on his
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own tongue, such knowledge is too wonderful

for us; it is, quite literally, too lofty for us to
attain (see Ps. 139:4-6).
In summary, this means that we should affirm
the age-old Christian doctrine of Gods complete
providence over all. God has sovereignty
ordained, from before the world began,
everything that happens in our world, but in a
way that does no violence to creations
secondary causes and in a way that does not
take away from human freedom or responsibility.
Beyond All Doubt
If all of this is true, then what should we be sure
of when we are hurt by others or when we hurt
others or ourselves? When we are thinking about
human suffering and its relationship to Gods will
and our wills, what should be beyond all doubt?
It should be beyond all doubt that no one suffers
anything at anyone elses hand without God
having ordained that suffering. During his first
hour or so in Birkenau, Elie Wiesel saw the
notorious Joseph Mengele, looking like the
typical SS officer: a cruel, though not
unintelligent, face, complete with monocle.
Mengele was asking the new arrivals a few
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questions and then, with a conductors baton,

casually directing them either to his left, so that
they went immediately to the gas chambers, or
to his right to the forced-labor camp. In seeing
Mengele, Wiesel was seeing a very evil man
whom, nevertheless, God was actively sustaining
and governing, nanosecond by nanosecond,
through his evil existence. And we can be sure
that, from before time began; God had ordained
that at that place those moments would be filled
with just those persons, doing and suffering
exactly as they did.
We can be sure, because of what God says in
places like Hebrews 1:3 and Ephesians 1:11, that
even those persons in those moments did not
fall out of Gods hands but that he actually
brought the whole situation about, guiding and
governing and carrying it by his all-powerful and
ever-effectual word to where it would
accomplish exactly what he wanted it to do.
We can also be sure that when we hurt each
other, the God who has made us in his image is
watching and will call us to account (see Gen.9:46). Even though he ordains all of our free sinful
choices, those sinful choices still count and we
are held responsible for them.
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