November 24, 2009: Toward A Robust View of the Sovereignty Of God (Part 2): Greg Boyd And People Who Teach That God Would Never Want Something Bad To Happen To You

Last week I contended with theological giant Tim Keller; this week I just stomp on a midget, Greg Boyd. (I’m not alone. All orthodox Christians gag on Greg.)

Boyd teaches that God does not know all the future. He still claims that God is omniscient, though, because he believes that God knows everything that can be known. To Boyd, the future decisions of free moral agents are in principal unknowable, and therefore even God can’t be sure of them. So God makes his best guesses (he does have pretty good instincts) and guides us accordingly.

In his book God of the Possible Boyd explains how this insight enabled him to counsel a woman who was distraught over the breakup of her marriage. Suzanne met her husband-to-be in a Christian college where they were both preparing to be missionaries. They courted for three and a half years and prayed and attended church together. When he proposed she prayed over it, and they consulted their parents and friends and their pastor, and all agreed that the marriage was God’s will for them.

Then after they got married her husband had affairs, lost his faith, physically abused her and filed for divorce. She was pregnant at the time.

Boyd writes, “Understandably, Suzanne could not fathom how the Lord could respond to her lifelong prayers by setting her up with a man he knew would do this to her and her child.” Boyd saw three ways to understand the situation: (1) Suzanne had been mistaken about hearing God’s direction in the first place. It hadn’t been God’s will at all but Suzanne’s – and she had turned a disobedient deaf ear to the true leading of the Lord; (2) It was indeed God’s will for her to marry this man who he knew in advance would turn apostate and cruel; (3) It was God’s will for her to marry this man, but only because he didn’t know the guy would become a thug. Even God thought at the time that the marriage was a good idea. Give God a break - he’s doing the best he can. You can’t expect God to give you perfect guidance all the time when he doesn’t know how people will turn out. Boyd likes alternative (3), thinking it is theologically correct and that it is a compassionate way to sympathize with God and counsel the grieving.

Boyd is a heretic. (When my sister was involved in a woman’s group that was studying one of Boyd’s books I told her “NO! NO! Read something else!”, and when a friend told me that his pastor told him to drop out of Moody and read Boyd, I told him “Find another church - now.”) Boyd’s demeaning, condescending, biblically unorthodox view of God fails to comfort, inform, clarify or even interest.

But I am very interested in the other alternatives that Boyd gives. What do you think – did Suzanne follow the leading of our good and omniscient God when she married an antichrist, or must she have made a mistake somewhere, since God would never lead his child to marry someone bad?

I have discovered in some Christian circles that believers who would never accept Boyd’s major premise (God doesn’t know the future) nonetheless buy his minor premise (it can’t be God’s will for any of his followers to have a bad marriage.) Those who accept this minor premise tend to believe that if we pray, seek the Lord’s leading, marry only another believer, maintain our purity both before the wedding and within the marital relationship, and speak all our partner’s love languages, then God will certainly guide us into a marriage that both honors him and pleases us. How could he not?

But I’m afraid this view is simply false, has no biblical warrant, and does not reflect a robust understanding of the sovereignty of God. It stumbles over the simple question, “How could you possibly know it is God’s will for you to have a good marriage?”

Consider the biblical data. It was God’s will that the prophet Hosea marry a whore and be very unhappy about it. It was his will that Joseph be abandoned and sold into slavery and be falsely accused and languish in prison. It was his will that a sword of sorrow pierce the heart of the blessed mother of Jesus (Luke 1:35). It was his will that some “faced jeers and flogging, while others were chained and put in prison. They were stoned, they were sawed in two, they were put to death by the sword” (Hebrews 11:36). And on top of all that it was his will that his own Son be tortured to death. So why does it seem impossible to Boyd (and, I’m afraid, to many non-heretical Christians) that God could will one of his children to marry a seemingly good believer who goes bad? This really should be an easy call. If God, in his sovereign will, should determine that his Son be betrayed by a Judas, why shouldn’t he determine that you or I marry one? If you answer, “Because I can’t see any way at all that God could bring good out of that circumstance,” I would respond, “You lack imagination.”

I think that God has graciously given me an unfair advantage in perceiving this truth. You see, I am Suzanne. Not literally - but my story parallels hers in many details. Now, in the year 2009, I am by God’s sheer favor the happiest married man I know – and perhaps the happiest married man I have ever known. But this has not always been the case. For years I endured marital circumstances that became for me what C. S. Lewis called the “severe mercy” of God.

You don’t want God’s severe mercy. Trust me, you don’t. But you may need it. God in his sovereign grace may entwine into your life the cruelty of Joseph’s brothers, the whoring of Gomer, the sadism of Herod, the betrayal of Judas, and many other things besides. He knows full well what some people are going to do to you, and he leads you into their lair anyway. Why? Why would he do that? I don’t know. It would be presumptuous of me to guess. He’s God, and I cannot fathom his ways. Maybe sometimes we can see bits and pieces of what he is doing, and maybe after years we will even be able to say, “Now I know what that was about.” Maybe not. But in the meantime we trust him.

And we relinquish to him our misguided sense of control and acknowledge that his sovereign hand may lead us into some circumstances that are delightful and some that are appalling. Consider that when St. Paul wrote, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty” (Philippians 4:12) he was neither crediting his wisdom for the bounty he sometimes enjoyed nor bemoaning his foolishness for the deprivation he sometimes suffered. He had already determined to receive from the Lord both good things and bad things with the discipline of holy contentment.

Like Paul I have known both poverty and riches - though in my case they have been relational rather than economic. God's sovereign love and exact foreknowledge have guided me through both. All praise and thanks to this all-wise, ever-loving, all-knowing God.