Question 3

3. If God is soverign and controls eveything He cannot be all good. If God is all good, he cannot be all powerful thus He is not soverign.

Reformed Theology: 

Reformed theology is rooted in the conviction that God is absolutely sovereign—meaning He exercises complete control over all things, including salvation, human decisions, and even suffering or evil. This view is drawn from passages like Isaiah 46:10 ("I make known the end from the beginning... My purpose will stand") and Ephesians 1:11 ("He works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will").

Because of this, Reformed theologians argue that God’s sovereignty and His goodness are not in conflict. Instead, they say that our limited human understanding simply cannot fully grasp how God’s eternal purposes unfold. John Calvin taught that God ordains all things—even sin—not by being the author of evil, but by using it instrumentally to accomplish good. This is sometimes called the doctrine of concurrent causation: God is the ultimate cause, but humans are still responsible for their choices.

The crucifixion of Jesus is seen as the ultimate example: it was divinely predestined (Acts 2:23), yet carried out by wicked men. In Reformed thought, God’s goodness is not measured by earthly comfort or fairness, but by His glory being revealed through His redemptive plan—even if that includes judgment and wrath.

Conflict

If we believe Jesus is God, then Jesus isn’t just a reflection of God’s character—He is the fullness of God in bodily form (Colossians 2:9). That means what Jesus did, how He loved, how He responded to sinners, how He forgave even while being crucified—that is God. Full stop. If anything in the Old Testament seems to contradict what Jesus revealed, then Jesus wins. He is the final Word (Hebrews 1:1–3).

So when we wrestle with whether God can be both good and sovereign, we don’t have to imagine an abstract philosophical being. We look at the Cross. That was the most evil moment in human history—more evil than the Holocaust, than the slave trade, than genocide, than famine. In that moment, Jesus—the only innocent One—took on every sin, every shame, every hell that humanity has ever chosen. And what did God do? He redeemed it.

Three days later, He turned the ugliest moment in history into the most glorious one. The Problem Isn’t God—It’s Our Imagination.

We struggle to reconcile evil and sovereignty because we don’t understand eternity. We’re looking at a grain of sand and trying to measure the entire seashore. But the Bible says, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). God is playing the long game. The eternal game.

Free will doesn’t limit God—it reveals Him. The most powerful being in the universe gave His creation the power to say “no.” Why? Because love isn’t love unless it’s chosen. God didn’t create robots. He created sons and daughters who were meant to be like Him.

The very fact that Jesus, in the Lord’s Prayer, instructs us to pray “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10) proves that there is divine will in heaven not yet manifested on earth. Job 38:33 affirms this mystery: “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you set their dominion over the earth?” Meanwhile, multiple scriptures reveal that the enemy holds sway over the world’s systems (John 12:31, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Ephesians 2:2), underscoring the tension between heavenly order and earthly rebellion.

Evil is not God’s will. Jeremiah 32:35 says that the child sacrifices in the Valley of Hinnom “never even entered His mind.” That means not everything that happens on earth is His doing. But everything that happens on earth can be redeemed if we let Him in.

In other words, His glory is found in how He redeems the chaos—not in micromanaging it.

And He’s not finished.

We serve a God who lets people choose death… and then still shows up at the tomb, weeping, before saying, “Come forth.”

That’s not a contradiction.

That’s the gospel of the kingdom. That news feels and sounds and tastes good to me. And that is the news I desperately want the world to hear.