Salvation By Grace

Question asked is how can God be sovereign over evil, but not responsible for it?

Sproul:

• Evil is truly a sin and it is a sin to call evil good and good evil, but when God decrees that evil should occur it is good that it occurs or it couldn’t be here. Because God ordains it and God is good and He only ordains that which is good.

Mohler:

• Agrees with Sproul
• States that the problem with theodicy (the study of the origin of evil) is that it arises from the wrong question, in other words rather than seeing God as essentially good and deriving whatever good there is from observing God, we abstract an idea of good and then try to measure God against that human abstraction
• That is always a losing proposition because we don’t know what good is
• When people say “If God does this he cannot be good”, they don’t realize that that is an internal contradiction. The only God that exists is good, He defines what is good by the consistency of His own character, not that He corresponds to some arbitrary understanding of good.
• We must alway have an eschtalogical [Eschatology is a part of theology and philosophy concerned with what is believed to be the final events in the history of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humanity, commonly referred to as the end of the world.] perspective

Zacharias:

• The whole anti-theistic movement (there is no God) ties themselves in knots over this issue
• On the one hand they deny any objective moral standard yet on the other hand whenever they see something they don’t like they say there it is “where is God in all of this.” [They are affirming the presence of a moral standard by stating that something evil has occurred.)
• Echoes back to one of Ravi’s previous sermons:If you acknowledge something wrong or evil, you must acknowledge a moral law, if you ackknowlege a moral law you must acknowledgement a moral law giver.
• 2 Christmas’ ago they were trying to push out God completely and then Dec. 26th tsunami hits . . . and everyone wanted to know where God was; “Every time you deny an absolute, you smuggle one in the back door which you cannot justify without God himself.”