Still Sovereign, Still Near

I’ve had a song stuck in my head for a couple weeks now. “Sovereign,” by Beautiful Eulogy. It’s been in my head for a while because it keeps making think about a question I’d rather let go. You can probably find the song wherever you stream music.

The song spends most of its runtime doing what I am comfortable doing: cataloging God’s sovereignty. He governs nations. He raises up kings and takes them down. He holds the wind and the sea in His hand. He’s the one who intercedes on the will of a man and causes that man to believe. It’s a big, confident, biblical picture of a God who is genuinely in charge of everything.

Then the song does something braver. It stops praising and starts asking questions. If God is really running the show, why do wicked men keep winning? Why does evil get to sit at the table and eat? Is God still holding the pieces, or did He hand the board to us and walk away?

I think that’s the more honest song. Most of us don’t struggle with sovereignty as a doctrine. We struggle with it at two in the morning, when the doctrine and our life don’t seem to match up.

Where this actually shows up

I’m not writing this from a hypothetical. Right now I know people carrying real weight.

A close friend of mine got hurt on the job two years ago. The injury healed slower than the bills did. He’s staring down the possibility of losing his house, and every month that passes wears a little more off him. Two years is a long time to keep believing something is going to turn.

Someone close to me is watching a long relationship come apart, and he’s still hoping he can save it. That uncertainty a deep grief that just settles on you and cuts deep.

Another friend is in the middle of another kind of mess. It’s the kind that I have seen cause the loss of trust, relationships, and sometimes even their faith. They won’t lose their faith, but it’s one of the deepest kinds of wounds.

None of these situations have tidy timelines. They’re all still open.

The tension the Bible doesn’t resolve the easy way

Here’s something I’ve been chewing on in my own study lately, working through the doctrine of salvation: Scripture holds together two things that feel like they should cancel each other out. God sovereignly grants faith without ever forcing a man’s will. And in that same breath, Scripture says God governs kings and nations and the plans of men without ever becoming the author of the evil those men do.

Same tension, two different places. In salvation, it’s God drawing a sinner to Himself without violating the will He gave him. In providence, it’s God ruling over a genuinely wicked world without His hands getting dirty in the wickedness. Both are true. Neither collapses into the other. That’s not a contradiction to be solved. It’s the shape of a God who is bigger than our categories for cause and freedom.

I say that because if you’re waiting for a tidy philosophical answer for why your suffering exists, you’re not going to get one here. And you’re not going to get one from the Bible. What you get instead is something better than an explanation.

The proof isn’t an argument. It’s a cross.

Here’s where the song lands, and where I think it’s exactly right. You don’t answer “how can a sovereign God allow this evil” with logic. You answer it by pointing at the worst evil that was ever committed.

An innocent man was arrested on false charges, abandoned by His friends, tortured, and executed by people who knew exactly what they were doing. By every human measure, that’s the clearest case of evil winning that has ever existed. And Scripture tells us plainly that this same event happened according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.

Both things are said in the same sentence. Wicked men killed Him. God planned it. And what came out of that worst injustice was the redemption of the world.

If that’s true, then no trial you’re in right now is outside the reach of that same hand.

Not the job injury that’s dragged on two years past when you thought it would resolve. Not the relationship you can’t seem to save. Not the wound left on your family. God’s sovereignty isn’t proven by explaining your pain away. It’s proven by what He’s already done with the worst pain in history.

Sovereign, but not distant

I want to be careful here, because sovereignty alone can sound cold if that’s all you say. “God is in control” isn’t much comfort to someone who needs to know God is close.

So hold this alongside it: the same God who governs kings and nations put on flesh and walked into the middle of our specific griefs. He wept at a grave He was about to empty. He was tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin.

The sovereignty that holds the universe together is not distant from you. It has a face, and it has scars, and it knows exactly what your kind of pain feels like from the inside.

That’s the whole picture. Not just a God who’s in charge. A God who’s in charge and close enough to sit with you in it.

If you’re in one of those seasons that doesn’t seem to have an end date, you’re not outside His hand. You never were.