John C. Lennox Weighs in on God's Sovereignty and Human Freedom

One of the top five questions I get (and get again and again) as a pastor surrounds how we make sense of God's sovereignty on the one hand and human freedom (or responsibility) on the other.  The question usually goes something like this: "If God is absolutely in control of everything, how can humans be free?"  Or "How can God hold us responsible for choices He's ultimately in control of?"

I'm not going to solve this mystery here.  (There's my disclaimer!)  But I do want to include an excerpt about this topic from Against the Flow by John C. Lennox (Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College).  You can find out even more about John Lennox and what he's doing here. 

I intend for this to be good food for thought as we consider and process this mystery of God's sovereignty and human responsibility: 

The following excerpt it from John C. Lennox, Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism (Monarch Books, 2015), pp. 17-18.

It is surely self-evident that in an utterly deterministic universe love and genuine choice would be impossible.  

When the Christian apostle Paul addressed the august Athenian philosophical court, the Areopagus, he pointed out that neither the Stoic explanation of the universe (featuring deterministic processes) nor the Epicurean explanation (featuring chance processes) was adequate to grasp the subtlety of things as they are.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way towards him and find him.  Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.  (Acts 17:26-27.)

According to Paul, God is in ultimate control of history; but this does not eliminate, bypass, or otherwise invalidate human responsibility to seek and reach out for God.

This topic has been the food of philosophical debate for centuries.  However, the Bible does not discuss the matter so much by giving us a philosophical treatise on it, as by focusing attention on the way it works out in down-to-earth history. ...

...we, with all the limitations of our humanity, can never have full understanding of the relationship between God's rule in history and human freedom and responsibility.  That does not mean, however, that we should not believe in them.  After all, most of us believe in energy, even though none of us knows what it is.  The belief that God's rule and human freedom are real is warranted primarily because this view has considerable explanatory power.  (In a similar way, the tension of seeing light simultaneously as particles and as a wave is tolerated in physical explanations of light.)  The biblical narrative, and indeed history itself, makes more sense in light of this complex view, rather than if we deny either God's rule or a degree of human freedom.  A great deal of humility is also called for, in view of what is ultimately (and probably necessarily) characterized by a certain degree of mystery.