“The LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man fearing God and turning away from evil. And he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause.’”
Notice how God took personal responsibility for allowing Satan to proceed with his challenge against Job as if God had done it Himself: “…you incited Me against him to ruin him without cause.” (v.3) However, the truth is that God did not harm Job. God loved and bragged about Job, and merely allowed Job to be tested in order to refute Satan’s malicious accusation against him. Rightly, now God accuses the true culprit, Satan.
Permission is again evident in the second test, when God said to Satan: “Behold, he is in your power, only spare his life.” (v.6) God certainly could have chosen not to permit Satan’s challenge, but perhaps God saw some benefit in it, particularly for Job, both by giving him an opportunity to demonstrate his faithfulness and to refute Satan’s charge and also perhaps God may have seen this event as being useful in helping to transform Job from being a moralist into having a deeper level of faith.
What do Calvinists believe?
Erwin Lutzer: “When Satan taunted God about Job, the Lord allowed Satan to inspire evil men to kill Job’s servants and steal his cattle; he gave Satan the power to use wind and lightning to kills Job’s children.”439
Erwin Lutzer: “Nonetheless, his permission necessarily means that he bore ultimate responsibility for it. After all, he could have chosen ‘not to permit’ it.”440
Erwin Lutzer: “In a word, what God permits, he ordains.”441
Our reply:
“Ordains” is an ambiguous term. Would we also say that in Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son that since the father permitted his son to leave with his share of the demanded inheritance that the father thus ordained the matter, or do we mean something else? It seems as if Calvinists are taking something in which God is entirely passive and rendering it as something in which God is active. John Calvin more clearly affirms this:
“From the first chapter of Job we learn that Satan appears in the presence of God to receive his orders, just as do the angels who obey spontaneously. The manner and the end are different, but still the fact is, that he cannot attempt anything without the will of God. But though afterwards his power to afflict the saint seems to be only a bare permission, yet as the sentiment is true, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; as it pleased the Lord, so it has been done,’ we infer that God was the author of that trial of which Satan and wicked robbers were merely the instruments.
Satan’s aim is to drive the saint to madness by despair. The Sabeans cruelly and wickedly make a sudden incursion to rob another of his goods. Job acknowledges that he was deprived of all his property, and brought to poverty, because such was the pleasure of God. Therefore, whatever men or Satan himself devise, God holds the helm, and makes all their efforts contribute to the execution of his Judgments.”442
Michael Brown responds: “Sickness, suffering, sovereignty of God, Satan, what does God do?; what does Satan do, especially as it relates to human sickness and disease? … From the Book of Job, there are two very important truths that we learn. Number one, you see someone suffering, maybe a godly person, someone who loves the Lord, and you’ve known them for years, and suddenly all kinds of calamity, sickness, tragedy in the family, don’t say, ‘Oh, they must have sinned real bad, because these things only happen to wicked people,’ like Job’s friends did. Don’t judge Job, don’t judge your friend who loves the Lord, and say, ‘they must have sinned, otherwise this couldn’t have happened.’ Conversely, there’s another great lesson from Job. Don’t judge God. Job was wrong to think that God did these things. God gave permission to Satan, but it was the malignant hand of Satan that afflicted Job, that afflicted the children, that killed the children and destroyed the livestock. That was the work of the devil, the destroyer. That was not God doing that to Job. There is a distinction in the text. God says to the devil, ‘You’re moving Me to destroy him without a cause; you’re trying to incite Me.’ Job wrongly judged God, and said, ‘God’s guilty.’ See, the friends said, ‘Job, you’re guilty.’ Job said, ‘God, You’re guilty.’ Both were wrong. Sometimes inexplicable things happen to the righteous, but it is wrong to turn around and judge the person and say, ‘you must be in sin; that’s why this happened.’ And it is wrong to turn around and say, ‘Well, we don’t know why God sent that.’ Who said God sent it? Just because it happened, doesn’t mean that God sent it.”443
While the devil hated Job and tempted him with the desire to fail, God loved Job and allowed him to be tested with the desire that he succeed. The problem with deterministic Calvinism and its associated teaching that God decreed whatsoever comes to pass is that such a decree would necessarily include both the existence of the devil, as a wicked entity, and also the devil’s desire to enter Heaven and to blaspheme both God and Job, which then raises the question of whether the alleged decree is, in actuality, the smiling face behind all evil, having secretly decreed absolutely every single bit of it. In other words, it is one thing for God to use Satan’s blasphemy as an occasion to ultimately achieve some benefit for Job, but it is entirely another thing for Calvinists to suggest that Satan was forced to act by God’s command, as John Calvin appears to affirm:
John Calvin: “But when they call to mind that the devil, and the whole train of the ungodly, are, in all directions, held in by the hand of God as with a bridle, so that they can neither conceive any mischief, nor plan what they have conceived, nor how much soever they may have planned, move a single finger to perpetrate, unless in so far as he permits, nay, unless in so far as he commands; that they are not only bound by his fetters, but are even forced to do him service,—when the godly think of all these things they have ample sources of consolation.”444
Although some Calvinists may wish to deny John Calvin’s quote, the reality is that Calvin was simply expressing logical consistency with determinism, and when Calvinists push divine permission into some form of active agency by God, then this is what necessarily results.
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439 The Doctrines That Divide (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 1998), 220.
440 Ibid., 210.
441 Ibid., 210.
442 The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, Chapter 18, Section 1 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, translated by Henry Beveridge, 1845), 201, emphasis mine, https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.
443 Michael Brown, Line of Fire.
http://lineoffireradio.askdrbrown.org/2009/11/11/november-11-2009/.
444 The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, Chapter 17, Section 11 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, translated by Henry Beveridge, 1845), 196, emphasis mine, https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.
[This post has been excerpted with permission from Richard Coords, Calvinism Answered Verse by Verse and Subject by Subject, © 2024.]
