In the New Testament in both Romans 13, and in 1 Peter 2, God makes it very clear that no ruler comes to power except as part of God’s sovereign will. The leader being referenced at the time was Nero, the Roman Emperor who would ruthlessly persecute and kill the Christians.

What is dismaying to me is that this really is Christianity 101. Seeing some Christians express shock and dismay or provide odd rebuttals shows just how shallow some people’s faith is. Some demand to know just how every bad and awful event in history could be part of God’s will.

Overnight, from the Holocaust to American slavery to [insert terrible act you despise here], people could not understand how that could all be part of God’s will.

Again, none of those things are part of God’s permissive or moral will. He does not want us to act like that. But God gives us the freedom to act and we live in a fallen world where we are all sinners with a will bent away from God and bound to sin. We will not disrupt God’s plan for our salvation and He allows us to act, using our sins and bad actions, weaving them into the tapestry of a history He already knows for an outcome He has already foreordained. We will not disrupt the will of God. Every good and bad deed is part of a plan, the outcome of which we know, but the path of which is only incrementally revealed to us.