Incomplete theses on God's will, providence, and evil

Last week, in my upper-level majors course on systematic theology, the topic was providence. We read classical accounts of divine and human agency and discussed the nature of God's will. I wrote up some provisional, incomplete theses to help guide them through the thicket. I'm sharing them below, partly as an aid to others, partly as an invitation to be corrected by my betters—this area is simply not my specialty. St. Thomas, pray for this theologian's poor soul!

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Affirmations

1. God, as the sole creator and author of creation ex nihilo, is solely responsible for the ongoing existence and well-being of the creation.
2. God is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient, and good.
3. God is Lord of creation.
4. God upholds creation as a whole and in all its parts at all times, without ceasing.
5. God underlies, informs, and enables any and all activity in creation: nothing happens apart from God; no creature can act apart from God’s sovereign will.
6. God conducts creatures and creation as a whole toward their proximate and final ends, in this world and the next.
7. Nothing exists or happens outside the scope of God’s will.
8. Sin and evil are contrary to God’s will; sinful deeds and evil events occur.
9. God does not will sin, nor is God the author of evil.
10. When and where sin and evil are found in creation, God permits it.
11. God is able to bring good from evil and sin, including when they are intended by creatures to obstruct God’s purposes.
12. In the end, God will triumph over all sin and evil, and they will be no more in the new creation.

Implications

1. We do not know why God permits sin and evil.
2. On its face, a sinful deed or evil happening is a surd: meaningless in itself; neither sin nor evil is ever (really, deeply, ultimately) good.
3. The experience of suffering or loss is not itself necessarily sin or evil.
4. God may therefore actively will (rather than permit) our suffering in this world.
5. “Everything happens for a reason” is either true in an incomprehensible way (where that “reason” is Christ, who will reveal all to us only in glory) or false in a facile and pastorally disastrous way (where the starvation of children has a readily intelligible reason we can grasp in the moment).
6. The relationship between God’s will (as primary cause) and my will (as secondary cause) when I engage in sin (say, lying) is mysterious and inscrutable: somehow my willing as a free agent in bondage to sin possesses some deficiency (or, rather, lacks something necessary) that keeps it from fully performing righteous activity in full in accordance with God’s will and command.
7. So that: 
1. We may say that God wills in all my willing, but...
2. ...we may not say that God wills the sin I invariably will.

Ian McFarland on the doctrine of creation from nothing

"In short, if the doctrine of creation from nothing means ... that even prior to being created, creatures are not absolutely nothing insofar as they are grounded in the Word, it also implies that creatures, as created, are absolutely nothing apart from God. The richness of divinity not only lies behind creation's diversity as its presupposition (nothing but God), but also is an active presence that underlies and sustains every feature of that diversity at every moment of its existence (nothing apart from God). Not can this perspective be charged with compromising the integrity of creatures' relationship with God, as though that which has absolutely no existence part from God is reduced to the status of a puppet. Once again, the Trinitarian framework of the Christian doctrine of creation is crucial here, since the existence of creatures is rooted in the Word, whose very being establishes, within the divine life itself, a set of relationships whose constituent terms (viz., Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) also have no existence apart from God. From this perspective, the idea that ontological independence from God is a necessary condition of genuine relationship (and more particularly, of love) fails to reckon with the character of God's own being as relationship."

—Ian A. McFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation (WJK Press, 2014), p. 94