The scriptures are abound with verses that speaks of the Lord’s plan:

There are many plans in a man’s heart, Nevertheless the Lord’s counsel—that will stand.

The counsel of the Lord stands forever, The plans of His heart to all generations.

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

God’s sovereignty requires the foreordination of all things. The consequences of this observation leads to talks of predestination, the question of if and how God elects those who get saved. Less discussed however is the universal question of God’s sovereignty, as in God’s role in the enactment and process of all material existence.

If God foreordained all things, then to which depth does this foreordination go? Is every physical event a work of God? Is it an indirect work in the sense that God scheduled it to happen at the creation of universe in its initial entropy or is it a direct work in the sense that God, right now, ticks along every atom and force to produce a material result? With God standing outside of time, knowing the whole of the future, has he charted the movement of each atom and the transfer of each force in the beginning, or does he charter it as events happen to enact his will, perfectly knowing in his infinite omniscience what entails what?

To tackle this question, useless to the obtention of salvation but interesting as a theological exercise, we must first establish the devices to plot our comprehension of the question. As it involves the foreordination of all things, itself an understanding downstream from our knowledge of God as standing outside of time, then we need to plot a timeline wherein all things happen. Here is a simple timeline going into infinity with events, labeled as things, regularly occuring.

The timeline as-is is impersonal and not very useful to the understanding of God’s processes. Let’s therefore chart the good events—those that lead to salvation—as green labels above the line and evil events—those that lead to damnation—as red levels below the line.

While this timeline is more personal and we could easily chart our own version of it for ourselves based on deeds done, it is important to demark the timeline from a balance. First, the timeline lists events which grows you closer to God, which does not exclusively list personal deeds, but also things which happen to you.

Also, Salvation is not predicated on whether you have more good deeds on the upper side of the timeline or evil deeds on its lower side. Rather, the timeline should be indicative of frequency, with a person growing closer to God committing less and less evil acts as time goes on instead of stagnating or contrariwise increasing in its density. A virtuous Christian, for instance, would see his timeline as such:

Of course, this timeline isn’t absolute and isn’t reflective of all Christians. It doesn’t plot the many good deeds a non-Christian may have done prior to their conversion and the many evil deeds a virtuous Christian will keep on doing, as sin is inevitable, but it shows to demonstrate the tendency that a virtuous Christian should be looking towards to. Again, “Good” and “Bad” here doesn’t reflect exclusively deeds but also simply things that may happen to you in life that grows you closer or farther from God. The green goes “towards” God, the red goes “away from” God.

With this visual imagery, we can now talk of the difference between a God that orchestrates and a God that intervenes.

An Orchestrating God

A God that orchestrates is a God that has elected every event down to its minutes. Nothing is happenstance, nothing naturally proceeds; God is the engine of the universe, the force behind all physics, and he chooses every possibility. All possible outcomes of quantum measurements are realized by God himself as to bring on his plan, which was computed before creation as God stands outside of time.

In the case of an orchestrating God, every event of the timeline is already ordained. There is no permitting or denying an event, as the event itself was placed by God on the timeline to bring about his plan. Therefore, the timeline flattens, and everything follows one another, as such:

If God is orchestrating, then there are many hermeneutical and philosophical consequences. For starters, we have to yet again re-open the issue of free will. A God that is orchestrating of its creation without exclusion obligatorily negates free will as it means that even the conscious decisions you make are careful elections of God, regardless of how one quantifies the soul irrespective of its materialist or spiritual qualities.

If one believes that the soul does not exist, or exists only as the sum of all conscious processes, then an orchestrating God negates your free will because he is responsible for every process that occurs in your brain. He therefore creates your salvation not in a manner of “reaching out” but by directly organizing your thought processes.

If one believes that the soul does exist, and it is at least partially responsible for experience and decision, then an orchestrating God still negates your free will as your soul is necessarily created even if immaterial, and therefore necessarly subject to God’s orchestration as an element of creation.

An orchestrating God also implicates and requires the validity of hypercalvinism, which is the belief that God foreordains some of his children to hell. You choosing God and you rejecting God are both processes which, as part of creation, are necessarily orchestrated by God as nothing is left to happenstance. This means that God also chooses that you reject him. As God knows everything that will happen, he knows that doing this will condemn to hell. Therefore, God willingly condemns some of his children to hell.

This, of course, interferes with the scriptural teaching that God is love:

He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

Calvinists (distinct from hypercalvinists) have the interpretation that God does not condemn any of children to hell, but simply that, out of love, he chooses to save some, with the rest simply left unconsidered as, after all, we are all deserving of hell due to our sin. It is therefore not necessarily unfair for God to have a pool of elects, but that even if one finds it unfair, then that it doesn’t matter because God does not have to show us love because we’re all sinners deserving of hell.

However, if a calvinist believes in an orchestrating God, fully equipped with the understanding that each decision we take, including those that grow us closer to God and those that make us farther from God, is completely foreordained by the Lord, then they must extend their interpretation to hypercalvinism or face the contradiction it creates, as you cannot have an orchestrating God that orchestrates the hell-choosing decisions of his children and that also plays no role in his children’s destination to hell.

An Intervening God

A God that intervenes is a God that allows for happenstance and the natural proceeding of things, but alters its circumstances in a most perfect way to bring about his final plan of salvation. It does not mean that God hasn’t foreseen what will happen, or that God did not charter the order of things that will happen, but simply that whether God permits or forbids an event is conditional on his plan for you.

Therefore, events happen naturally, but God intervenes in order to adjust creation to his plan through miracles. On the timeline, it would look like this:

Sometimes, God has to intervene to enact his plan, but oftentimes he does not have to and lets events happen as they are naturally supposed to happen. Even events that we would consider good, sometimes, have to be sacrificed for the purpose of fulfilling God’s plan.

If God is intervening, then we do not face many of the problems posed by an orchestrating God. Man’s free will, for example, is mostly preserved, as we retain free agency except for when God chooses to intervene. It also retains full compatibility with all sorietological traditions, calvinist and otherwise, as whether man can choose God out of his free will remains an open question with the scope of the discussion.

One could say, for example, that man’s will to pursue God is only possible with an intervention of God, and another could also state that man is free to choose God (perhaps with the assistance of the Holy Spirit) without infringing the philosophy of an intervening God. With an orchestrating God, that possibility doesn’t exist and all sorietology must necessarily converge towards hypercalvinism.

However, an intervening God is not a perfect solution either. It is too easy to follow the idea of an intervening God to its logical conclusion and suggest that a watchmaker God becomes possible, which is a form of Deism with partial intervention. We can be led to believe that God is often distant or absent, which contradicts God’s immanence, his presence in everything, and his filling of all things. A careful development and interpretation of an intervening God is necessary to avoid such pitfalls.