The language of permissive will is delicate, and it is corrupted at both extremes. On one side, “permission” is stretched into a bare and idle passivity—the notion that God merely stands aside and watches sin occur, that the sinful act lies wholly outside His decree and catches Him, as it were, off guard. This protects God’s holiness at the cost of His sovereignty, surrendering a vast territory of what comes to pass to the autonomous will of creatures, contrary to the Scriptures that ascribe even the crucifixion to the determinate counsel of God. A God who only permits sin in this idle sense is not the God who works all things after the counsel of His own will.

On the other side, the distinction is collapsed entirely, so that permission becomes mere authorship under a softer name—God is made the immediate efficient cause of sin, infusing evil into the heart and compelling the deed, which would make Him the author of sin and a tempter of men, blasphemies that Scripture explicitly forbids: God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth He any man. The sound doctrine threads between: God’s permission of sin is willing and purposeful, not idle—He freely ordains to allow it, bounds and overrules it for good—yet it is genuinely permission and not authorship, for the act’s sinfulness arises from the creature alone. He gives men up to their own hearts’ lusts; He suffers the nations to walk in their own ways; He delivers up His Son by His own counsel while wicked hands commit the crime. Sovereignty and holiness stand together: nothing escapes His decree, yet He is the author of no man’s sin.