Summary:
The simple answer is “no”.  “Controlling” (causing) all things is a misapplication of what it means to be sovereign.  If God controlled all things, He would be controlling (causing) our sin.  God is not interested in “controlling everything” that happens. He is interested in leveraging things that we think and do to train us (working all things together for our good). He needs to let us exercise our will so that we can see our need for Him.  He also loves to bless us when we trust Him when we trust Him.  Our choices should be in alignment with the two greatest commandments. If they are primarily seeking “self”, we will choose the wrong path.  When we come to understand that it is better to give than to receive, we start to understand what God is teaching us. If the 6-year-old chooses direction based on their level of trust of their loving and wise parents guidance, the will see results accordingly.

A little more:
Many people misunderstand the sovereignty of God.  Contrary to what some people teach, God does not “cause all things”.  We do know that He uses all things that happen to work together for the good of those that love Him, but that doesn’t mean He “causes all things”.  For example, God doesn’t cause us to sin.  We do know that He does cause some things, but that doesn’t mean that God causes all things.  We know that God will not allow some things (e.g. for us to be tempted beyond what we are able).  So, at the root level, we know that “all things” fall into one of 3 categories:

• Things God causes to happen (there are lots of examples in the Bible of things He caused)
• Things God allows to happen (the best example is our sin – He allows us to sin, but He does not cause us to sin)
• Things God will not allow to happen (the most clearly stated is temptations beyond our ability to resist)

All of these support God being sovereign because they are all part of a loving and wise plan.  A loving parent has the same three categories with their children.  They may cause their children to experience things that will challenge the child by moving to location with a challenging school.  They may allow the child to mess up (e.g. 6-year-old example).  They may keep their child away from bad influences that they are not yet mature enough to recognize and handle.

When God created us, God had three high level choices :

1. Don’t allow us to do wrong (a bunch of robots???)
2. Allow us to do whatever we want (lack of guidance)
3. Allow us to do most of what we want, provide counsel and intervene at selected times.

• When would a child feel more loved:  When they never do wrong, when they are given total freedom and the parent just looks at them when they mess up, or when they mess up and see the hand of the loving parent reach out with a message of unconditional love and helping them understand what happened and why.

Getting practical:
In the picture story of the 6-year-old, the parent allows the child to spend the money instead of saving so that the child will learn to save. Paul says that the things he wants to do he doesn’t and the things he doesn’t want to do he does.  When we are given some level of freedom, it comes with the understanding that sometimes we will not make the best decision or potentially a bad decision.  But that can be good for us if a loving and wise parent is there to help us learn from it.  When this is done in a framework of unconditional love, it is very powerful in building character and trust (faith).

Context to remember:
Each person has a values framework and they believe theirs is the best balance of values (or at least pretty close).  Most everyone thinks that they are basically a good person.  Putin, Stalin and Hitler thought they were good people setting up an ideal society.  But problems come when our values framework conflicts with someone else’s values framework.  Now multiply that by the nearly 8 billion people on earth and we see the problems we have today.  Of course the real problem is that none of the 8 billion values frameworks are as wise and as God’s and the vast majority are focused on filling “self”.  God intentionally gave us the freedoms we have during this brief time on earth so that we can see our imperfections and look to Him for something better.  That is what the 6-year-old should do.

Additional thoughts:

• People throughout history have thought God should solve their immediate problems rather than leveraging those problems to solve the root causes. The same was true why the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah. The same is true of the 6-year-old seeking relief from not being able to buy the toy. We think that God should make this world a small slice of Heaven.  But just like Jews were looking for a physical world conquering Messiah, we tend to look for God to make this world a happy place. But God is looking at maturing us so that Heaven will be a true Heaven.  God is showing us that primarily seeking “self” and not equally seeking “others” is not what will make us better off now and definitely not something that would be a good component of relationships in Heaven.
• There are hundreds of examples in biblical narrative about people doing wrong. It should be obvious that God does not cause all of these. But, we know that He allows them just as the parent of the 6-year-old allows the child to spend their money on something with nominal value.  Biblical narrative is full of people exercising free will.  We need to understand that the free will given to us is part of God’s sovereignty and it has a purpose in His wise and loving plan.
• We know that Jesus solved many worldly problems such as blindness, disability and disease. We also know that God does solve some of our problems today. But, we also need to understand that God’s primary focus is Heaven and not making this world a small slice of Heaven.  When Jesus healed, in addition to showing compassion, it was to draw people to Himself to make it clear that He was God.  But God also allowed the early Church (and His children throughout history) to suffer intense persecution.  If we don’t understand how that is part of His plan, we start to think that He should be solving all our problems.
• We think we know what needs to be done. But the reality is that God’s plans are greater than ours. We also think we know how things should be done.  But God is working on people for reasons we don’t grasp.  Our problems come when we decide what needs to be done and we conquer problems in our strength and wisdom.   Compare the 6-year-old’s problem resolution to the parent’s approach to the problem.  The sooner we understand God says that if we seek first Him and others, that is when He blesses.  That is because loving others is better for us than  seeking “self”.

Two questions when God allows something bad to happen:

• What truth/principle of God should I be learning/applying?
• What good might God be turning this into?

Summary:
Like the parent of the 6-year-old, God is looking at our eternal life and sees this time of troubles as something that prepares those that are listening to benefit now (mature) and to be in a better place later – Heaven.  Heaven is a place where everyone there will be people that have chosen to trust their Heavenly Father’s counsel as wiser than their own.  So, God is sovereign in allowing us to mess up because God sees it in context.  He sees how allowing some self-created pain now prepares us for an eternity of time with people listening to their wise counsel.   Remember that the main battle of this world is us deciding if we are going to trust “self” or our loving and wise Heavenly Father.

Remember:  God built His plan before He created this earth.  The plan was to give us some freedom, some guidance, some discipline and some intervention.  He knew that we would sometimes mess up because we would sometimes reject His counsel.  He planned ahead of time though that Jesus would take our consequences on the cross so that we can KNOW that our messes will not be held against and that we have unconditional love and acceptance.

Bible verses:

• Romans 8:28  And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
• Psalms 37:4-5  Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.  Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
• Luke 18:16-17  (Jesus speaking) “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.  Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” 
• 1 Corinthians 10:13  No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. 
• James 1:13  Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and He Himself tempts no one.