I think this blog post by Doug Wilson is absolutely brilliant. As a writer, I find the analogy of God as storyteller one of the best ways of understanding how God can be in complete control, and at the same time we still have freedom and responsibility. The comparison breaks down if you push it too far, of course, but I think it helps a lot. Wilson puts it much better than I would:
If the world and all its heartache and resident evils were a clock, then the only sane conclusion would have to be that the clock is broken. If someone postulates that the world, Lisbon earthquake and all, Asian tsunami and all, is ticking away serenely on the mantlepiece, then let us all respond with a horselaugh.
But the world is not a clock. The world is a story.
Is The Lord of the Rings broken because it has Nazgul in it? Is Pride and Prejudice broken because Wickham is a chump? Is Beowulf twisted because Grendel was twisted?
…I would rather believe there are absurd remainders and irredeemable evils than to believe that the clock is running smoothly when it clearly isn’t. Clocks are supposed to tell time, and no friend of truth will pretend the clock is telling time when it is not. But story tellers are supposed to tell stories, which is quite a different kind of telling. God is a master storyteller, and He does not put absurd remainders, pointless dead-ends and irrecuperable absurdities into His story. He will bring all the threads together in the last chapter, no strays and no remainders, no oddities that the editor missed. All things work together for good in the story — not all things are good right this minute as the second hand sweeps majestically ever on. Wise storytelling is quite a different thing than having every cog doing the right thing at every moment, keeping perfect time…
Gollum makes the story go, and Gollum would completely gum up the internal workings of a clock.