The Sovereignty of God
We have been seeking to develop a passion for God. In recent weeks we have been examining his various attributes or characteristics, in order to get to know Him better. Because to know him is to love him.
We’ve looked at:
• His Eternity - how he exists outside of time and has an eternal perspective
• His Immutability - how he never changes, so I can always count on him
• His Self-Sufficiency - how he doesn’t need me, but he chooses to be involved with me
• His Omnipresence - how he is everywhere; there’s no place I can go where he isn’t
• His Omnipotence - how he is so powerful; there’s nothing he cannot do
• His Omniscience - how he knows all about me and loves me anyway
Today we come to an aspect of God’s character that I believe is the most important one of all. In fact, if you cannot learn to appreciate this truth about God then you will never really enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.
I believe that this doctrine is the most important doctrine in the entire Bible. It is the area of truth where Satan will attack you most severely, because he knows that if he can tear down your confidence in God in this area - he’s got you. And likewise, if you build up your confidence in this aspect of God’s character, then you will have a strong anchor when the storms of life rage.
I am talking about the sovereignty of God.
Now we here in Canada are familiar with the word “sovereignty”. We’ve been thru endless debates about the desire of many in the Province of Quebec for more sovereignty over their own affairs. We understand that the word “sovereignty” means “to have final authority or rule; not to be subject or subordinate to any other authority.”
Now when we carry this concept into theology, and we talk about the sovereignty of God, we mean that God can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, wherever in the universe he wants to do it. It means that everything in the universe (and outside the universe for that matter!) is under His ultimate authority and control—and that includes you and me.
Remember in the book of Job, where Satan wanted to test Job’s loyalty to God. God spelled out very clearly exactly what Satan could and could not do. Satan was restricted and limited by the sovereignty of God as to what he could do in Job’s life. So Satan was not sovereign in Job’s life; God was.
In fact, there are four things that we need to understand about the sovereignty of God. Because if we understand these things, we will find that the sovereignty of God is one of the most important and comforting doctrines in the entire Bible.
1. Nothing happens apart from the sovereignty of God.
God’s sovereignty is all-inclusive. Nothing happens in the spiritual realm, nothing happens in the physical realm, nothing happens in the relational, or temporal, or financial, or social, or emotional realm that is beyond the sovereignty of God.
cf. Rabbi Kushner - When Bad Things Happen to Good People
Take the world of nature for example. Who controls nature—God or Satan? God, of course. After all, he made it!
Psalm 135:6-7: The Lord does whatever pleases him, in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths. He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth; he sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses.
Yet you would be surprised at how many Christians believe that somehow Satan controls the weather. A few years ago down in Pennsylvania, we had a very bad winter. And many meetings and Christian activities had to be cancelled.
One of them in particular was a multi-church missions conference that was to have been held in Philadelphia on a certain weekend in February. It had to be postponed because of a blizzard.
In a later mailing to reschedule the conference, the organizers blamed Satan for that postponement! Instead of praising God for his sovereignty in postponing their conference, they gave Satan the credit for having more power than he actually does.
We have got to get to the place where we give God the credit for what happens in our lives—even when what is happening is bad, or unpleasant, or inconvenient, or painful. He allows these things, in his sovereignty, in order to make us into the people he wants us to be.
Romans 8:28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Now if you’re going to say that nothing happens apart from the sovereignty of God, then you know what the next question is, don’t you? What about evil? If evil exists in the universe, and if nothing happens apart from the sovereignty of God, then doesn’t that make God responsible for the existence of evil?
And the answer to that question is yes. But it’s a qualified yes. God did not create evil. He did not introduce evil into the universe, but he allows it to be here. Evil is not God’s desired will, but it is part of his permissive will. In his sovereignty, God allows evil to exist. He restrains it, he limits it, but he allows it to exist.
And he takes responsibility for that. There are many statements in Scripture where God appears to be the author of evil as well as good. Isaiah 45:7 is one of them, where God says: “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things.”
Remember, God gave Satan permission to test Job, so in a sense, God was ultimately responsible for the awful things that were happening to Job.
The situation is something like a godly father who has a rebellious son living in his home.
Awhile ago, I read the autobiography of Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham. Franklin was a rebellious son as a teenager and into his twenties. He got kicked out of LeTourneau Christian College. He smoked, he drank, and he did a lot of other things. He even got in trouble with the police.
Franklin lived at home with his parents during that time of his rebellion. And his actions caused his Mom and Dad much dismay, and embarrassment and stress, especially since his father was such a well-known preacher.
But I really admire the way that Billy and Ruth Graham dealt with their son. They didn’t disown him. They didn’t kick him out. Although they didn’t approve of his lifestyle, they didn’t let that stop them from loving him. And they prayed for him. And they allowed him to continue to live in their home—inconvenience and pain and embarrassment and all, because they believed that God wasn’t finished with Franklin yet.
And that’s something of what it must be like for God to allow evil to continue to exist in the universe he created. It means pain, and hurt, and inconvenience for God. But what would the alternative be? If God were to wipe out all sin and evil at, say, midnight tonight, how many of us would still be here tomorrow morning?
God, in his sovereignty, allows evil to exist. He didn’t create it, he doesn’t approve of it, but he allows it. And in the end, we will understand why. And we will glorify him for his sovereignty.
2. I can trust in God’s sovereignty
There are a lot of things that God allows to happen in my life, or allows to happen in the world, that I don’t understand. And the reason that I don’t understand them is because of my vantage point. I’m a creature of time. I can’t see into the future. I can’t see the overall plan.
Those of you who served in the military can really appreciate this sense of bewilderment. Your unit is suddenly ordered to pick up everything and move out. Then when you finally get to where you are going, you’re ordered to go back where you came from, on the double. It doesn’t seem to make any sense!
But that’s because you’re not privy to what’s going on at headquarters. The commanding general has the big picture in view as he pores over his maps and sifts through his intelligence reports. And that’s why he’s moving you around the way he is. But he doesn’t stop to explain the overall plan to his troops in the front line. Their job is to just follow the orders.
Have you ever seen a tapestry? Have you ever looked at the back of a tapestry? Quite a difference between the front and the back, isn’t there? That’s a good illustration of the way we see life. God sees the top-side, and we only see the underside.
There’s a well-known poem about it called the Weaver:
My life is but a weaving between my Lord and me
I cannot choose the colors; he worketh steadily.
Oft-times he weaveth sorrow, and I in foolish pride
Forget he sees the upper and I, the underside.
Not till the loom is silent and the shuttles cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why
The dark threads are as needful in the Weaver’s skillful hand
As the threads of gold and silver in the pattern he has planned.
I can find tremendous comfort in the sovereignty of God because he’s looking at the big picture. He can see the ultimate goal.
Psalm 33:11 …the plans of the Lord stand firm forever, the purposes of his heart through all generations.
And I can find tremendous comfort in the sovereignty of God because I know that he is good and that he loves me. Therefore, his purposes for me are going to be good.
Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Romans 8:28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
God’s sovereignty is comforting in another way as well. It means that God has provided me with enough time, enough resources, and enough ability to do what he wants me to do with my life.
Have you ever found yourself saying “If only I had more time… If only I had a little bit more money… If only I hadn’t been born into this family… If only I could be like so-and-so… then I could really be effective. Then I could have a satisfying and meaningful life.”
But God, in his sovereignty, has arranged our circumstances—our time, our talent, our finances, our personalities, our family situation—in order to position us to do exactly what he wants us to do and to have exactly the kind of impact he wants us to have.
When Jesus came to the end of his earthly ministry, he said to his father in heaven “I have finished the work you have sent me to do.” He had only been in ministry for three and a half years! Yet, in the sovereignty of God, that was enough.
God gives us exactly what we need to do his will. So let’s stop complaining about who we are and what we have (or don’t have) and let’s find out what it is that God wants us to do.
It all comes down to what you think about God. What kind of person do you think he is? How much confidence do you have in him?
Recently I read a story about a couple who had set sail in their 40 foot yacht from Australia. They were headed for the island of Fiji, but they got caught in a tremendous Pacific typhoon. Their boat was swamped and sank, and all they had left was a little inflatable dinghy and a survival kit with some flares, rations, fishing line, and so forth.
There have been times when I have found myself in the middle of a typhoon. And one of the things I have done is to prepare a survival kit. My wife and I have these little three by five cards on which we have written Scripture verses, or quotations from Christian authors. And we call them our survival cards.
And on one of those cards, I have two verses written: Psalm 141:8 and Psalm 142:3.
But my eyes are fixed on you, O Sovereign Lord; in you I take refuge…When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who know my way.
And those verses remind me, in the midst of the storms of life, that God is in control and that he is a good God; a God I can trust with my life.
3. God’s sovereignty is not resting upon me.
God’s plan and God’s program is not dependent upon my choices, or my decisions, in order to be carried out. God is not waiting on me to respond the right way in order for his will to be carried out. His will will be done regardless of how I respond.
But he blesses me when I do respond the right way, and he allows me to participate in the carrying out of his plan.
It might be tempting to think that God’s sovereignty is based on his omniscience—he can look ahead in history to see how people will respond, and then he can build his plan around that. But that is not what the Bible teaches.
Over in Romans 9 we read about how God’s plan unfolded through the birth of Jacob and Esau. God selected Jacob to be the one through whom the promise to Abraham would be fulfilled. I’m reading from verse 11:
Romans 9:11-13 Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls—she (Rebecca) was told, “The older will serve the younger.” Just as it is written: “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
God chose Jacob to be the one to carry out his plan before Jacob was even born.
And in John 15:16, Jesus told his disciples:
John 15:16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit.
So God’s sovereignty is not resting in any way on my performance. And it is also not subject to my judgment. In that same chapter in Romans, we read:
Romans 9:20-21 But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?
The sovereignty of God isn’t up for critical review. It isn’t our place to be critical or judgmental of what God is doing. And yet how many times do we do this?
Some circumstance or situation comes into my life and I immediately question God. I begin to assume that he doesn’t love me, or he doesn’t know what he is doing, or he isn’t really in control.
Some Christians think that every bad thing that happens to them is because Satan has somehow snuck in and taken a potshot at them when God wasn’t looking. That is an insult to the sovereignty of God.
To use an office analogy, nothing will ever get into your “in-box” without having the stamp of God’s sovereignty upon it.
4. The sovereignty of God does not exclude my responsibility
With all this talk of God’s sovereign plan being carried out regardless of what you or I do, that might make us think that it doesn’t matter what we do. God’s gonna get “his thing” done regardless, so let’s just sit back and do nothing.
Sorry, that’s not biblical! The relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility is a mystery but it is not an absurdity.
God has clearly given us things to do and it matters whether or not we do them. We are not pre-programmed robots. We are not puppets on a string. We have the power of choice, and God asks us to use our free will to do his will.
There are two theological traps that I can fall into. On the one hand, I can become theological determinist—I can say “God is sovereign. His will will be done. It doesn’t matter what I do.
“Whether or not I pray for, or witness to, my non-Christian friend isn’t going to make a bit of difference in where that person will spend eternity. What I do has no absolutely no bearing on that person’s eternal destiny, because God already has that figured out.”
And that is a wrong view. Jesus gave us the Great Commission. He said “Go and make disciples of all nations.” He didn’t say “Sit around and watch God do it.”
The Bible says “The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” It doesn’t say that prayer doesn’t matter. So my activity and my responsibility is important.
But the opposite theological trap is to conclude that what I do is decisive in whether or not God’s will gets done. This view can put you on a guilt trip real fast: “If I don’t go, they will never hear. If I don’t pray, then God’s work will come crashing to a halt.” And that’s equally untrue. Because the work of God isn’t dependent upon me.
The right view is somewhere in the middle, and I confess that I don’t always know where that balance is. There’s a lot about God’s sovereignty that I haven’t got figured out.
There’s a little cliche that goes something like this: “Pray as though it all depended on God, and work as though it all depended on you.” But there are times when you have to stop working and rest and recharge.
Even Jesus did that. There were people he didn’t heal, and people he didn’t preach to because he just didn’t have the time or the energy. And at those times, Jesus rested in the sovereignty of God. And that’s why we need to rest in the sovereignty of God.
The sovereignty of God is the most important doctrine in the Bible. Because when you believe in the sovereignty of God, it means that you are letting God be God. You are not trying to usurp his role, or make him out to be something more or less than he really is.
He is sovereign; He is in control. And how I respond to that fact determines what kind of relationship I will have with him, or whether I’ll have any relationship at all.