Seeing God's Sovereignty

Some people you just don’t like. But you must love them anyway. That’s just one of the ways God gives insight how we look to Him. Loving those who are unlovely to us is unnatural and impossible, apart from the grace of God.

When I told one such person about a little gem I had run across on the “Banner of Truth Trust” website run by Iain Murray I was dismissed rather ignorantly with a statement that ran something like this – “I used to be interested in that sovereignty of God stuff but now I have found that there is so much more!”

I don’t think well on my feet, so I let it pass without further comment. But the more I think about it the more ridiculous this person’s comment seems to be. He gave the impression that the sovereignty of God is an isolated attribute that doesn’t affect anything else. It just sits there like a rather drab fact, one of many facts that can be known about God.

I mean, what can we truly know about God that is not affected by His sovereignty? And not simply affected, but also governed? Isn’t what it means to be God simply the same as being sovereign? Could you believe in a God who wasn’t sovereign? You’d end up with something like the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Romans had - with flawed, spiteful, self-centred, unpredictable beings who constantly warred over getting their own way. The Open Theists of today are headed that way.

A less than omnipotent God would not truly be God. It absolutely baffles my mind to see how any person with half a brain could so much as use the word “God” in any context in which He was not absolute. It might be me, but I just shake my head. That’s probably deeply ingrained Christian influence talking. What saws me off at the knees is when supposed Christians seem to think that way. What sort of brain cramp could cause people who have been steeped in Christianity – in the doctrine of God’s absolute sovereignty – to blunder off into some blind alley in which He all of a sudden is no longer truly God, but something less? I shake my head again. Is there such a thing as being so clever you have to invent conundrums in order to be challenged?

You can’t put the sovereignty of God on a par with, for example, His love or His mercy or His grace. You can’t even put it on a par with His holiness. They are not the same sort of thing. Sovereignty is the ground upon which these other attribute rest. If God was not God in the absolute sense then He would be a god who was unable to express eternally and fully His divine attributes. You could theoretically have a sovereign “god” who was either holy or evil, but you could never have a true god who was not sovereign. Anything short of that idea is so patently ridiculous as to defy the definition of the word. You’d end up with Hinduism or paganism or voodoo or just plain postmodern Open Theism. Have these people never heard of Elijah and the prophets of Baal?

Back to the person who got all this started in me. His statement that there is “so much more” is dangerous because it is only part of the truth. There is indeed more to know about God than His sovereignty. But the part that is passed over so blithely is that all subsequent truths about God hang upon His sovereignty like ornaments on a tree. If God’s holiness is only relative, if His power is limited, if His will is ultimately resistible – then you have effectively destroyed God. But since God is God, He is infinitely holy, He is almighty and His decretive will is unopposable and unalterable. Everything else is to be received in this light.

It is precisely because God is sovereign that He can demand that standard of perfection in His creatures which meets His own infinite holiness. Not only that, but because He is sovereign He can enforce upon every one of His creatures (angels or men) just and right penalties – eternal penalties – for their failure to meet His standards. Going beyond that, it is because He is sovereign that He is able to use all the evil inventions and motivations of His own rebellious creatures in order to display the glories of His righteousness, love, mercy and grace in Jesus Christ. He planned it from eternity. He brought it to pass. Every fallen angel and all fallen men were against Him, but their intentions only served to achieve His perfect ends.

The “low” view of God that has become prevalent in much of Christian thinking today is a result of an overemphasis upon God’s immanence at the expense of His transcendence. We are in the process of making God in our own image – even as Christians. What an indictment! But God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and His ways are not our ways. He is not a man. He became a man, yes – for the salvation of His church – but that does not make God in our image; it remakes us in His. We had defaced and lost the image of God by the fall, and by the willing embrace of its results by every person born naturally of woman since that time.

Just because God stoops down does not mean that we should reach up in order to ascend. Because He is gracious does not give us leave to be arrogant, grasping or proud. He can give, but we are only ever capable of receiving – and even that by His grace. All things are from Him and through Him and to Him. And all things are also for Him. We all need to see and to seize that picture before it’s too late.