I grew up in a strong Christian family. I learned good practices and good doctrine and good behavior. I always understood that God was sovereign, but ... only mostly sovereign. Later, I began to get inundated with Scriptures on God's sovereignty and I ran into a problem. Scripture doesn't describe God as "mostly sovereign." It doesn't describe Him as sovereign ... contingent upon me. He's absolutely sovereign. "He does all that He pleases" (Psa 115:3). "The mind of man plans his way, but YHWH directs his steps" (Pro 16:9). "I know that You can do all things, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted" (Job 42:2). "So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires" (Rom 9:18). "Ah Lord YHWH! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and by Your outstretched arm! Nothing is too difficult for You" (Jer 32:17).
"All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, but He does according to His will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth; and no one can ward off His hand Or say to Him, 'What have You done?'" (Dan 4:35). "The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the LORD; He turns it wherever He wishes" (Pro 21:1). On and on and on. And it became unavoidable. God wasn't sovereign; He was Sovereign. As Paul put it, the only Sovereign (1 Tim 6:15).
I remember processing that after the first wave washed over me. Really? Sovereign? He does whatever He wishes? Really?? I thought, "That would mean that ... Hitler, was God's will. That He planned it, intended it for good (Gen 50:20). All the evils over the centuries were still evil, but God allowed them to produce good (Rom 8:28)." And I thought, "Wait ... that would mean that I was God's best choice as the father of my sons. Nope! Can't be!" Of course, the weight of Scripture overwhelmed my resistance and I finally settled that issue in my mind. It has become a rock of safety, in fact.
Esther was a nobody, a captive Jewish girl in Persia. Her claim to fame? She was pretty. Circumstances worked out to bring her to the attention of the king and she became the queen. Then forces were at work to completely eliminate the Jewish people in Persia, and she was asked to talk to the king. That could result in her execution. Her cousin, Mordecai, said, "If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place and you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?" (Est 4:14). Esther was a nobody who was the right person at the right time for the right task. She obeyed and saved the Jews. Because God is absolutely Sovereign. That's all of us. You and I are in our individual circumstances not by chance, but by design. We are who we are where we are because God has designed us to be so for such a time as this.
6 comments:
God's Sovereignty relieves us of so much worry about the outcomes of our choices. We may think that we've messed things up and are outside of His Will for our lives, but we can rest assured that not even our defiance can overturn His Will.
It's interesting, too. While we surely have an impact, good or bad, on our children, in the end we cannot take full credit or full blame for what they become because, in the end, God is in charge of that, too.
I think that is a blessing for godly parents. As long as they uphold their duty to raise their children in the direction they should go, they can rest assured that God is not disappointed if their children decide to disobey.
We’ve all heard of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but with an acknowledgement of God’s Sovereignty, we can be confident we are always in the right place at the right time. To my mind, if God is not in absolute control of every single thing that happens in the universe that He created, from its beginning to its end, He is not God. All of my other beliefs about God, faith, life, etc., are built upon the rock-solid certainty of God’s Sovereignty and generally easily fall into place based on that foundational truth. (I do recognize the different types of God’s will, of course.)
So it's kind of a moot point, then, isn't it? It seems to me the question is what does it mean for us, particularly in how we behave? Well, we can dispense with that which again refers to His sovereignty because it's a given. That is to say, should this fact influence our actions and behaviors at all?
Marshal, some think that the concept of an absolutely Sovereign God (as presented so often in Scripture) makes us pointless. We're just doing whatever the Puppetmaster makes us do. That would be a reasonable conclusion, except for two factors. First, God commands and expects us to respond, so we DO have free will of sorts. We DO participate in His world, supporting or opposing His plans and commands. He DOES expect us to act. Second, the concept of His ultimate Sovereignty means that we can act BOLDLY. "What if I obey and share my faith with my friend and he doesn't receive it? Have I failed?" No, not a chance, because God is in charge. "What if I sin? Have I contravened God's plans?" No, because "you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good." So, on one hand, we ARE an active, functioning part of His plans and what we do matter, while, on the other hand, we can have the ultimate confidence that He will always work all things together for good.
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