Continuing the Conversation: He is sovereign over all
April 12th, 2010 by Dan
This past Sunday we had a bracing conversation about the topic of God being sovereign. This profound topic always provokes deep emotions from all of us. So, we thought we would give ourselves a chance to extend the conversation online.
Let me recap: God is lord of all- He is lord of history, He is lord of creation, and he is Lord of his people. Here are some snapshots from this Sunday’s message to rekindle our memories:
The Christian understanding of this world is this: It is not as arbitrary as it appears, though it is as broken and fickle as it appears. There is a God who has made this world, who is governing this world for his good purposes, and who will re-make this world for His glory and our good. He has, for a time, allowed our human independence to not only corrupt our moral and physical existence, but that of the natural world as well. But God is in control of the world. In fact, He is sovereignly in control of everything.
1. He is in control of His people
God did not choose all of the nations of the earth to be His people in the same way as He chose Israel. He did not reveal Himself to all the nations in the same way he did with Israel…. and the same dynamic is at work in the New Testament.
In the New Testament the people of God are all of those who believe in Jesus and who become spiritually united to Him. But who has faith in Jesus? The New Testament’s answer is; all of those whom God chose, out of the magnitude of his grace and love, to set his saving adopting love upon.
Lest we be confused at this point, let me make it clear: everyone who is a Christian is a Christian because God chose them. Not the other way around. You may think you chose God, but you did not. He chose you first, and then empowered you to choose Him, to desire him, to love him, to believe in him.
Let me quote Jesus on this:
1. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide (John 15: 16)
2. John 6: 44: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.
Some people balk at this idea – but we need to examine why we are so resistant. Some of us fear being taken advantage of; some of us fear losing our independence; some of us hate the idea of suffering and cannot imagine God allowing it. All of these different lenses offer glimpses into the kind of God we would want: a just God who deals with oppression; a compassionate God who cares about suffering; a gentle God who does not abuse his power. And this is precisely the God who the gospel describes; sovereign, yet gracious, gentle, yet not willing to overlook injustice and wrong.
OK, that is enough to get the ball rolling; let’s talk!
12 Responses to “Continuing the Conversation: He is sovereign over all”
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Hi Dan,
Thank you for creating this medium to ask questions, I think it’s a great idea, as I think many people had unanswered questions on Sunday but could not ask due to the time constraint.
My question is this: I think the idea that God is sovereign and that even the difficult moments in our lives will one day be a blessing is comforting. I have no problem with this. It’s just that this notion makes it sound like the phrase “end justifies the means” is in fact true. Then, if we were to make certain decisions or choices that end up being beneficial, a simple example being a white lie, is this justified?
Thanks!
Hannah
Hi,
This blog is a great idea, I wanted to stay after the service on Sunday to ask you a couple of questions but had exam preparation to do.
My questions may stem from my Christian-immaturity, and lack of biblical knowledge, but I don’t understand why God chose Israel in the first place. Nor do I understand why God chose me. Is there any biblical verses that point us to an answer? I know these questions may be something only God can answer. It just seems so conflicting that God doesnt chose everyone, and let people chose him or deny him.
Erica
You know, I’ve been going to Church and receptive to the Word for most of my life, and I’m kinda shocked that I didn’t know that I was chosen to follow God. I believe I was ‘forced’ to turn to Him in 2004 for survival, and really did turn my life around. Then, last year, I ran into a mountain of difficulty, and wondered where God was to protect me from catastrophe. It seems to be the old adage….that you do grow through difficulty, and the analogy I may give is that I’m a tube of toothpaste and all my foibles need to be further squeezed out of me to become more like Christ. I’m missing Church. Peace to you all and we’ll see you Sunday…….btw, this was an excellent idea….cheers!
I can grasp a lot of this on an intellectual level, but some of it still grates on me intuitively. God is sovereign, okay, he could choose to save no one, okay, but since, if we hold to a Calvinist view of this, that election is entirely unearned, then there is a sort of question that emerges in my mind about why some should receive this and not others. I know that there are theologically-correct, intellectual answers to such a complaint and yet I still feel this intuitive unease. Why should I gain from his reward, indeed, but why should so many not gain if we are all rotten? Again, I can accept that God will do whatever it pleases God to do, but I’m confused by it all the same.
Thanks for the opportunity to discuss this hot topic.
I think that the Israel example points in another direction. Although God chose Israel as his people, didn’t he choose to bless the entire world through them. Ephesians 3:6 says: “This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.” (NIV) The idea of God choosing some individuals while rejecting others is therefore not congruent with the Israel example because although he did choose them (Israel) first, salvation is also extended to the Gentiles.
As for our inability to choose God without him first choosing us, I completely agree. But as you mentioned in your sermon, doesn’t God want all to be saved? (sorry, I don’t know the verse reference that you quoted) Couldn’t this situation be explained by the idea that God reaches out to all (whether through his word, divine intervention, through nature, etc.) and therefore enables all to be saved, although only some accept him?
Thanks again for the conversation!
I certainly don’t want to pretend to resolve the uncomfortable paradox between choosing and being chosen, but I read this description once that I thought, if nothing else, lays out the issue clearly, from “Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport” by Richard Mouw:
“My uncle Tunis Mouw had a wonderful career as a Baptist preacher who was passionate about evangelism. Soon after I became convinced of Calvinist theology, I told him about my newfound theological convictions, expecting him to argue with me a bit. But instead he told me that he also was a convinced Calvinist. ‘But the way I see it,’ he said to me, ‘we have to paint above the door of salvation the words “Whosoever will may come.” I hope, though, once a repentant sinner walks through that door, he will look up and see that the Lord has written on the other side, “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” ‘ ” p. 47.
I think it’s natural to become hung up on the causality but causality ceases to be compelling if you can imagine God outside the bounds of time. Lacking sufficient imagination, this remains a struggle.
Wow. What a response! I am going to try and respond to all of you in turn, so bear with me. I will start with Hannah.
Hannah, thanks for your comment. I think you bring up a good point we could not explore on Sunday; if God is sovereign, does that mean all things are His doing – and therefore what happens to ethics, since then even murder would be His doing?
Let me clarify that God is sovereign, but He does give us substantial freedom to order our own lives. He lets us obey Him or go our own independent way; he allows us to sin or not to sin, as it were. God does not force me to sin, nor does He even try to persuade me to sin! He lets me do it.
So in the issue of ethics, we need to realize that God has a perfect ethical standard, that he wants all of us to follow. We fail to, and He allows us to fail, but does not fore or impel us to fail.
The one area where the scriptures seem to indicate God overstepping our own natural inclinations is in the area of salvation. Here is where God helps us to see him rightly, because the biblical view of human freedom is this: we freely do what we see and think to be right. But in our natural state, we cannot see God as the right choice for us. God seems too constricting, too rigid, too unloving. This is a false view, a distorted view of God, but it is instinctive to us – until God comes and removes those distortions from us. Think of it as a temporary blindness caused by cataracts – and then the Holy Spirit comes, and removes the cataracts – and you finally see GOd in His beauty and glory – and then you rightly choose Him, because you FINALLY see him as the beauty you have been seeking your whole life.
Erica,
Thanks for your questions- and indeed most of us have them! This is a very deep part of the Christian faith, and these are tough issues upon which people of good faith can honestly disagree.
Let me tell you that I too struggle with the idea of God choosing some and not others. In my experience, when people choose to do something with NO UNDERLYING standard to help them choose, then it is arbitrary -and to me, arbitrary implies irrational, and maybe even unfair.
There is something about God choosing that seems arbitrary – what is the underlying standard? It isn’t justice – He is not giving us what we deserve (thankfully!). But HOW He chooses, and what are the reasons He chooses some people over others, is not clear to us. God has not chosen to reveal WHY He pours out grace on some people and why He does not.
He tells us that His standard of choosing is His love and grace; in Ephesians 2 it says that were were dead in our sins and trespasses – but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved.
So we see from these verses that we were spiritually dead until God intervened, and the basis for His intervention was His love and grace. That is it! We have to trust that in the depths of His love and grace He chose well.
But we all have this issue, really, do we not? If you believe, for example, that human beings freely choose God (i.e. the opposite of what I taught on Sunday), then you are faced with a different, but still equally perplexing, set of questions. Here are some of them:
a. If we choose God, what mysterious dynamic makes some of us choose God and some of us not choose God? What mysterious dynamic lies at the heart of human freedom? How does this freedom operate? How does it work? The dynamic is as arbitrary as the dynamic of how God chooses – but at least in the case of God choosing we KNOW that the dynamic was fuelled by love and grace. We do not have that assurance if the dynamic is located in human freedom.
b.We have to face the fact that people who were born in, and grew up in, places that have a lot of knowledge about Jesus are statistically far more likely to become Christians than others. So how did those people get there? Did the little boy born in Saudi Arabia CHOOSE to be born there, where he may never hear of Jesus? If God exists, then He had oversight over their birth and environment. He, as it were, stacked the deck pretty heavily in favour of some people receiving Jesus and others not even hearing about Jesus. So you still in good conscience have to deal with the fact that, even if GOd did not choose who is saved, He certainly made it uneven as to who would and who would not be more likely to embrace Jesus.
Finally, I take great comfort in the fact that the person doing the choosing is the most loving, most compassionate, most righteous, most sinless, Being in the Cosmos. If anyone can make seemingly arbitrary decisions without being unfair or irrational, He can.
Hope this helps!!
Dan
Thanks Dan. This issue above all things does tend to grate on us deeply. There are, it seems to me, two reasons for this. The first lies in our understanding of salvation and the second lies in our view of ourselves. Let me take them in order.
Salvation. We tend to picture salvation in our minds as a law court scene. God is judging us, and the act of judging in our paradigm in a responsive one. Judges listen to arguments from lawyers, sift through evidence presented to them, and then render verdicts. So if our paradigm for salvation is one that sees GOd as the Cosmic Responder, then this picture- of a God who Initiates – is counter-intuitive.
But of course that is the picture the gospel gives us of God. He chases us, not we Him. He took the initiative with Israel. He took the initiative to send His Son to us. He took the initiative to die for us. God is not, when salvation is concerned, pictured as a Judge – but as a Lover, chasing after an adulterous spouse, trying to overcome their rebellious, cheating heart by taking the initiative in pouring out His love and sacrificial grace. The other picture of salvation in the gospels is a slave market, where slaves are bought by a Master who then gives them their freedom – and then adopts them as His own. These two paradigms, of God as Initiative – taker, need to be kept in mind when we approach the issue of salvation.
Ourselves. We tend to think of ourselves as masters of our own ship. Our instincts for self- preservation, our training and our culture all reinforce deeply our sense that we are Sovereign Masters of our Own Life. This is an illusion. We are not. We are, in the terms of the New Testament, not free, rational and sovereign beings. We are slaves (to our sinful nature and to the Prince of the power of the air); we are blind ( we do not see God as He really is or desire Him as He ought to be desired) and we are dead (spiritually unable to respond to God until He makes us alive).
Until we deconstruct both of these natural inclinations in our minds and hearts, we will always have a very difficult time, both intellectually, and existentially, with this topic.
Thanks for your honest appraisal of the situation in your own life, Dan.
Marty,
Thanks for bringing up the issue of Israel. I think if you read more carefully the verse you recited, you will see that it does not say quite what you claim it said. It does not say that the WORLD are heirs, but that the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel. But nobody I know disagrees with this truth! The people of Israel were to be a blessing to the nations – God promised that to Abraham in Genesis 12 and Genesis 15. But you will note that he did not bless all of the world in the same way He blessed Israel. He did not make covenant with the world, reveal Himself to the world, do miracles to the world as He did to Israel. THey were His children, His adopting love was set upon them. And so, in like manner, God’s adopting love is upon all who become Christians by trusting in Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. But as I mentioned on Sunday, the verses of the New Testament are clearly in favour of the idea that God is the one who chooses His people. He is the lover who chases us; He is the Redeemer who takes the initiative to pay the price of our freedom.
You bring up a huge issue, however, and it consumed much of our time in the spontaneous bullpen session of Q and A right after each service; does not God desire all people to be saved? It clearly says so in some verses in the New Testament, like 1 Timothy 2: 3- 4: This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth
So, this verse is why many people can in good conscience argue that the only way that we can square the truth that God desires all people to be saved, with the truth that not all ARE saved, is that God desires it, but human freedom frustrates His will. Marty, this makes logical sense to me, philosophical sense to me, and makes God much more….palatable to me. My only problem is that it does not make biblical sense to me. It does not do justice to the mass of verses that assert, plainly and unequivocally, that God is the one who chooses. I cannot ignore them, just because they do not fit my nice logical categories.
So I am left with a bit of a mystery: God says He wants all to be saved, He says only some are saved, and then He asserts that He chooses those who are saved! We have to deal with that messy set of biblical data.
The easy way is to either ignore one group of verses or the other. The hard way is to try and make them live in harmony with one another. I grant to you that it is not easy, given my own position, to figure out the emotional life of a God who wants one thing, but actually ensures another. On the other hand, I don’t like the implications of the other position either – that God is not in control of who is saved; that God, in the final analysis, is not sovereign over who has eternal life – that God simply rubber stamps the free-will decisions of humans, that the final outcome of History is not in His hands, but in ours.
Because ultimately that is where this discussion ends up. Either humans have the ultimate say in who gets eternal life, God’s grace, God’s adopting love, His fatherly care, or God Himself does. My position is that when the issue is painted this starkly, the biblical data is very clearly weighted on the side of God keeping control, of God taking the initiative, and not the other way around.
So you have wisely shown that my position has some real mysteries involved in it. I grant that. I submit that all sides in this discussion have difficult questions to answer. My plea is that the Word of God would be our guide, and that we would be willing to leave some things as mysteries if we need to. When Paul, in Romans 9, tells the Roman church that the mystery of God, proclaimed in the Old Testament, is now being fulfilled in the issue of who is receiving Jesus – ie why are so many Gentiles, and so few Jewish people, becoming Christians? And the verse Paul quotes to back up the question – ‘why are people X receiving Jesus, while many less of people Y are?’ is this: ‘I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion.’ Paul uses God’s saying to Moses, as PROOF that the mystery of who is receiving Jesus and who is not receptive, is in God’s mysterious hands. Not in ours.
Thanks for the good insights and push back, Marty!!
Hi Dan,
It’s great you set something up for discussion on such an improtant topic. Perhaps it would be even better to have a time of open discussion on this issue since it really involves God’s character, and how it is that we are able to decide whether He is in fact a good God. How do we know, that is, that His choices are not unfair, or irrational? I know someone who told me that God had not chosen him to be “a christian” and therefore, the bible had no significance for him. How would you reply to this person? One other question. If without God non-Christians are too blind to recognize Him, aren’t they eqully blind to good and evil, since God defines what’s good and what isn’t, and therfore incapable of choosing, without God, good over evil? How can we hold anyone accountable then for the evil choices they make?
Thanks Dan,
Anita
Anita,
I am not sure where to go with all of your questions! The first thing I would say is that we do not decide whether God is good or not. That would be arrogance of the highest magnitude. God is good; nature shows it, His Word declares it, and the Cross confirms it. We can recognize what is true, or not – but we do not MAKE it true. If we decide God is not good, we are really saying – we refuse to acknowledge He is good. We decide nothing when it comes to God’s goodness; that would be like getting together to decide whether gravity existed or not. It does exist; we simply recognize the truth or we do not.
Regarding judging whether his actions are irrational – how would humans be in a position to decide if His acts were irrational? We would have to have perfect rationality before we could do that – and we don’t! We are the irrational ones; how could we even attempt to judge God base on our limited rationality?
The whole tenor of your questions indicates we have the right, and ability, to judge God. Where would that right come from? Our moral superiority? We have none. Our greater wisdom and rationality? We have none. We are the finite ones, the unwise ones, the ones whose rationality is stained by our biases, whose hearts are corrupted by our sin. So I really don’t know where to go with answering your questions, since to my mind we have no philosophic, moral or ethical right to judge God. I DO think we have the right to examine what he has revealed to us through His Word and history – the Cross – to try and help our deficient rationality come to grips with the reality of God. So there is a place for reason as it tries to understand revelation.
But reason never should trump revelation; what God has revealed about Himself is infinitely more true, and trustworthy, than human speculations about God. It is a little like having a National Enquirer reporter try to ‘decide’ whether Brad and Angelina are enjoying their marriage based on the photos his photographers got in the latest trip to Italy; without hearing from the couple themselves, that reporter has no really good evidence to judge such a thing. So, too, we cannot judge God’s worthiness based on a few snapshots of Him that we choose in our discretion to look at and then extrapolate from.
As to answering your friend, I would simply ask him how he knows God has not chosen Him? He would need to be God to know that! And, where did He even get this idea, of God choosing? It is only found in the Bible – therefore, to say the Bible has no significance for him, yet he bases his whole view of God on the biblical one, is self- contradictory.
Finally, your last question is, to my mind, one of THE toughest questions in this whole area. No, people are not blind to good and evil, since God has given them the ability to know good and evil. And no, people are not blind to recognize God either. They do not NOT recognize God; they simply refuse to acknowledge His infinite worth. That is the biblical definition of their blindness; blindness to the worth of God above all things. So they are capable, and responsible, for discerning and choosing between good and evil.
God holds people accountable for the evil choices they knowingly make, in full knowledge of good and evil. He also holds us accountable for wilfully suppressing the knowledge of himself that he gives us, through nature and history. We don’t have any excuses before his judgment throne. We surely have no right to ascend to that throne and try to judge Him.
Hope that helps; thanks for the questions!
Dan