What the Bible says about Sovereignty of God
(From Forerunner Commentary)
God is aware of everything regarding our lives. Not even a thought can be hidden from Him regardless of where we are, regardless of what justifications we might give for what we decide to do. So, when it comes down to the issue of sovereignty, do we allow God to be sovereign in our lives? One of His names, Yahweh Shammah, means "The Lord Is There." Since we are His children, wherever we are, He is. If we allow ourselves to entertain ideas that He is unconcerned about us, we are gravely mistaken.
God's supremacy is so great that He can keep track of all that is happening across the entire expanse of what He has made. Therefore, He is allowing what is occurring in the world. He is permitting it to occur and even directly causing some of the calamitous events to happen. He is not detached from what is going on—in fact, everything is under control. He who sees every sparrow fall also has His eyes on us for our good.
Whatever we do, we must not allow Him to slip from our thoughts. Every thought of those who live by faith should begin with Him and His will.
God is urging us to make serious and deliberate choices to propel us toward the conclusion of His purpose. He requires us to commit and make decisions. In matters of morality, remaining neutral is not an option. The issues are sharply defined: obedience, disobedience; life, death; good, evil. He especially points out that He will not tolerate idolatry. Idols are useless vanities that people choose to submit to rather than the sovereign God.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part SixRelated Topics: Choices | Choosing Life | Decision | Decisions | Disobedience | Idolatry | Life and Death | Obedience | Sovereignty of God
It is not the brilliant, luminous glory of God's appearance that humbles Job but God's power, intelligence, and wisdom revealed in the creation. This, combined with His right to do with it as He pleases, brings Job to understand how ignorant, puny, and base he is by comparison.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Sovereignty and Its Fruit: Part Ten
Psalm 68:19-20 contains an important thought bearing on salvation. "Blessed be the Lord, who daily loads us with benefits, the God of our salvation! Selah. Our God is the God of salvation; and to GOD the Lord belong escapes from death." In a sense, this is a major issue for all to acknowledge; everything written in God's Word is intended ultimately to lead us to this point and this issue. Only God can save. He can save us now and others when their time comes to be called. Salvation, then, is not a matter of "Can He save?" but "When will He do it?" If He delays for some people, He has good reasons.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part Eight
Provoked means "rebelled against." Their disrespect and irreverence produced the fruit of limiting His willingness and power to provide for them in any situation. In their minds, they set boundaries upon what they thought He would or could do. The psalmist does not mean they literally hogtied God to keep Him from doing things, though the practical result of their relationship virtually amounted to that. However, in their lack of faith and fear of God and their failure to make practical use of His sovereignty over His creation and His willingness to help His people, they mentally drew lines, concluding that God could not or would not provide for them in their circumstance. Thus, they chose to arrive at their own solutions that resulted in sin and death. They were obviously not living by faith but by sight. Hebrews 4:1-2 confirms this was at the base of Israel's failure in the wilderness
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God and Human Responsibility: Part ElevenRelated Topics: Disrespect | Disrespect of God | Faith, Lack of | Faithlessness | God's Sovereignty | Irreverence | Lack of Faith | Limiting God | Living by Sight | Rebellion | Relationship with God | Sovereignty of God
We of all people do not want to be fighting God when He brings about changes in economies or government. The changes may appear on the surface to be working against us, but who is ruling? Who can turn Him back? Who can stop Him from providing for us in spite of what is happening around us? Romans 8:32, 38-39 reminds us who is really in charge:
He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?. . . For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Such constructive encouragement is a valuable bulwark against the stressful fear and depression that can arise when events seem to be spiraling out of control.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part SixRelated Topics: Depression | Fighting God | God's Sovereignty | Separation from God | Sovereignty of God
This idea, "As he thinks in his heart, so is he" applies both to the righteous and the evil. Here, the subject is evil. We can translate the first half of verse 7 in a more modern way as, "As he calculates in his soul." "Calculate" puts a twist on the word "thinks," making it a bit stronger and providing a sense of deceit—that the person is considering the odds of a scheme.
In all three verses, Solomon warns against exploitative people, against those who are slick controllers who manipulate others through charm or beguiling words. God is telling us that we need to have enough discernment to look on the heart, as the proverb says, "As he thinks in his heart, so is he."
There is an inseparable connection between teaching and practice: We cannot practice truth until we are taught it. We pick up some things from our culture because people do not do everything wrong; from time to time, they hit upon things that are right. Thus, in Romans 2, Paul writes about the conscience of the unconverted. There may be little or much in a given culture in harmony with God and His way.
So, as a person thinks in his heart—as he has been educated to think—is the way he really is. Doctrine - teaching - becomes important because, within the framework of His purpose, we really cannot walk in way of God until He teaches us the truth. He must feed the mind with the right knowledge if the person is going to do right as a way of life. This is what God is after, which is why doctrine is so important.
Thus, God says, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6). This verse does not mean that the child will do everything right but that the child's basic training will never completely leave him, and if his parents start him off in the right way, "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree." It is a generality, but a true one. What people need is truth. We need the doctrines put together in the correct way so they lead in the right direction—toward God's purpose.
What matters is the thinking material that the person works with because the knowledge that his mind, his heart, assimilates will form the basis from which he calculates. If a person lacks truth, he will not come to proper decisions and produce the right actions.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God (Part Eleven)Related Topics: Acknowledging the Truth | Acting Upon Truth | Assimilation/ Feeding Process | Calculating | Child Training | Conscience Must Be Educated | Conscience Must Be Trained | Deceit | Discerning Truth | Doctrine | Man's "Schemes" | Manipulation | Sovereignty of God | Spiritual Practice | Train up a Child in the Way He Should Go | Truth, Departure from
What if a ruler, the one to whom we are to submit, is an oppressive person? What if he is just incompetent or stupid, and we know better how to do the job he should be doing? What if the person is sexually immoral or financially greedy? Does God still want us to submit? What protection do we have in these kinds of circumstances?
Abomination that it is, those in authority often do evil. They might have serious character flaws that catch their victims in the effects of their flaws. What is so maddening is that they justify their ways—seeing them as good—and they will turn around and blame the innocent for the evils that occur.
For example, the proverb says that "all the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes." The incompetent man does not think to himself, "I'm really dumb, stupid, idiotic, and shouldn't even have this job." The sexually immoral person does not see himself as perverse. Many prostitutes will say, "Yes, I'm doing wrong according to the law, but I am providing a needed and wanted service. If it weren't, I would have no customers." They justify themselves; they are pure in their own eyes.
Consider the enemies of Jesus. They felt justified in taking His life because He was stirring up the people. No one on earth has ever been more innocent, yet they justified what they were doing because the people were being stirred up by Him. They accused Him of being a revolutionary, a threat to community stability.
If we are in a position like this—under an oppressive ruler who justifies the way he is doing things, and we are suffering the effects of his actions—we feel like powerless pawns being taken advantage of. We feel he is denying us the liberty to do what we want. Should we submit or rebel?
To know what to do, we must look at what Jesus did in a similar circumstance. This is not an occasion in which the authority figure demands submission, and in submitting, we must break the law of God. The situation does not involve being forced to sin but simply submitting to one who is unreasonable and oppressive.
John 19:10 is part of Jesus' trial for His life before Pilate, and occurs after Pilate had ordered Him to be scourged: "Then Pilate said to Him, 'Are You not speaking to me? Do You not know that I have power to crucify You, and power to release You?'" He could choose to do either. Pilate was a corrupt official. His record, according to secular history, was not at all good. The Jews despised him for his harsh ways.
"Jesus answered, 'You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore the one who delivered Me to you has the greater sin'" (John 19:11). His response is very meaningful. It reveals His attitude, His approach, to every circumstance of His life.
To be in the same frame of mind, we must ask ourselves, "Do we see God?" Is He really a part of our lives? Is He really running this creation? Is He really sitting at the controls of things? Is He really aware of us as individuals? Does He have every hair on our heads numbered? Are we really the apple of His eye? Are our lives really in His hands? Have we really given them to Him, or are we holding part of ourselves in reserve?
"You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above." Jesus saw life clearly and simply: God was in complete control of everything going on in the universe. Not that everything was being directed by Him in the sense that He was causing it to occur, but that Jesus believed with every fiber of His being that God was with Him all the time, everywhere, and at every moment. He knew His life was in His Father's hands, and Pilate could do nothing against Him unless God allowed it.
Would God have us submit to somebody who was cruel, hard-hearted, incompetent, sexually unbalanced, perverted, stupid, or financially greedy? Would He have us live and work under such a person? He put His own Son in that position! Everything at Jesus' trial and crucifixion looked totally stacked against Him. Carnally, it seems as if He had every right to rebel. He could have replied, "Do you not know to whom you are doing this?" Instead, He says, in paraphrase, "You would not have the power to do anything except that My Father passed on this. And He is now looking at Me to see how I am going to respond. Will I submit to the authority that He has permitted to be over Me right now?"
Do we see God in our lives like this? We have to look at ourselves differently than the way people in the world look at themselves. We must decide whether or not we are in God's hand. Do we have the faith to trust that we are in His hand and that the constituted authorities are also in His hand? Do we believe He is aware of what is happening and that He deeply cares about what we will do in each situation? As He did with Abraham, He must know what kind of witness we will make (see Genesis 22).
John W. Ritenbaugh
Submitting (Part 1)Related Topics: Apple of God's Eye | Authority, Submission to | God's Control | God's Intervention | God's Involvement | God's Sovereignty | Honor the King | Pontius Pilate | Prostitutes | Self Justification | Sovereignty of God | Submission to Authority | Submitting | Submitting to Authority | Witness, Quality of
This drawing is totally beyond our control; it is entirely a sovereign act on the Father's part. Jesus intimates that even He has no say in selecting those drawn to Him to be His disciples.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part SixRelated Topics: Called According to God's Purpose | Called Out Ones | Calling | Calling, Uniqueness of | Drawing imagery | God's Calling | God's Sovereignty | Sovereignty of God
One does not find the true church on his own any more than one can find Christ and the Father on His own. A person is led to God and to the church, and he is added to it upon repentance, baptism, giving himself wholly to God, and receiving the Holy Spirit. We see not only that God's true church cannot be found without revelation, but also that it cannot be joined. What this reality begins to reveal to us is God's sovereignty over His creation and His purpose. Therefore, as Jesus clearly states, He built and continues to build His church.
Seekers badly misunderstand, thinking salvation is open to anybody at any time. However, Paul puts a damper on this notion, writing in Romans 9:16, "So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy."
Is it possible that people cannot find it partly because they do not know what to look for? Yes! This is true partly because of what God's church is. The Bible variously describes it as part of a Kingdom that issues citizenships (Colossians 1:13; Philippians 3:20); a building of which its members are materials (Ephesians 2:20-22); as the body of Jesus Christ of which its members are vital, living parts (Ephesians 1:22-23); and as a Family into which God's children are summoned (Ephesians 3:15). There is no more important and exclusive institution on earth. No volunteers are accepted. Each person becomes a part of it by God's design and His design only. He is sovereign!
John W. Ritenbaugh
Is There a True Church?Related Topics: Church as Body of Christ | God Draws People to Him | God's Calling | God's Sovereignty | Sovereignty of God | True Church
God has ways of causing us to yield so that He can mold and shape us into what He desires. Because of this, we will be ready for our "place" when the Kingdom comes. God not only has power, but He also always has alternatives to ensure that His will is done without taking our free moral agency from us. He has another option we may not want to consider: If we will not cooperate by using our free moral agency for right purposes, He can always replace us with somebody better. We are, after all, the weak of the world. We have every reason to be encouraged, however. He will use every means at His disposal to prepare and save those called into His purpose on schedule with the return of Jesus Christ.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part Four
Grace reigns supreme over law, sin, and death. Because God is gracious and the supreme sovereign over His creation, and because He is supreme over law as its Giver and can resurrect whom He chooses, grace is His to give freely as He pleases. Grace is supreme over the others because God has willed it so and gives it to whomsoever He chooses.
Because grace is a gift, it can neither be demanded nor earned (it can, however, be requested). Therefore salvation must be by grace. Because of this, even the greatest sinner is not beyond the reach of His mercy. Conversely, because salvation is by grace, all boasting is likewise excluded.
For example, Isaac receives grace, but Ishmael is cast out with his mother. Jacob receives the inheritance and blessing, but Esau is in reality cursed. God chooses to have Christ born in the tiny town of Bethlehem, not at the Temple or even in the capital city, Jerusalem. He could have sent angels to announce His Son's birth in every capital of every nation on earth, or at least to announce it to the religious leaders among the Jews. Instead, He chooses to invite common shepherds and foreign magi for that peculiar honor.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part ThreeRelated Topics: Boasting | Boasting, Refraining from | God's Mercy | God's Sovereignty | Grace | Mercy | Salvation by Grace through Faith | Sovereignty of God
What we observe in the world around us confirms that end-time Israel is following the same spiritual pattern that our ancestors established anciently. Human nature does not change. These verses verify that some knowledge of God remains within the Israelitish nations.
However, theirs is not an enlightened, discerning, and intelligent zeal for God. Rather, God says in Hosea 4:6 that His people—in this case meaning ancient Israel—are destroyed for a lack of true knowledge. God then lays the greater blame on the teachers for their failure to teach truth. The Interpreter's Commentary says that "ignorant" in Romans 10:3 can correctly be translated as "ignoring," revealing a deliberate disregarding of God's righteousness.
The broader history of Old Testament Israel shows that God's Word was available, but the people did not access it to seek God. Thus, their ignorance was not completely the teacher's fault; the people should have studied the Bible on their own. Paul explains in Romans 1:18-21 that man is without excuse before Him because knowledge of God is available. The contrast Paul provides in Romans 10:1-3 indicates that the teaching the Israelites received produced at best a vague, superficial base of knowledge about God. This is not a foundation of true knowledge that will work to produce a good relationship between God and man.
We can see an example of this kind of teaching in our time. Most of us have seen what is happening in so many churches these days, most especially in the mega-churches. Their services come across as superficial entertainment that gives people an upbeat social experience that contains some religious instruction. They come up short in teaching high-quality biblical truths to enhance people's relationships with God. It has produced a people who believe that they are saved and going to heaven immediately after death, and who think God's laws are done away. They keep Christmas and Easter, which are obviously pagan holidays, and at the same time fail to keep the Sabbaths, which both Jesus and Paul clearly kept.
How can they be following Christ when they do not do what He did and in fact do what pagans do? Where is God in the minds of those who conduct their lives like this? In truth, what they think about Him is nowhere near the truth because neither they nor their teachers make the effort to know Him (John 17:3).
They know some things about Him, but they do not know Him. If they did, they would be seeking Him, and He would be revealing truth. Where should they be seeking Him? They must begin in the Scriptures. In them, two things are beyond dispute: first, that God is the Supreme Sovereign over His creation, His purpose for creating it, and His plan for fulfilling it; and second, that man is responsible to this awesome Creator.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Living By Faith and God's SovereigntyRelated Topics: Christmas | Easter | God's Laws 'done away' | God's Sovereignty | Living by Faith | Mega Churches | Pagan Holidays | Relationship with God | Sovereignty of God
These verses show us two examples regarding prayer: First, it illustrates how God can respond to our prayers, and second, how Paul reacted to God's answer. We, like Paul, want God to remove our afflictions any time we are in discomfort, but especially when the affliction is chronic and, we feel, inhibits accomplishment. God's response to Paul, however, fit a far greater need, perhaps to keep Paul humble so that his many gifts did not become a curse. Instead, God gave him strength to bear up under the affliction, thus keeping him in a constant state of dependency for strength to go on. Paul humbly accepted this and continued his ministry despite his affliction, knowing it was fulfilling God's will.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part NineRelated Topics: Prayer | Sovereignty of God | Submission to God | Submission to God's Will | Thorn in the Flesh | Trials | Trials, Purpose of | Trials, Rejoicing in | Trials, Shaping Power Of
Do we get the significance of the truth that He works all things in our lives too, according to the counsel of His will? This truth does not apply to just the "big" things of His overall purpose but even to us! Do we really perceive our relationship to Him as being one of the Potter to the clay?
As He formed and shaped Adam and Eve, He is forming and shaping us, and it is our responsibility to accept and submit. Do we live our lives as though He truly is omnipotent, omniscient, and individually aware of us? Do we conduct our lives in such a manner that we fully understand that this awesome Being is actively and personally involved in what we do?
By viewing Him as Potter, do we grasp that He has every right to mold the clay into whatever form or state and make whatever use of it as He chooses? He can fashion from the same lump one person to honor and another to dishonor. He can determine our sex, race, ethnicity, level of wealth, or location. He is under no law or rule outside of His own nature and purpose. He is a law unto Himself, under no obligation to give an account of His actions to anybody else. He exercises His power as, where, and when He wills.
He is not merely overseeing our lives but actively participating in them, and He is ultimately responsible for what happens in them just as much as those national and worldwide occurrences that we hear in the news. The sovereignty of the Bible's God is absolute, irresistible, and infinite. Our trust is to be in Him.
God's purpose and plan has been and is being carried out as He purposed, and nobody can turn Him aside. Now His purpose and plan has reached out to include us just as He predestined when He declared the end from the beginning. Have we caught the vision?
Are we willing to completely turn our lives over to this Being who does not always act in a way that is pleasant to us? God immediately struck Aaron's sons and Uzzah dead, but He has allowed countless others who perhaps did far worse things to live long and seemingly full lives.
God permitted Methuselah to live almost a thousand years. He chose to endow Samson with strength as no other person ever had. Jesus went to the pool of Siloam and chose one man to heal, paying no attention to the others. Why did He allow the Morgans, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and many others to amass incredible wealth, while allowing perhaps billions of people around the world barely to scrape by in miserable poverty?
When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, the city of Jericho and its citizens stood barring their progress. God brought the walls down, and the city's defenses collapsed—the one and only time God did such a thing. Every other city had to be conquered by warfare, risking Israelite lives to take them.
Clearly, He treats and responds to individuals according to the counsel of His own mind, and He answers to no one. He does this even in the lives of His children. The apostle John lived to be around one hundred years old, yet Stephen was stoned to death, Peter crucified, and Paul beheaded.
Considering the witnesses of those great servants, what right do we have to complain about the discomforts He creates for us to endure and grow within? He could rescue everybody in every uncomfortable circumstance, but He does not. Have we fully accepted that He may choose difficult things for us?
John W. Ritenbaugh
Fully Accepting God's Sovereignty (Part One)Related Topics: Acceptance of God's Purpose | Accepting God's Sovereignty | Clay and Potter Analogy | God Oversees Our Lives | God's Involvement in Our Lives | God's Purpose | God's Purpose for Us | God's Sovereignty | Methuselah | Potter and Clay Analogy | Samson | Sovereignty of God | Stephen, Example of
Comprehending God's sovereignty should begin to produce another necessary yet difficult quality: complete resignation to God's will. We Israelites have gained quite a reputation with God for being unwilling to accept life without griping.
Human nature naturally complains when it feels it has been deprived of what it had its heart set on. We think that our possessions are ours unconditionally. We feel that we are entitled to success when we have done something well. We believe that, when we work hard and competently, we deserve to keep what we have accumulated. We hold that, when surrounded by our happy family, no power may enter our beloved circle and strike down a loved one. We can even think that we should be immune from bankruptcy because God must honor our obedience! However, understanding and accepting God's sovereignty includes His right to do or allow anything He wills.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Sovereignty and Its Fruit: Part TenRelated Topics: Calamity, God Creates | God Creates Calamity | God's Sovereignty | Human Nature | Sovereignty of God | Yielding to God | Yielding to God's Will
God overcame Paul and saved him. Certainly there have been sinners far worse than Paul, but the sense of his thought is that nobody is beyond the reach of God's power to convict of sin and affect dramatic changes of behavior.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part SixRelated Topics: Conviction of Sin | God's Sovereignty | Paul's Calling | Paul's Change of Perspective | Paul's Conversion | Sovereignty of God
II Peter 3:1-6 contains vivid illustrations of God ruling and overruling to bring His purpose to a successful conclusion in spite of men. Because the Creator God truly is sovereign, He is constantly moving His creation, including us, toward the conclusion of the purpose He determined from the beginning. All things do not continue as they were. God is working and intervening, making adjustments in the course of international, national, and personal events, as the incidents of the Flood and the Tower of Babel vividly illustrate. Peter could have added many more examples, such as freeing Israel from Egypt, guiding Israel to power and destroying it, and scattering the Israelites over the face of the earth. God has done this so completely that most have no idea where Israel is or that they themselves might be Israelites.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God: Part SixRelated Topics: Babel | Babel, Tower of | Exodus | Flood | God's Control of History | God's Intervention | God's Involvement | God's Sovereignty | Sovereignty of God | Tower of Babel
These verses contain an astonishing statement of God's unseen influence in earthly events and how personally involved He is in what is planned for these end times. God motivates both the destruction of the harlot by her fellow conspirators and the very drives for the union of nations into the Beast. He is working this very moment as men conspire to bring this to pass!
How could it be otherwise? If God makes prophecies about what He will do, He had better have the power to bring them to pass. He does this by influencing the thinking of those He has put into positions to fulfill them.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Sovereignty of God and Human Responsibility: Part ElevenRelated Topics: Beast of Revelation | Beast, Relationship with Woman | Beast, The | God's Intervention | God's Involvement | God's Sovereignty | Great Harlot | Great Whore | Sovereignty of God