The Sovereignty of God

God is sovereign. “Duh,” you may be thinking. “Why are you telling me this?” Well, believe it or not the sovereignty of God is a topic of intense debate. Ask someone what it means that God is sovereign and you’re likely to get different answers depending on whether or not you’re speaking to a Catholic, a Protestant, a Calvinist, or an Arminian. Don’t know what that means? That’s okay. You don’t have to understand the terms to understand the concept that different people have different beliefs and understandings about what it means that God is sovereign. About the only thing all these groups agrees on is that if you don’t have the right understanding of God’s sovereignty, you don’t have the right understanding of who God is. If you don’t have the right understanding of who God is and how He works, that has serious implications for your spiritual life. Some even believe it can jeopardize your salvation. Wow! That’s pretty heavy stuff.

So let’s start with the basics. What does the word “sovereign” mean? According to Webster’s Dictionary, sovereign means: 1) one possessing or held to possess supreme political power or sovereignty (we’ll cover this definition in a minute). 2) one that exercises supreme authority within a limited sphere 3) an acknowledged leader. Sovereignty means: 1) supreme power especially over a body politic. 2) freedom from external control. 3) controlling influence. So if God is sovereign, we accept all these premises about Him. The Christian belief in what that means at a practical level is where things get a bit more interesting.

Basically, Christians believe that the sovereignty of God means that God is the supreme authority and all things are under His control. So far so good. The issue comes when you try to reconcile a God who controls everything with things like free will and salvation. Some extreme views of God’s sovereignty say that everything that happens was foreordained and planned by God. Nothing happens that God did not either directly cause to happen or allow to happen. This view sounds great on the surface, but when you look a little deeper the cracks begin to appear.

If nothing happens that God did not either directly cause to happen or allow to happen, then God is responsible for a lot of bad things. God is either causing natural disasters or allowing them to happen. He’s at best allowing terrorism to exist and allowing murder to occur. That doesn’t really sound like a loving, merciful God. In fact, this view is what makes most people pursue atheism. They say things like, “I don’t want to serve a God that allows all these bad things to happen.” I don’t blame them! But the Bible doesn’t say that God allows bad things to happen or that He causes bad things to happen. It doesn’t say that at all. In fact, it describes God as merciful, loving, slow to anger. Jesus says He came to give us life. It’s the devil that’s out to steal, kill, and destroy.

You may think that you don’t hold this view, but I bet it’s crept into your thinking a time or two. When you’re trying to understand something difficult? When someone dies young? When a tragedy happens? It’s easy to say that God did it, or that God controlled it happening. That takes the blame off of any personal responsibility and places it firmly on God’s shoulders. And, honestly, it’s easier to believe that than to understand why things happen that are against God’s will if He is sovereign.

But the Bible says that lots of things happen against God’s will. It comes down to this key in the definition of sovereignty: legal authority. God is a law-abiding god. It’s part of who He is. He is holy. He puts certain laws into place, and He abides by those laws. That’s part of His nature. When He created the world, He passed that legal authority on to Adam and Eve. He didn’t intervene when they were being tempted by Satan because Adam and Eve had the legal authority. To intervene at that point would be to undermine that authority. It would break the law. It would invalidate free will. So God in His sovereignty limited Himself by allowing free will and legal authority to take place. It wasn’t God’s will that Adam and Eve sin. If it were, then there wouldn’t have been a consequence to their sin. After all, they would have still been in the will of God. How can God punish people for sin if sin is His will? The obvious answer here is that they were NOT in the will of God. Sin was NOT God’s will or plan.

When Adam and Eve sinned, they passed their legal authority on to Satan. So sin and sickness and disease and deception and all kinds of things against the will of God were released into the world. Because Satan had the legal authority, all God could do was operate according to the law. Sacrifices for atonement could be made. That sacrifice would cover the sin and allow God to act on behalf of the person offering them. Ultimately, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ accomplished this atonement once and for all. When we are saved, we take back our dominion from Satan on the basis of this atonement. We’re not slaves to sin any longer. We’re not under Satan’s legal control. We hand the dominion back to God.

God CAN step in and act contrary to our faith and contrary to certain spiritual laws. He has the ability. Some could argue He has the ultimate authority. But He won’t. He won’t because free will is very important. God didn’t create us so that we could do nothing but worship Him. He created us so that we would CHOOSE to worship Him. Loving someone by choice is much more powerful than loving someone because you have no other choice. So God won’t violate your free will. He won’t violate what you ultimately believe. God is not mad at you. He isn’t holding your sin against you. All sin that would ever be committed, was ever committed, could ever be committed was atoned for by the finished work of Jesus on the cross, but you don’t automatically get salvation just because Jesus died on the cross. You have to receive that gift. You have to appropriate it for yourself. You have to use faith.

There is a balance to the sovereignty of God. There are spiritual laws in place that He follows. It’s important to understand that sovereignty for what it is and what it means. We’re told to resist the devil, but if we think that sickness and trials and temptations are God’s will, how can we resist them? This is what James is talking about when he says that a double-minded person does not receive from God. You can’t pray for healing while believing God sent sickness to teach you a lesson. God doesn’t send sickness. It’s not His will. The Bible makes that clear.

But sickness comes all the same because we live in a fallen and broken world. God can use that sickness. He can turn it for good. You can exercise your spiritual muscles and put into practice the fruits that God has already put inside you. But that’s not the same thing as causing it to happen or even allowing it to happen. Study this out for yourself. Search the Scriptures for references to God’s sovereignty and our choice and responsibility. It’s important that you understand what God’s will IS and also how to access that for your life. It’s important that you understand WHO God is. It makes a huge difference to how spiritual blessings will manifest in your life.