Sovereignty of God

(Read the series so far.)

Recognition of God’s sovereignty in His work with people can be a tough subject to tackle. Even believers can become so earthly minded that we forget that God is not an elected leader Who seeks our approval. He is the Supreme. He is the Creator. All answer to Him, and He answers to none.

That can be deeply offensive to the American mind, but that makes it no less true. God is God—and as such, He is the Planner, the Author and the King. Don’t skip what Paul wrote and focus only on the offense: Paul made the point that God had (and has) a plan. He is at work. He has decided on the basis of His own desire to work through some people, and that wasn’t based entirely on them—but on His sovereign right to make such a decision.

Before you dive into what seems objectionable about those words, look at them. If you have a relationship with the Living God, you can celebrate the fact that you are not a cosmic accident. God has a plan He is working. He wanted you, and He chose you! How can that not be an exciting reality?

When I first saw it, it was all jumbled up with grocery ads and direct mail fliers that urged me to consider the metaphysical significance of my current gutter system. But this piece of mail, this greeting-sized envelope postmarked from Long Island, NY, was less noisy, unassuming somehow. I recognized the handwriting as belonging to my husband’s grandmother—a carefully-formed script that she’d learned through hours of instruction in elementary school, back before the ubiquitous keyboards and touch screens that now dominate our lives.

Read Part 1.

Other Passages Answer Clark Pinnock’s Open Theism

Genesis 6:6—God is sorry and grieves. The LXX uses the word enthumeomai, which is simply to consider or think about, not to “be sorry” (See Matt 1:20). The Hebrew nachem is to have sorrow or to console oneself. Clearly God has emotional responses to the deeds of men. Still, this gives no indication of what God did or did not know beforehand. If He wants to have foreknowledge and still be saddened by what takes place, does He not have the right to do that? Or is He only allowed to express emotion if He follows the rules of open theism?

Genesis 8:1, 9:15-16 (and Ex 6:5)—God’s remembering is not indicative of His otherwise forgetting. Rather it points to a return to focus of that which is remembered. God didn’t forget Noah or the covenant. To assume that God’s remembering requires His first forgetting demands the presupposition that God has the same limitations as humanity. To use God’s remembering as an argument that He forgets or does not know, requires presupposing that the premise of open theism is correct before examining the biblical data.

The problem of evil presents a challenge for philosophers and theologians who hold to the existence of God. Simply stated, the problem includes three conditional premises and a concluding question: If God is all powerful, all knowing, and all beneficent, then how can evil exist? In order to resolve the problem that the concluding question implies, one of the three premises has to be denied or altered.

While I would suggest that the problem can only be resolved by understanding and defining the beneficence of God through the lens of His holiness (as emphasized in Isaiah 6 and Revelation 4), the theology of divine openness, otherwise known as open theism, attempts to answer the question by denying the other two premises. Open theism is on the extreme end of the “free-will” spectrum as a philosophical attempt at resolving the problem.

Minnesota Golden Gopher basketball star Trevor Mbakwe’s virtually unprecedented sixth year on the college round-ball scene is in the books. He has made peace with the circumstances that undoubtedly delayed a professional career on the hardwood. “I definitely didn’t plan on being in college for six years,” Mbakwe told a reporter, “but everything happens for a reason.”

Everything?! Most people who think long enough about that notion cannot live with the discomfort of it. Within this subset, those unwilling to identify blind, impersonal chance as the reason behind everything that happens, generally prefer a God who is—in one way or another—incapable of stopping the bad things that happen to good people.

Reasonable arguments could be marshaled in defense of the “everything happens for a reason” position, including the notion that a personal, sovereign God furnishes the reasons. But here, I simply relay a story.

To many of us the outcome of Tuesday’s election is incomprehensible. In multiple ways, it doesn’t make any sense. But if forty six years of life’s puzzles have taught me anything, it’s that when you’re inundated by the incomprehensible, it’s time to focus for a while on what is clear and certain.

Often enough the incomprehensible starts to make sense somewhere in that process.

Maybe you don’t need what follows, but I did. Just passing it along.

Four things that are still true after Tuesday

1. God is perfect and unchanging.

For I am the LORD, I do not change; Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob. (Mal 3:6)

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. (Jas 1:17)