Doctrine/God's Sovereignty/Increasing Our Faith

God’s Sovereignty: A Study Of The Will Of God

Posted on by Allan Turner / 0 Comment
God's Sovereignty

In an over-reaction to Calvinism’s extremes, many Christians have shied away from a study of God’s sovereignty. This is regrettable. The sovereignty of God is a thoroughly biblical subject. Even though the words “sovereign” or “sovereignty” are not found in the KJV, one or both of these words appear in the NKJV, ASV, NIV, and NRSV. Nevertheless, the idea of God’s sovereignty is clearly taught in both the Old and New Testaments. “Sovereignty,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary, means, “Supremacy of authority or rule as exercised by a sovereign.” This idea is applied to God by such words as “dominion,” “rule,” “ruler,” “Lord,” “King,” and “Potentate.” As Jack Cottrell points out in his outstanding book, What The Bible Says About God The Ruler, “The sovereignty of God may be concisely summed up as absolute Lordship.” Sovereignty, then, is equal to lordship, lordship is equal to ownership, and ownership is equal to control. It is precisely at this point that Calvinism strays. I’ll have more to say about this further along; but before proceeding on, let’s make sure we understand the ramifications of Sovereignty.

The Ramifications Of Sovereignty

If God is truly the Sovereign of the universe, then whatever happens, we are told, is God’s will. A young baby dies of cancer, a young mother or father is seriously injured in an automobile accident and all these are said to be God’s will. We pray earnestly for a fellow Christian’s recovery from a serious illness and in closing our prayer we say, “Not our will, but Thine, be done.” But recovery does not take place and death occurs. Has God’s will truly been done? At funerals, if one listens to what is being said to the bereaved, one invariably will be heard saying, “It’s God’s will.” Are these things really God’s will, and if so, in what sense?

Repelled by the thought of a loving God being responsible for the death of the innocent and those we love, many Christians have concluded that God is not yet Sovereign Ruler of the universe. Unlike now, one day, they say, God’s will is to be done in all things. As sympathetic as I am to their reasons for coming to this conclusion, I’m convinced that those who hold such a position are badly mistaken.

From a biblical standpoint, the sovereignty of God is simply not open for debate. If God is not sovereign, He is not God! Therefore, when I answer “yes” to the question, “Is it true that whatever happens is the will of God?,” I must make sure that those who hear me understand that my answer is not an unqualified “yes,” as failing to do so would be both theologically misleading and personally devastating. Thus, my “yes” is qualified by the fact that there are at least three different senses in which the “will of God” is used in the Bible:

  1. God’s Decretive Will,

  2. God’s Preceptive Will, and

  3. God’s Permissive Will.

When we understand these, we are able to realize that God is not personally, nor directly, responsible for the many things people want to credit, or discredit, Him with, even though it continues to be true that everything that happens falls ultimately within His sovereignty.

God’s Decretive Will

There are things that God decrees to happen. He causes these things to happen by His omnipotence. These can be described as God’s decretive or decreed will. A biblical description of God’s decretive will is found in Psalm 33:11, which says: “The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation,” and again in Isaiah 14:27, which says: “For the Lord of hosts has planned, and who can frustrate it? And as for His stretched-out hand, who can turn it back?” It was God’s decretive will that was at work in His scheme to redeem mankind through His Son Jesus Christ (Acts 2:23; 4:28; Colossians 1:4). For the Bible believer, it is simply a given that whatever God purposes cannot be frustrated.

For example, in Romans 8:28-30, we learn that God has decreed He will justify, and one day glorify, certain foreknown individuals (viz., “whosoever will”) on the basis of a foreordained Christ (Acts 2:23; 1 Peter 1:19-20), a foreordained gospel plan (Acts 2:23; 1 Peter 1:19-20), and a foreordained life (Ephesians 2:10). With this firmly established, Paul joyously affirms, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31), to which I say, Amen and amen!

In like manner, the doctrine of the resurrection rests firmly on God’s decretive will. In John 6:40, Jesus said, “And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.” Again, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” Indeed, whatever God proposes, and Himself carries out, will, in fact, happen. This is the reason why God can say He declares “the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will do all My pleasure’” (Isaiah 46:10). This, then, is what is meant by God’s decretive will.

God’s Preceptive Will

But there is a second way in which the “will of God” is used in the Bible. This has to do not with what God purposed to do Himself, but with what He desires for man to do. This can be described as God’s preceptive will and is primarily concerned with man’s obedience to His word or precepts. The writer of Hebrews speaks of the “will of God” in this sense when he says, “For you have need of endurance, so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise” (Hebrews 10:36). It was in this sense that the Lord used the expression in Matthew 7:21: “Not everyone who says to Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.” When Jesus said “the will of My Father,” He was speaking of God’s precepts, statutes, or commandments. Consequently, it is in connection with God’s preceptive will, and not His decretive will, that man is commanded to “work out [his] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).

Moreover, it is in connection with God’s preceptive will that we understand the Lord is “longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Actually, God’s desire (i.e., His will) for the salvation of all men is reflected many places in His word (cf. 1 Timothy 2:4; Luke 7:30; Matthew 23:37), but such must be kept distinct from His decretive will. A failure to do so will cause one to land squarely in Calvinism’s camp.

God’s Permissive Will

There is yet a third sense in which the “will of God” is used in the Scriptures. It can be described as God’s permissive will. Perhaps it is with God’s permissive will that men have the most trouble. In this category are all those things which God neither purposes nor desires, but which He allows man, in his freedom, to bring about. (There is a sense in which this third category is related to the second (viz., God’s preceptive will. With a strict use of the word “permissive,” it can be seen that man’s response to God’s desire or preceptive will is not decreed or purposed (i.e., forced) by Him, and is, therefore, something He permits. (In other words, God does not make someone obey His laws; but, in the strictest sense, He simply permits him to do so.) That which makes this third category different from the second is not the presence of God’s permission, but the absence of a stated desire on God’s part that these events or circumstances should happen. In this category there are events God neither purposed nor desired, but, nevertheless, permits, including some things that are clearly contrary to His stated desire (will), such as man’s sins. Therefore, when God said, “They have also built the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or speak, nor did it come into my mind” (Jeremiah 19:5), He made it plain that it was not His will they were doing, whether decretive or preceptive—i.e., it was not the mind (will) of God that they should do such a thing. Even so, the Lord permitted His people to exercise their free wills and do those things clearly contrary to His counsel/will. Things like this are within the “will of God” only in the sense that He permits them to happen (cf. Acts 17:24-30; 14:16; Romans 1:18-32).

God’s permissive will permits both bad and good things to occur. It is used by Paul in this latter sense in 1 Corinthians 16:7, when he writes: “For I do not wish to see you now on the way; but I hope to stay a while with you, if the Lord permits” (emp. mine). He uses it this way again when, in Acts 18:21, he writes: “I must by all means keep this coming feast in Jerusalem; but I will return again to you, God willing” (emp. mine). In Hebrews 6:3, the writer put it this way: “And this we will do if God permits” (emp. mine).

But sometimes, of course, the Lord does not permit or will something to happen that His creatures desire to happen and, as Sovereign, it is His prerogative to do so. For example, in Acts 16:7, Luke writes: “After they had come to Mysia they tried to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit did not permit them” (emp. mine) And, according to James, the height of prideful arrogance is manifested by the one who does not take into consideration that his desires may be, and sometimes are, preempted and/or superseded by the Sovereign Ruler of the universe (cf. James 4:13-15).

In Conlusion, Control, Not Causation, Is The Key

Calvinists and other determinists have wrongly thought that the key to sovereignty is causation. Rather, the key to sovereignty is ultimate control. Through His absolute foreknowledge of every plan of man’s heart, and through His absolute ability (omnipotence) to either permit or prevent any particular plan man may have, God maintains complete control (sovereignty) over His creation. The power to prevent means that God has the final word in everything that happens. To deny this is to deny the sovereignty of God!

Whatever happens, then, is God’s will. Everything (i.e., every single thing) that occurs falls within the sovereign will of God in one sense or another. Even so, it is crucial to understand that there are three different senses in which this may be true:

  1. Sometimes a thing occurs because God decides it will happen, and then He makes it happen. This we have called God’s decretive will and it seems to be limited mostly to His working out the “scheme of redemption.”

  2. Sometimes a thing occurs because God desires it and man decides, of his own free will, to do what God desires. We have identified this as God’s preceptive will, which has to do with God’s commandments or precepts.

  3. Sometimes a thing occurs because of the agency of an individual or group of individuals, and God permits it to happen. We have called this God’s permissive will. Included in this category are sinful or careless acts like murder or the death of one caused by the actions of a drunk driver. Even tragedies that occur through the natural processes would fit in this category.

All three of these categories can be classified as “God’s will,” but only the first is God’s will in any causative sense. Even though God is Sovereign Ruler of the universe, categories two and three remind us that we must allow the Sovereign Ruler to respect the integrity of the freedom He has so graciously accorded His creation. As His creatures, we must learn to trust God’s wisdom in knowing what good can be drawn from the tragic episodes He permits to take place in category three.

Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him (Job 13:15a).

(continued)

Atheism/Increasing Our Faith/Scientism

The Fingerprints Of God

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God's Fingerprints

The God I believe in is not known only by faith. He is not invisible to reason. He has not just acted undetectably behind some naturalistic evolutionary process that was, to all appearances, mindless and purposeless. No, the God in whom I believe acted openly and left His fingerprints all over the evidence. This is why the book I cherish proclaims, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork” (Psa 19:1).

Atheism/Scientism

Black Boxes, Darwinism, Modern Molecular Biology, And Irreducible Complexity

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Irreducible Complexity
Darwinism arose within a scientific community that knew very little of biochemistry and imagined the cell to be something rather simple that could ooze itself up and out of some supposed primordial soup. Molecular biologist Michael Behe says this just isn’t so. He says molecular mechanisms are “irreducibly complex.” What this means is that they are made up of many parts that interact in complex ways, and all the parts need to work together. Therefore, any single part has no useful function unless all the other parts are also present. (For a simple non-biological example of this complexity, consider the mousetrap pictured below, for to remove but one of its parts would prevent it from doing that for which it was designed.) This means there is no pathway of functional intermediate stages by which a Darwinian process could build such a system step by tiny step. Up to now, Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated, only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have actually opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know Darwinian theory is just a figment of the imagination and not a viable scientific explanation.
The Irreducibly Complex Mousetrap
The Irreducibly Complex Mousetrap

 

Atheism/Scientism

What’s Reasonable About It?

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Mt. Rushmore Example

Scientists get excited about finding stone tools in a cave because they speak of intelligence—i.e., a tool maker. No one believes such artifacts designed themselves. Neither would anyone believe that the carved heads of the Presidents on Mt. Rushmore are the product of millions of years of chance erosion. We can recognize design—the evidence of the out-workings of intelligence—in the man-made objects all around us. Similarly, as in William Paley’s famous teleological argument, a watch implies a watchmaker (Natural Theology, 1802). However, many leading scientists believe that all plant and animal life, including the incredibly complex brains of the people who make watches, automobiles, et cetera, were not designed by an intelligent Maker, but rather came from an unintelligent blind evolutionary process. Again, I ask you, Is this a reasoned-out, defensible position?

Atheism/Scientism

The Blind Watchmaker Thesis

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The blind watchmaker

When forced to think about the “blind watchmaker thesis,” a thesis that says God is not necessary for biological creation because the impersonal material forces of genetic mutation and natural selection can, and did, produce all the fantastic complexity of living organisms, a reasonable-thinking person will think it preposterous—i.e., nothing more than a complete “bluff,” as some have called it. For natural selection to work, there must be a self-reproducing entity. But even the simplest conceivable entity is incredibly complex and full of information. Additionally, this whole functioning unit would have to come into being all at once before mutations and natural selection can function, and this assuming they can function at all.

It was astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, in a defense of his now defeated steady-state theory, who came up with some devastatingly powerful calculations on the likelihood of a hypothetical minimum self-reproducing cell coming together, given all the necessary ingredients (which, by natural, non-enzymatic processes, is impossible anyway). He hypothesized a cell of only 400 enzymes/proteins, although a real-world bacterium has about 2,000. Hoyle calculated the probability of this hypothetical minimum cell forming by natural processes as 1 in 1040,000. To put this in context, it has been estimated there are about 1080 atomic particles in the universe. If the universe were actually 15 billion years old, as Richard Dawkins, the Oxford Zoologist who popularized this idea in his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, believes, this would calculate to about 1018 seconds. If every second and every atomic particle were an experiment in a soup of ingredients necessary for a cell to form, this would amount to 1098 experiments. This is way short of any chance of getting our assumed “cell.” If we make every microsecond an experiment, this will give us 10104 experiments. This, of course, gets us nowhere, so let’s make every atomic particle in our universe a universe like our own with every atomic particle in all those universes and every microsecond an experiment. We now have 10204 experiments, but this is still a long way short of 1040,000 necessary for a reasonable chance of succeeding. Consequently, the chance of this happening is zero, zip, nada! Nevertheless, my Atheist neighbor dogmatically (dare I say, “religiously”) insists on believing it anyway, and this while criticizing me for my presumed “blind faith.” Go figure!

Doctrine/Hermeneutics/Redemption

A Harmonization Of Romans 3:28 And James 2:24

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Paul Vs. James

Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law (Rom. 3:28).

You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only (Jas. 2:24).

My view—and I call it this only because I am here defending it—is that when everything is said and done, Paul and James are not talking about two different kinds of works at all. Instead, they are speaking of the “good works” (i.e., acceptable works) that are the same for both (cf., Paul’s use of “good works” in Ephesians 2:10). So, the question is: What is the explanation for the different ways Paul and James relate faith and works to justification? I believe this best answer is that faith and works are both related to justification but in different ways. In other words, both Paul and James are referring to the same faith, the same works, the same people, and the same justification. Both are in complete agreement on all of these things, which are somehow, some way, related to each other. The difference is, or so it seems to me, in the way they have chosen, by inspiration, to express themselves, and this stems from how the relationship between these two things is to be understood.

Paul is emphasizing the immediate, direct, inherent relationship between faith and justification, while James is emphasizing the necessary, but indirect, relationship between justification and works. Thus, like James, we can say that justification is by works, but only in a secondary, indirect sense, in that works are the natural, necessary expression and evidence of faith. It is important, just here, to keep in mind that the works (viz., “good works”) under discussion are the works or conditions of law, and not those works done in connection with conditions of grace. Paul’s aim is to deny that justification is equally related to the “law of faith” and the “works of law,” which are two completely different systems, while James’ purpose is to demonstrate that justification is related to the “good works” of the law, but only in that such works are the natural, inevitable expression of genuine saving faith. So, Paul, in his context, does deny a system of justification by faith plus works, and this because “works of law,” (viz., the always imperfect works done under a system of justification by perfect law-keeping) are permanently prevented (the legal term is “estopped”) from having any soteriological value, while James, in his context, does, in fact, affirm justification by a faith that works—and once again these are the “good works” Paul mentioned in Ephesians 2:10.

Therefore, we are not just talking semantics here, as some think. Paul denies that one is justified equally by the “law of faith” and “works of law,” while James affirms that one can be justified only by a faith that works-viz., genuine saving faith begets or produces the “obedience of faith” that serves to glorify God. This “obedience of faith” is not just obedience to the grace conditions which are those “works” we must do in order to be saved and stay that way, but obedience to those “good works” which we were created in Christ Jesus to do—works “of God” that He determined “beforehand” we would do in connection with His Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

This interpretation, I believe, passes the scriptural litmus test. If not, I look forward to its refutation.

27 Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law. 29 Or is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also the God of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, 30 since there is one God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. 31 Do we then make void the law through faith? Certainly not! On the contrary, we establish the law (Rom. 3:27-31).

Doctrine/Salvation

A Critique Of The “Once Saved, Always Saved” (OSAS) Doctrine

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Once saved, always saved

To Calvinists and many Evangelicals, salvation is a one-time event that takes place when one “believes that Jesus is the Christ and accepts Him as his or her personal Savior.” On the contrary, the Bible teaches there are conditions one must meet in order to be saved and stay saved. In what follows, we’ll take a look at what the Bible says about the conditional nature of this continued salvation.

And you, who were once alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works [this is what they once were], yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death [that is, He saved them], to present you holy, and blameless, and irreproachable in His sight [this is talking about something He will do]—if indeed you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and are not moved away from the hope of the gospel which you heard… (Col 1:21-23).

Notice that the “if indeed you continue in the faith….” is a conditional statement that says Jesus will present us holy, blameless, and irreproachable if we continue in the faith. The unavoidable implication is that one may choose not to “continue in the faith” and, as a result, be “moved away from the hope of the gospel.” This would not be due to a lapse in the Lord’s protection, nor would it be the triumph of an enemy power. Instead, this would be due to the free exercise of one’s will. But if the “once saved, always saved” doctrine that Calvinists/Evangelicals advocate is true, then why this warning from Paul? Truth is, continued salvation is conditioned upon our continuing in the faith?

When writing 1 Thessalonians 3:5, Paul wanted to know whether the brethren at Thessalonica were continuing in their journey of faith, or whether Satan had been successful in tempting them to go astray. If so, he believed the labor he expended on them would have been “in vain.” How could this even be possible if a child of God cannot fall from grace?

If the “once saved, always saved” doctrine were really true, then Paul’s concern would have been not just nonsensical, but completely heretical as well. Truth is, OSAS is a doctrine not taught in the Scriptures.