The Deep Waters of God’s Sovereignty

This Wednesday night we carefully waded into the deep waters of God’s sovereignty. In a statement, God’s sovereignty means that 

God has decreed in himself, from all eternity, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably, all things, whatsoever comes to pass. …(1689 London Baptist Confession)

This is a summary conclusion of the whole Bible’s teaching about God in relation to reality, and as we saw in the Book of Isaiah, the sovereignty of God is a truth intended for our comfort. Even when we don’t like our circumstances, even when the pain of our suffering feels unbearable, the fact of God’s sovereignty assures us that we are not victims of a haphazard universe spinning out of control. But as Question 27 of The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) puts it, 

all things, in fact, come to us not by chance, but by God’s fatherly hand.

It is better that we see God’s fatherly hand behind our pain than to imagine a God powerless to stop bad things from happening. The latter imagination might appeal to our modern sensibilities about how God should be, but it’s a far cry from what the Bible actually says. 

Isaiah 45:6–7,

… I am Yahweh, and there is no other.
I form light and create darkness;
I make well-being and create calamity;
I am Yahweh, who does all these things.

The Meaning of Unconditional 

In two weeks at our last Wednesday Gathering of the year, we’ll talk more about God’s sovereignty in relation to our salvation, but for now, I want to highlight one important point that will come up again. 

Notice that in the London Confession the motive of God’s decree is said to be “by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably.” In other words, God’s decree is independent of anything outside himself. To make the truth crystal clear, our theological forbears double down in Chapter 3, Paragraph 2:

Although God knoweth whatsoever may or can come to pass, upon all supposed conditions, yet hath he not decreed anything, because he foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.

In other words, God didn’t make his decree based upon his foreknowledge. He did not look into the future, seeing all the possibilities of what could be, and then he made his decree based on those conditions. That would mean that God’s decree relied upon something outside himself — and therefore his decree would be conditional. This is the classic Arminian view. 

This view does not deny God’s decree (or election, as we’ll see in a couple of weeks), but it claims that God’s decree is dependent — that he is not making his decree based upon his own most wise and holy counsel, but based upon what creatures will do. The Open Theist view goes even a step further and says that God cannot even make decrees based upon foreknowledge because there’s no such thing. They claim God can’t know a thing until it happens. Both errors, Arminianism and Open Theism, limit God and elevate man, and we believe the teaching of Holy Scripture repudiates them.  

These are deep waters, but the implications are wonderful, and I’m eager to explore a five practical takeaways on November 29. I hope you’ll join us.