What Does “Sovereign God” Mean?

“Sovereign God” represents our view of who God is.  God is the Sovereign of the Universe.  He is not weak and effeminate.  He does not seek permission from man to execute his will.  He has no obligations to man whatsoever.  No one can say to Him “what doest thou?”  He does as He pleases.  He doesn’t just know the future, but He has in fact decreed the future.  Nothing can happen that He has not determined, from the dropping of one hair from my head, to the Grand Finally of the world.  God can save whom He wishes to save, and damn those He wishes to damn.  Man can not be saved unless God saves him, and if he is saved, he is saved on God’s terms and in God’s time.  Man can not command God’s Spirit to indwell him, and neither can man resist, though he may try, the determined power of God’s Spirit coming in to the heart.  God leaves nothing to chance.  God saves those He loves without any possibility of failure, and those He does not favor, He leaves in sin to their own desires.  Whatever God does is good - because He is God.  God is answerable only to God and none other - neither man, nor angels, nor gods, nor creation, nor philosophy, nor futility can make Him accountable to them.  God is justified in condemning sinners, and infinitely merciful in saving some of them.  But He is not obligated to save one of them.  If God let the entire human race go to Hell, He would be justified.  It is because of man’s wicked pride that he demands his own notion of “fairness” from the Creator of creatures.  Some people have said, “I will not serve a God like that.”  But that is the God you are serving, whether you want to or not.  Man’s effort to make God into a controllable, subservient, subordinate, frustrated, weepy-eyed, genie in a bottle is futile.  God has determined the end from the beginning, and everything in between the end and the beginning is merely the means by which He has predetermined to execute His sovereign will.

The knowledge of God’s Sovereignty should frighten us.  I know that it is not popular today to fear God, but that’s exactly what the Bible tells us to do - FEAR GOD.  We imagine Him to be our homeboy, a dude, our pal, a good-ole-boy that likes us just the way we are.  But nothing could be farther from the truth.  God is Holy.  God is the Almighty.  Jesus is the Lord God Omnipotent.  He demands of us a life of repentance and faith.  Let us fear, lest any of us should seem to come short of it.  We must not live in a high-minded conceit, trusting in some shallow profession of faith; but we must earnestly seek assurance that God has favored us with new birth, shedding the love of God abroad in our hearts, causing us to love Him and His law, His people, His ways, and His word.  Those of us that have been blessed with the assurance of God’s working in us may bask in the sweetness of His love, and we may glorify Him, being the objects of His unmerited favor, having nothing in ourselves by which we may boast.  But for those have no working of God in their souls, tribulation, wrath, and vengeance to every creature that loves not God.  Cry against Him, curse Him, defy Him, all unbelievers - and you will build your indictment and seal your judgement on that terrible day!

Soli Deo Gloria!  To God Be The Glory!

    

Tags: Bible, faith, God, God's Sovereignty, providence, religion, salvation