Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching the clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: I'm going to be reading here in a few moments from Isaiah chapter 44. We saved this particular attribute—this is our last message in the "What is God Like" series that we've been doing. We've saved this last attribute of God, which I'll tell you right off the gate is the sovereignty of God. For me, I'm just going to be candid with you—and you'll see this is going to be a very candid message—when I got back to the pulpit after my sabbatical a little over a year ago, I told you that I was going to preach the Gospel and I meant that. I wasn't going to bring myself into it unless myself had something to do with it. In other words, I wasn't going to preach from my pain.

When I first came back after losing Hannah Grace, I preached on heaven because—and I told you that I was very honest—I'm preaching about this because it ministers to me. I hope it ministers to you too, and I know it did because we talked about heaven a lot. Then when I came back, I said I have my own journey of pain, as some of you have too, but I'm not going to let that pain bleed into the pulpit entirely unless I believe it has significance for all of us. In other words, I can't separate my own journey from my pulpit ministry entirely. I think that would be dishonest and not transparent.

I thank you for being with me and understanding that. We're going to get a little raw this morning because this is a difficult subject to process and to go through. It's not just for me; it's for many folks here in the first service also. If we try to tackle the sovereignty of God without understanding all the other attributes that go into the sovereignty of God, then the sovereignty of God is going to make God unfair, mean, and will redefine Him. We're going to bring that point up numerous times throughout this message.

In that smoothie, as an illustration, all the different stuff in there represents all the attributes. When you blend them all together, now you're ready to begin to comprehend to some degree—as limited or as extensive as that could be—the sovereignty of God. There is probably no more hotly debated attribute than this one. It comes from many different angles. Believe me, the little bit I'm going to say this morning won't barely even scratch the surface of all the things that we would need to discuss. I'm going to really be talking about one aspect of God's sovereignty.

Let me define it for you by A.W. Tozer. He said, "God's sovereignty is the attribute by which He rules His entire creation, and to be sovereign, God must be all-knowing, all-powerful, and absolutely free." Absolutely free. Remember that; we'll see that in a little bit. Because if God lacked a bit of knowledge, if He lacked a thimbleful of power, His sovereign reign would cease and it never could have got started. If He lacked any type of selfless love, everything else would have crumbled. If He lacked the fact of not knowing the future—not knowing the end from the beginning—the whole house of cards would have come down, or I should say each domino would have been tipped over.

He is absolutely all-knowing. He is absolutely holy. He is absolutely just. He is absolutely love. He is absolutely merciful. He's absolutely all these attributes, and He's absolutely sovereign. Supreme in power, Webster defines it. Possessing supreme dominion as a sovereign ruler of the universe, supreme and superior to all others, chief. God is the sovereign good of all who love and obey Him. A supreme Lord or ruler, one who possesses the highest authority without control. No one controls Him. Let the scriptures define Him now.

This is what the Lord says, Israel's King and Redeemer, the Lord of Heaven's Armies: "I am the first and the last; there is no other God. Who is like Me? Let him step forward and prove to you his power. Let him do as I have done since ancient times, when I established a people and explained its future." Going over to the New Testament, Paul describes the sovereignty of God to Timothy, which he will display at the proper time. He who is blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.

When you talk about the sovereignty of God, you're going to probably enter in—especially the theologian-type guys—you're going to probably have an argument, depending on who's hanging around you. You're going to find one of two extremes and a bunch of stuff in between. You're going to find extreme Calvinism or extreme Arminianism. I won't get into that. This is just a bullet point to understand the ramifications. Extreme Calvinism would be described—and maybe you're an extreme Calvinist, I'm not here to argue with you. There are bigger questions than that we'll talk about today. My words: we're all sort of cosmic puppets. God's the puppeteer. He does what He wants. Thus, my freedom of choice is ambiguous, maybe, or my freedom of choice is really an illusion.

You disagree with that, but I'm just trying to bring out the extremes of both positions. I come somewhere in the middle. Extreme Arminianism, which many would feel John Calvin never taught what I just said and neither did Arminius ever teach to this either: God is held captive by our free will. Thus, He really doesn't know the future. There's a movement out there called Open Theism that is very prevalent in many circles and not very well thought out. Different people, John Piper and others, have actually written rebuttals to this thought that basically says that God doesn't know the future because it hasn't happened yet and the future is controlled by our free volition.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Though we can grasp a working concept of this truth, it's impossible to fully understand it because of its eternal nature. So when I leave you today, you won't have all the answers because I don't have all the answers. But I hope I help you think right because that's my journey—thinking right. First point I want to bring up—it's actually the second in my notes: God is absolutely and totally free. Now, that sounds sort of common-sensey, but you'll see that that's a very important principle to understand. No one or nothing can compel Him or stop Him. We are free in a sense. We're free in America, but are we free? No.

I can't go 150 miles an hour down US 19. I'm not free to do that. A stoplight will stop me, and if the stoplight doesn't stop me, a truck will stop me. If the truck doesn't stop me, first a policeman will stop me. But something's going to stop me because I'm not really totally free. Now, I can drive down US 19 unhindered, but there are certain laws. I can take a little bird. You know that song with the line from the '70s? "Born free as the wind blows." Remember that? The little lion. If I take a little sparrow and I take a little sparrow out to this field—I have it in a cage—and I set the little sparrow free. There you go! And the bird flies away.

A hawk comes and gets it. Hors d'oeuvre. Was the sparrow free? No. In fact, if you let that little sparrow go, you'll find it probably doesn't travel more than two or three blocks from here. I had these parrots living in my neighborhood since I've been there. They never move. I ask them to move; they never move. They just hawk and squawk all the time. So there's really no freedom. It's only God who possesses universal authority. Only His power is unlimited. He does not ask permission for anything, for there is no higher. So God is free because He's only truly the sovereign one that we have defined Him.

Now we get to the tough stuff, in a sense. In apologetics—and that's the defense of the faith—there are numerous arguments you have. You have the cosmological argument. In a nutshell, you say if there is something, then there must have been a creator. You can take that down. I believe it came from a speck of dust. Then I ask you the question: where did the speck of dust come from? Ultimately, you can take that little speck down to the lowest molecule you can, but to have something, it had to come from somewhere. There's a First Cause. Logic screams that nothing happened by chance because something had to start the something that happened by chance.

So when you argue that point—and this is a long argument that the big smart people use all the time—you come to the conclusion: yes, there has to be a God. There has to be a higher being, logically speaking. Then you have another type of argument called the teleological argument or intelligent design. This argument simply says that okay, now we understand that a God-being, a higher being created this something that started the human race. But now we've got to look at the human race and we've got to look at the universe. How the planets are balanced in the solar system, how they spin on the axis, the ecosystem of the world.

The intricacies of a human body, an animal body, and how we work from our DNA, which is so incredibly complex. It hardly could be taken by a roll of the dice and randomness. So when we look at the cosmological argument, yes, there is a God. Now we look in intelligent design, teleologically, and that God's personal. If God wasn't personal, we'd just be little blobs of blobs. We wouldn't have this intricacy. This intricacy was designed. We were designed. This world, this universe was designed. It didn't happen by accident. So we know that there is a God and we know that He's personal. Now, okay, who's the God?

So we get to the next level of arguments and we start talking about the authenticity of the scriptures—our New Testament and Old Testament scriptures—how accurate they are. They are the most reliable documents by far of that whole time era. We look at the claims of Christ. Who did Jesus claim to be? God. What did He claim to do? Die on a cross, rise again, and pay for the sins of mankind. Do we have anything logically to tell us that didn't happen? No. Everything we have points to that's exactly what happened. This man Jesus died on a cross, and this man Jesus wasn't in the grave three days later. It's not that debatable if you're going to be honest with yourself.

Okay. So we have a God. He created everything. He made us really unique and special. He says that He's love. He says that He's for us and that He's merciful and that He's kind and that we're His unique creation. Then why is there evil in the world? Why do bad things happen? Or maybe you want to put yourself in this equation. Maybe say, "Why did this bad thing happen to me? If God is all what you just said He was, if He is in control, the sovereign ruler of the universe—there is none higher than Him, He answers to nobody, He's absolutely free—and He says He's love?" Well, if this is love, I don't want anything to do with it because I don't feel that loved by this sovereign ruler of the universe. I'm not saying this from a first person; I'm saying this is what happens inside men and women as we wrestle with these things.