REJOICING IN THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE INIMITABLE GOD

W W W W World Wide Web Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for Volume What is New

CHAPTER I

I delight in the sovereignty of God, that He knows where we don't, that in Him all knowledge is perfected, its nature, tenor, detail, meaning, perspective, background, foreground, what is underground, above ground, its entirety, and this in overwhelming truth, validity and coverage so that it sings.

It is a grace of graces that He rules, disposes, resolves all issues and you see in Daniel, unties all knots because of His perfect sight and understanding, and does so in a personal manner because He is a personal Being, source of all that IS personal, ever in Himself being 3 persons as One Being, infinitely intimate, of one nature, gloriously sociable, ultimately wise.

I delight in His appointments, that He has, and states as a perfectly honourable Being, One not subject to the erosions of our kind of time which is merely something He made for our system (Romans 8:37-39), to the alterations of decay or to any other imposition or condition: unbreachable, He dwells in light unapproachable except in this, that He has declared Himself (I John 1:18, I Cor. 2:9-13) and so may be known. He rules as He will, without breaking His own rules, for they are His.

I delight in the sovereignty with which He so acts, and that He is intensely honourable and does just as He says (Titus 1:2, Psalm 138:2), and that He wants us to be obedient (Acts 5:32), and gives as Peter said, the Holy Spirit to those who obey Him. Instead of being an unfeeling or despotic bureaucrat or autocrat, for Him mercy and truth goes before His face, and righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne (Psalm 89). That is why mankind all but always WANTS righteousness and justice (concerning himself), whatever he himself might choose to deal out, and however evil it may be! It is ingrained, it is self-attesting, it is undistorted, it is plain.

I delight that sovereignly He has told us that it is the Father's good pleasure, having made peace through the blood of the cross, to reconcile all things, by this His slain Son, One bodily resurrected, His mission protected but not from pain: the Lord Jesus Christ (Colossians 1:19ff.). It is to so reconcile all things, even all to Himself. This, which pleased Him, as a work following on from the cross of the redeeming Christ, is not only for what is on this earth, but we are told, is to the very heavens it goes in the scope of His desire, none excluded, flinging its wonder to things past (Ephesians 1:4), present and to come till judgment. He has thus sovereignly appointed the Gospel by which this has been done, the impact known before all, as the results from His sovereign power and wisdom. Heaven therefore will have no false intruders, nor hell any needless occupants, since He whose sovereignty is, and from whom it gets its name, has so spoken of what pleases Him and of what He does not desire.

Through His grace, this is precisely what I desire and rejoice in the amplitude of His statements, including his, that God is love, as well as truth (John 14:6, I John 4:7ff.). Since in ordination I have been charged to seek the purity of the Church, and so desire, this I do, as a duty and as a privilege.

I find Him altogether a delightful Being and praise Him for being Who He is.

Sovereignly He determines all things, knows who are His (II Timothy 2:19), and there is no effectual contest in this, but for man He has contested sin and dying with it, aborted it, bearing death, dismissed that as penalty; and what stands in His way, He can snap like a twig, in the result, whatever the cost on the way, for His heart is purity itself and His power knowing no limits, He has only what He has set up with wisdom from the first, to cover to the last: He is alpha and omega, the beginning and the end of all creation. If you want to think of anything, He is there first.

It is exquisite that He has shown us His principles^*1by His Spirit through His written word, the Bible, even the deep things of God with words governed by His Spirit, so that heaven will not mean repudiation of anything He has said, but consummation (I Corinthians 13, Psalm 119:144,152,160,89).

I rejoice that so vast is His love that it moved Him, having incarnated His Son, so that death to cover sin for any who believe^*2and receive Him, passes from final imposition, into giving glorious eternal life: this from His mission to save and not to judge the world, in a context of God, man, world, heaven and hell; as likewise, that He is so individual and gentle and helpful, that He has made it so simple and clear and indefeasible in so many places with such profound emotion linked to equally profound action.

How God resolves actions, disciplines, performs wonders, such as in His investigations and researches in the hearts of mankind, manifesting their sin and Himself, in the soul, is not the subject of petty thought, as if the form of God were furnished with voyeur seats for all, but rather His words, His principles, His procedures, His promises, these are purer than first dawn dew, and more reliable than the mantle of the entire earth. His actions and interventions in persons and nations, as with Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4) and Sennacherib (Isaiah 37ff., Jeremiah 29:17ff.) depend entirely on Him (Deuteronomy 29:29), who in superabundant grace has spelled out even the deep things concerning Himself as known and shown by His Spirit (I Corinthians 2:9ff., Colossians 1:19ff., with 1:26ff.). Free in His actions, He is just in His ways, which are everlasting (Habakkuk 3:6),

He keeps His own word, freely given, adheres to His own stated principles and allows no man to amend or extend them, for they are as is sure as He is (Revelation 22). Impositions of creeds and confessions, ideas and philosophies on His word, as if these could stand with it, which stands alone, is a confessionalitis of great danger to man; but traditions must be traded out and His word, the truth, traded in which is one more reason why it is so great a grace to keep us free from such overlords, as is made clear so excellently in the Westminster Confession, itself often abused by being deployed in other ways, forbidden in its own text (Ch. 20 and 31:4). Such things can help; but they are mere aids to the word, not substitutes for it or mandatory over it.

His word He has selected to give, and deposited with man. The selection of the saints may neither be made to depend on man's will (cf. John 1;12) as if it authored itself, nor to deny its relevance as if God did not consider man at all, but merely drafted him. Its relevance is as before God in His sovereign grace, love, compassion and universal desire as in Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2 and Ezekiel 33, John 3; and historically His will and way is seen in ever so many lamentations, exhortations, extenuations and invitations (as in Jeremiah 17, where after so much for so long on so much from the so longsuffering sovereign God, there is yet one more very simple action sought, that He might pardon!). Man himself is relevant in the occasion of God's selection of His own before time was or the world existed, sin arose or salvation was called for on this earth, itself an absentee (Ephesians 1:4, Romans 8:30ff.).

Foreknowing His own^*3, in terms of His universal principles, particular probes and discerning knowledge, and leaving where love could in integrity go no further (Isaiah 57:15ff.), He has fulfilled to the uttermost the cost and the quietus from love, when its insurgency is complete; and being Himself love, He is satisfied, grief borne in integrity (Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff., Colossians 1:19ff., I John 4:7ff., Lamentations 3:33, II Timothy 1).

The human will before sin is not meritorious, merely freely operative, but this as before God for it is as yet not even created: but He knows, as He knows all, and foreknows. Nor is the will merely a matter of relevance to God, which He cites (John 3:19ff., Matthew 23:37ff.), but human works are irrelevant as meritorious or conditional for the branding of any soul as His own. They are excluded (Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2); and indeed, as Paul points out, if this were not so, then any man could boast; but this is not so, for the cost and quality of salvation is divine in genesis, exodus and fulfilment, and human efforts are in this field, too trivial by comparison to be more than microscopic, and at that, irrelevant to the issue. HIS selection is logically antecedent to any works of man, but not to man himself, who is the object of enquiry and the resource to be assigned.

HERE the principles of His good pleasure are a jewel beyond all jewellery, and a wonder surpassing. Neither as foreknown nor in history are any works of man relevant or concerned, for not only are they forbidden for this function repeatedly, but would merely quash liberty, as if a thing of type X made it, and so fulfilled the way it was made in the first place. It is the will underlying, the spirit of man before time and the fall, it is the reality before love which matters; and this ONLY GOD knows. When the soul, revived, revitalised, regeneration awakes to spirituality then it knows too, and the Spirit attests with the spirit of man that he or she is a child of God (Romans 8:16, Ephesians 1:11).

It is God who knows, who shows, who goes, who rescues, who redeems; but His principles stand. BOTH of these are His sovereign will, to seek and not force, in love, and reject in truth is need be; and having willed to make man He has willed so to extend a universal love to him, and with such sincerity, that albeit foreknowing many who rebel in the ultimate, He yet sees them in that light, only for them then to lapse as a thing hateful (John 3:16-18,18,36), and as such to be characterisable (Romans 9:13).

It is just like a lung-cancer case where the surgeon sees the need, the condition, the cure, and offers it freely; but the patient (foreknown in this case), refusing it, becomes a veritable malady of sickness, aggravated by a deathly wilfulness. Thus God knows all and states sovereignly how He selects and His principles that He WOULD have all and it pleases Him to reconcile all to Himself, but that where His own power shows no place, He does not manufacture it, as if to rule as a tyrant. Reconciliation is indeed something achieved by God and wrought in the heart of man; but it is not done so that it has no relationship to that heart in the eyes of Him who saves. WE must look to Him, and be saved. HE enables His own to come, and these, sovereignly He knows, in a sovereign love which neither short-circuits its stated amplitude, nor its integrity for the sake of gain. What a sovereign is this!

It is not in mystery that His love dwells, but in the light. In the Messiah accordingly, was life, and the life was the light of men. He IS the light of the world, and His compassionate call to all is as decisive as His deadly repudiation of what messes with His mercy, adds foolish philosophy to His words or presumes on His mercy, to manipulate or modify it. HE is sovereign, as is neither theology, nor philosophy nor church; for the church that abides, simply obeys (cf. Acts 5:30), and the one that is dictatorial, let alone wrong as so often, is merely a mess of polluted pottage, rather like the Diotrephes of III John. It is God who will act on His own principles, and whether it be a Peter (Matthew 16:22-23), or a Paul (II Corinthians 12:7ff.), He chides or chastens, as the case may be, extending power to faithfulness, correction to error, precaution to danger.

This sovereign God, then, STATES His own willingness, what He WOULD have concerning all (Colossians 1:19), the extent of the thrust of His own love, how far it reaches into the environment of man and this world; and this contrasts with man's unwillingness to the point, as a thing He considers, foreknows in essence, He who penetrates all to the heart and the uttermost. Thus where despite all, ultimate rejection in the spirit of man is yet found, in essence foreknown, then this is stated, in the face of His love, leaving love's converse in judgment, this being both the including and the concluding principle. It is subjected to no dubiety, just as is the conquest of grace on the other side; and so He rules in the truth (John 5:24, 3:19,36).

To say that it is not so, is to be wiser than God, or to know Him better than He knows Himself, or His will, inferentially. Such becomes a hideous failure indeed, which in turn leads readily to the quasi-hideous decree invented by Calvin, in unwitting calumny. THIS is the sense in which the Gospel needs no protection: INVENTION to support it. Perfect as it is because of Him whose it is, it rebuts misconception which travails with it, however well-intentioned this may be.

What it is, is what is to be confirmed and established, as Paul proceeded to do so much and so often (Philippians 1:7): indeed, for this he was SET! as he states. THAT is not to interfere with the sovereignty of God, but to establish it... If pressed, errors such as that of Calvin (and his error is one of many which many have made, who nevertheless often normally performed exceedingly well, it seems, their line dipping in dabbling at some point), can make for schism, a disorder in need of correction for the sake of the peace and soundness of the Church. The original constitution of the PC of Australia, as noted in Possess Your Possessions Volume 10, Ch. 6, *10, did an excellent job of moderation in this matter, since polluted.

Each minister at ordination is properly required to seek the purity of the Church as a duty, as a faithful ambassador, and so far from contention, this is obedience whereas those who seek to block it, defy and defile what God has ordained. It is so much the more grave, when an existing grace is cancelled; for then it is not as if a long process of reaching understanding is in view, but a short despatch of the beautiful thing that was provided is made. If we must exhort one another, then this is for an exhortation.

I rejoice that many who are last and the least will be first, the more since the ostensible is not God, but He who humility and reality knows; and indeed it is the more ardent in this, that from Israel (as in Jeremiah 20, II Chronicles 18:23ff.) to Christ (Matthew 23), many elevated their monstrous evasions and morbid ministries in power to rule, or seeking it, teaching for commandments the doctrines of men, by their traditions (Mark 7:7ff.). God is not inert at this, though His longsuffering seems to induce such a feeling in some, to judge by their (in)actions.

Through His grace and by His merit, I am at rest in Him, His love, His will, His word, His sovereignty, His compassions which fail not, His power, His principles, and in His word which He exalts above all His name, being the truth (Psalm 138:2); for a lie being incapable of proceeding from His mouth (cf. TItus 1 and Barbs .. 6-7); just I rest in His promise of eternal life, ex-works, ex-merits, actual or inferential, ex-meritoriousness, since this but confirms it. HIS being the only relevant merit, it neither wavers nor wanders nor ever fails, and so in His faithfulness He sovereignly keeps what in faith is committed to Him against that day of judgment (II Timothy 1:12).

It is in that sense that mercy can smile in its face (James 2:13), that it rejoices over judgment. Thus am I also at rest because of His power to prevail with His own grace and principles, in His gift of eternal life so that none receiving it can perish (John 10:9,27-28) or be snatched away. Indeed, nothing is able to abort them, for however long men superficially love to taunt, it matters little: for not only is He the alpha but the omega, but the whole course of all flesh is perfectly plotted by Him. It is well that man should rest in Him whose gift of eternal life is both secure, wholly gratuitous and postage paid, in the cross, His bodily resurrection the attestation, as declared by the Spirit of holiness (Romans 1:4), the result already paid on application through faith (Galatians 1, 3, 5), just as foreknown. Praise God for His rest (Matthew 11:27ff.).

What greater or more delightful God could you possibly wish to have, and the fact that He IS God, this is the final and most absolute path of perfection. Who would not rejoice for ever to have eternal lie with HIM (cf. I John 1, 5).

NOTES

How God precisely applies His principles before our time (which are the truth - John 17:17) is entirely His own business. THAT He applies them is ours; for He has told us and we are to receive it (John 17:1-10), unless presumption pillories faith, and makes it merely factitious, even a fraud from the first.

In our Christian Apologetics construction, the entire harmony of these principles of God's declaration is shown, in the context of God as self-revealed in the Bible; and this is an instrument for thankfulness and gratitude to God for His truth. Indeed, it enables one to use a presentation to demonstrate both the harmony and the coverage; for what IS done MUST be possible. Thus, a construction, based on biblical principles has been provided for example in Predestination and Freewill, my Melbourne University M.A. thesis, which being about 3 times too long for a normal M.A., was not permitted to grow further. However, in it a model is made true to the divine principles shown, and this in itxself by no means a doctrinal deposition, but an image or procedure true to what is provided. Its purpose was pragmatic, but principled also.

It was to place together all the elements in a coherent, harmonious and fruitful way so that this being POSSIBLE, therefore there was no residual problem. Biblical principles revealed by God are not only in entire harmony with themselves, as shown in this way, but likewise in principle, and their coverage is profound and insatiable. From these, all things stand resolved in this area and arena of thought, on such a basis. The needful parts as provided from the Lord in His word, are indeed not such as thought can make, since they involve His own omnipotence, omniscience, nature as revealed in the Bible, and direct statements. ONLY when these are all taken into account is this nutty problem of philosophy solved; and when these are so taken, there is nothing left out that is not covered.

Now in point of detail, HOW God in the form of God operates and how His knowledge works: this in not our business. We show that in terms as revealed all these things are perfectly covered. As to these principles and perspectives from the Bible, that there is no other possible approach to His realm of predestination and freewill, determinism, responsibility, creativity that covers all aspects, than that stated in biblical principles, has been repeatedly shown in this work (e.g. Possess Your Possessions, Volume 10, Ch. 5, as marked especially, cf. Predestination Heptad). Failure to occupy this excellent site of testimony to the glory of God as provided in the Bible, and to receive the encouragement to man which it supplies, is a serious defalcation, relative to the faith.

That it is there to be taken, a gift from God, this is one more testimony to His sovereign majesty, as covering all things: the mystery of His glory so deeply revealed, not in disharmonies or inexplicable obfuscations, nor in philosophies indulging in ludicrous reductionisms, is to be found revealed substantially, in what was a continually expanding wonder, till the Lord came and completed His formal revelatory work. From this, His biblical revelation, that He only can so speak, comes as in all things, the grounding and the founding, the perspective and the operative harmony that only God in His glory can provide. Praise God that He DOES provide it. We can apply it. TEST all things, says Paul in I Thessalonians 5. WHO ELSE can so reveal things, including things to come, says the Lord in Isaiah 41, 43, 48! It is not only in time, but in theme that this applies. It is not only in information and explication, but in salvation that this is so (Isaiah 43:10-11), the one attesting amid a whole symphony of grounds (cf. Light Dwells in the Lord's Christ, Who Answers Riddles and where He is, Darkness Departs).

This is thus one more way of possessing your possessions.

John 9:39 has interest here. A consequential judgment applies when the invitation of God is knowingly rejected (John 9:40, 15:21); and this is an area of outcome from the unlimited divine offer, the celestial desire to act without judgment, the unrestricted Gospel from the heart, anointing the earth with no equivocation or limitation, in its cordial, convivial and cardinal offer. This is where the ardent scope of the plan, the relevance of man in the image of God, divine foreknowledge overcoming the contemporary human pathology, and genuine disapprobation of depth in many among mankind, all meet in a calamitous resistant, result.

Here, then, 100% is the responsibility of man in the light of the 100% encompassing, universal love of God for all in the planet. Here is where love is very patient, and not mere force. When, however, this ultimate human preference is known, as seen in such cases in history, where it is found, alas love as so often in the affairs of men (in God's image), yearns (Isaiah 48, Jeremiah 13, Luke19), but does not grab, whether directly or indirectly, in time or in eternity.

The fact that God has foreknown does not circumvent but rather establishes the liberty thence responsibility of man, as so foreknown. Predestination simply secures it against error. The love of Christ as an ingredient in such foreknowledge ensures that none is ever excluded except where the integrity of love has first been deployed and satisfied (John 9, 15). It is not wrong to enter the stated principles from the mind of God to work out results of those divine principles, or to compare them with other divinely stated principles (as given by Paul as example in I Corinthians 2:13, he being with those who do such comparing cf. II Corinthians 11:1). The complete accord is a massive confirmation of the integrity of the Bible, already shown on other grounds. This, a matter of normative divine revelation, sits as a wonder, and should be recognised with distinctive joy from His grace.