Proverbs 16:1-6 - The Sovereign God of Proverbs

Introduction

“What kind of government is this?” That was the frustrated cry of a woman in China trying to find information on her grandfather who had just died in the coronavirus outbreak. Her story was told in a New York Times article last week. As soon as her grandfather Zang passed away, she says, “they took him away like a dead pig, or a dead dog”, giving her and her family no time to plan a funeral, or even tell them where his ashes were. She said, “The news is always talking about how good everything is, but they don’t even care about the ordinary people. ” The totalitarian Communist government tried to hide from the world its inability to contain or control the spread of the virus, and continues to downplay the pandemic within its borders because dictatorships cannot ever admit they are not in total control. But their utter failure to control this growing plague led that woman (and many others) to ask, “What kind of government is this?”

As much as we here in the US might be tempted to ask the same question (albeit for different reasons), there are a lot of people who want to ask that question about God’s government of the world: “What kind of government is this?” They read verses like these in Proverbs that seem to indicate that God is some kind of cosmic totalitarian—that you can plan whatever in your heart, but it doesn’t really matter because God is in control and not you! As C.S. Lewis once put it, why bother to wash your hands? If God intends them to be clean, they’ll come clean without your washing them!

And the questions keep coming the further you read—in verse 4 we read that it is the LORD who has “made the wicked for their purpose”? If God is in complete control of everything the way these verses say, does that mean that He is responsible for the evil in the world? Why do terrible things happen to innocent people, why do wicked and violent people get away with so much? If God is good, and He really is in control, then why do little girls have to lay in hospital beds fighting cancer? What kind of government is this?

These aren’t just academic questions that theologians and philosophers can bat around in their scholarly journals—we need answers here on the ground! If God is in complete control of everything, then do my choices even matter? If God is in complete control, then why does evil still exist? These questions are some of the most profoundly mysterious—yet profoundly important—questions in all of Biblical faith.

The theological term that we use to describe God’s complete control over everything is the sovereignty of God. When we say

God is sovereign: There are no limits to His rule

This is what we find in verses like Daniel 4:35

Daniel 4:35 ESV

all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?”

Not only are there no limits to His rule, but

There is nothing that God does not rule

At the end of our chapter today, Solomon says

Proverbs 16:33 ESV

The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.

Even things that we consider random or unpredictable are not random or unpredictable to God. Whether it is the orbit of our Solar System through the Milky Way galaxy or the path of a dust mote in the sunlight or the orbit of a subatomic particle in an atom, God completely and utterly controls every single thing that comes to pass, and there is nothing that He does not completely and utterly control.

There is so much that can (and must) be said about the sovereign rule of God in the world—there are so many questions, so many mysteries, so much that is so far beyond what we can fathom. So we have to be careful when we talk about this subject—it is far too easy to "weaponize” this doctrine, to make it into a wedge to divide Christians or use it as an excuse to ignore evil or abandon the command to make disciples.

So what I aim to do this morning is just take the tiniest corner of the fabric of God’s sovereignty—just one or two tiny threads of this doctrine—and show you from these verses that, far from feeling as though we live under a cosmic dictatorship,

God’s sovereign rule over all things is the basis of our greatest comfort in this world and the next.

I want us to examine this doctrine in such a way that it will increase our “praise, reverence and admiration of God”, and give us humility before Him as we work hard for the sake of the Gospel.

Our text this morning gives us at least three reasons why we can be comforted by the sovereign rule of God. First, in verses 1-3, we are told that God’s sovereignty means that

I. He brings His plans to pass by means of our decisions (vv. 1-3)

Look with me at verse 1:

Proverbs 16:1 ESV

The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord.

This is the answer to our question, “If God utterly decrees everything that comes to pass, do our decisions even mean anything?” Verse 1 says it as plainly as possible: The plans of the heart do belong to man!” You really do have the ability to make a free, uncoerced, meaningful decision—because

God decrees what we freely choose (v. 1a)

What the Scriptures teach us here is that the only reason you can make a meaningful decision is because God is in complete control of the universe! If He were not utterly in control of every detail, you would not be able to make a decision, because you wouldn’t exist! So you really can make valid, meaningful plans of what you are going to do in a given day because God has sovereignly decreed that you can decide whatever you want!

But at the same time, the sovereignty of God means that any decision you make is not only free, but

Our free choices are completely consistent with His will (v. 1b)

You make free, uncoerced, genuine choices, but every choice you make comes from His will—“The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the LORD”. We have real responsibility, and God has real sovereignty—both at the same time.

Again— trying to fathom the depths of the mystery of God’s sovereignty with our limited, fallen minds is like trying to paddle across the Pacific Ocean with a couple of Dollar General pool noodles under our armpits. But let me try to give you an illustration that might get us just a glimmer of how our free choices and God’s sovereignty can both be true at the same time. How many of you are familiar with the plot of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet? “To be, or not to be...” So if you’re familiar with the play, answer this question: Why did Hamlet kill King Claudius? (He was seeking revenge for Claudius killing his father). Was Hamlet free within that story to decide to kill Claudius? Sure—Hamlet was able to lay his plot against Claudius, stage the play, fake his madness, kill Polonius—he was free within that story to do whatever he wanted.

But there is another way to ask that question, “Why did Hamlet kill Claudius?” Because Shakespeare wrote the story that way. All of Hamlet’s actions in the play were freely chosen, but they were decreed by William Shakespeare as he wrote the play. On the one hand, Hamlet did whatever he wanted in the play; on the other hand, he did exactly what William Shakespeare had decided beforehand that he would do. “The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the LORD”.

God decrees that we can make free choices that are always completely consistent with His will. And verse 3 says that

He establishes all our decisions for His purposes (v. 3)

Proverbs 16:3 ESV

Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established.

When we submit to Him, He establishes our plans—He brings to pass what we freely choose to do. And the Scriptures show us that the reason He establishes our plans when we submit to Him is because He uses our decisions to accomplish His will!

The most striking example of this is found in the story of Esther. You’ll remember that Esther was taken as queen into the court of King Ahasuerus, who was about to authorize the mass murder of her people, the Jews. Her cousin Mordecai urges her to go and speak to the king, and reveal to him that she herself was a Jew, and that he needed to stop the massacre from happening. She was afraid to go before him, because anyone who went into his presence without being summoned was threatened with the death-penalty. So she had a choice to make—a real choice—she could not go and tell the king who she was, or she could risk death and go before him. In Esther 4:14, Mordecai puts it before her like this:

Esther 4:14 ESV

For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”

In other words, God had sovereignly placed her there in the court of Xerxes for the specific purpose of accomplishing His will to save the Jews! Her free and uncoerced decision to go before the king and plead for her people was decreed by the sovereignty of God as He wrote the story of the deliverance of the Jews from the hand of Haman! God’s sovereign rule over all things is your greatest comfort in this life and the next, because He brings His plans to pass by means of your decisions—you can trust Him that your life matters in this world!

He brings His plans to pass by means of our decisions, and

II. He brings His righteousness to pass by means of our wickedness (vv. 4-5)

Look at verses 4-5:

Proverbs 16:4–5 ESV

The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble. Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord; be assured, he will not go unpunished.

The first thing we have to understand here is that

God is in control over the wicked

Verse 5 makes it clear—no one who is wicked and arrogant will escape the judgment of God. They may scoff at the notion of eternal punishment, they may shrug off the warnings that their sin is piling up condemnation that will be poured out on them on the Last Day, they may flatter themselves with the notion that they will get away with all of their mischief, but God sovereignly reigns over them! And He will not fail to bring on them all of the punishment they deserve—if not in this life, then surely in the next!

But there is another truth about God’s control over the wicked here—look again at the end of verse 4. It says that He has made the wicked for the day of trouble”—this does not mean that God made wickedness—God is not the author of evil. But those wicked creatures who hate Him and pursue all their evil are His creatures nonetheless, and they are utterly under His control! There is no wickedness they can perform that can do any violence to His purposes—in fact, He uses their very wickedness to accomplish His purposes!

We see this clearly in the story of Joseph in Genesis—his brothers hated him and wanted to kill him. They settled for selling him into slavery in Egypt, which turned out to be the very thing that ended up saving them, when they fled to Egypt during a famine and found Joseph occupying high government office in Pharaoh’s court! Joseph tells his brothers in Genesis 50:20

Genesis 50:20 ESV

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.

God’s sovereignty means that the wicked cannot thwart His purposes with their evil—He uses their evil to accomplish His purposes!

Not only is He in control over the wicked, verse 4 of our text tells us that

God is in control over disaster

—He reigns over the wicked, and He reigns over the day of trouble that they find themselves in! The Scripture tells us this clearly, in Isaiah 45:6-7

Isaiah 45:6–7 ESV

that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.

God’s sovereignty extends even over the calamities and disasters of this world—earthquakes, tsunamis, blizzards. All of those “days of trouble” are under His direct control. Not only that, but He is in direct control over the brokenness and hardships of our lives in this fallen world: In Exodus 4 God said to Moses,

Exodus 4:11 ESV

Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?

God rules over disability, disease, tumors and plagues. (The Communist government in China may try to pretend that it has power over the coronavirus outbreak, but it is God alone who sets the times and boundaries for that disease.) God’s sovereignty means that He utterly and completely controls all of the calamities, disasters, diseases, sufferings and tragedies of our lives.

Some people want to reject the notion that God is sovereign over these because they want to get him “off the hook”. That you can’t blame God for suffering, that He has nothing to do with bad things that happen, that He is as taken by surprise at disaster as you and me. That He feels bad for us when calamity strikes, but says, in effect, “Hey—don’t look at Me! I had nothing to do with that!”

Can’t you see how awful that would be? If God really had no hand in any of the suffering or evil that comes into your life, then that means there is no meaning to it! It is random suffering, meaningless suffering. God is nothing more than a cosmic cheerleader, shouting at you from the sidelines, “Good luck out there! Hope you figure it out!” Look at the suffering you’re going through and tell me that’s really what you want to hear from God when tragedy strikes?

Beloved, your greatest hope in this broken world is that God Almighty reigns over your suffering! God not only allows such things to happen; they come by His decree: He forms light and creates darkness, He makes well-being and He creates calamity. The prophet Amos puts it even more bluntly:

Amos 3:6 ESV

Is a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid? Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?

The Word of God is plain—your suffering, your pain, your calamity or disaster or illness or disability or trauma are not random, they are not meaningless—they have come to you from the hand of Almighty God Himself, and He never allows suffering or pain or evil to touch you unless He has a purpose in it! “The LORD has made everything for His purpose—even the wicked for the day of trouble!”

God’s sovereign rule over all things—even evil and suffering—is the basis of our greatest comfort in this world and the next. He brings His plans to pass by means of our decisions, He brings His righteousness to pass by means of our wickedness, and

III. He brings His salvation to pass by means of His faithfulness (vv. 6-8)

Look at verse 6:

Proverbs 16:6 ESV

By steadfast love and faithfulness iniquity is atoned for, and by the fear of the Lord one turns away from evil.

Here is one of those glimmering verses in the Old Testament that shine in a straight line to Jesus Christ, the One who atoned for our iniquity on the Cross. The steadfast love and faithfulness of God—Who would have been perfectly just to utterly wipe out every single one of us because of our sin against Him—instead showed that steadfast, immoveable covenant love, keeping His promise to save His people by sending Jesus Christ:

John 3:16 ESV

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Jesus Christ, God Himself in human flesh—fully God and fully man—came here to this broken, sinful, violent world and

Jesus was faithful to do what the Father sent Him to do

Above anyone else ever in all of human history, Jesus Christ “committed His work to the LORD” — Every decision He ever made throughout His life, He made in submission to the will of His Father:

John 5:19 ESV

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.

He committed His work to His Father, and His Father established His plans. On the night He was betrayed, as He contemplated the anguish and horror that was about to descend on Him at the Cross, Jesus prayed

Luke 22:42 ESV

saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

And by Jesus’ free, uncoerced, unforced decision to submit to His Father’s will, God brought about His plan to save His people from their sins. Jesus was faithful to do what the Father sent Him to do, and

Jesus suffered the most evil act in human history

Of all the innocent suffering that has ever taken place, of all the wickedness that has ever been perpetrated against another human being, the crucifixion and death of Jesus Christ is the absolute lowest depth of evil—and that act of evil took place by the sovereign decree of almighty God! Acts 2:23

Acts 2:23 ESV

this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

The hands of those lawless men were moving according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God!

Acts 4:27–28 ESV

for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

The depravity of Herod, the moral bankruptcy of Pontius Pilate, the hatred of the Gentiles and the cries of the Jewish leaders to crucify Him—all of that evil was ordained by God so that you and I could have salvation!

So when you contemplate the sovereignty of God—the reign of God over the lot cast into the lap, the reign of God over your free and real choices, the reign of God over the tsunamis that wipe out villages and the dust motes that dance in the sunbeams and the tumors that invade innocent children’s bodies and the violence that destroys families and the viruses that spread like wildfire through China—you must always start at the Cross of Jesus Christ!

Because that is the only way you can make sense out of the suffering and evil in this world—I can’t tell you why wildfires destroy neighborhoods, I can’t tell you why tidal waves rip children out of their mother’s arms and carry them away, I can’t tell you why a young mother has a massive stroke and loses her ability to care for her family, I can’t tell you why a little girl has to suffer radiation burns so severe that she can’t swallow or speak.

But I can tell you that none of it is meaningless because God reigns over it! I can tell you that we don’t serve a God who can do no better than to post an animated GIF on your timeline saying “Sending positive vibes”. I can tell you that we serve a God who is not helpless in the face of evil, but a God who makes evil serve His good purposes for you! And all the proof you need of that is to look at the Face of your suffering Savior on the Cross! If He could make that evil serve His purposes for your eternal good, then surely He can do the same with the suffering that afflicts you now!

And if you are in the midst of this suffering and it seems to you that God has abandoned you, that He has inflicted all of this on you because He has forgotten you or because He hates you or because He is unwilling to help—listen to the voice of your suffering Savior on that Cross! In the darkest moment of His suffering, He cried out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46) When you are at your darkest moment of suffering, beloved, when you are sure that every promise you ever heard from God is a lie, when you are certain that He has abandoned you and is ignoring you and leaving you in the pit of your own personal Hell—Jesus Christ looks down on you and says, “I’ve been there!”

When no one else understands your pain, when you are so bewildered and crushed by the evil that has landed on you—look to Jesus Christ! Because He knows what you are going through! He knows how agonizing it is to suffer unjustly! He knows why you feel abandoned—and that is why He will never leave you alone in that moment! He has been there—you can open up to Him and tell Him everything, and He will hold you fast through all of that evil until all of His good purposes have been accomplished through it!

Your greatest comfort in this world and the next is that you serve a God who reigns over all things—from the word on your lips to the orbit of Jupiter in the heavens to the virus in the cough to the evil in the heart of the wicked. And this sovereign, almighty God has bent all of His omnipotent power in His steadfast covenant love and faithfulness to utterly and eternally save you from the penalty and power of your sins by the innocent suffering and death of His Son.

So look to Him in the midst of this evil world, trust Him utterly to save you! His purposes cannot fail, His love cannot be thwarted, His grip on you cannot be loosened by height, depth nor any other thing in all creation! He is the only One with the authority to save you, He is the only one with the power to turn calamity to your good, He is the only One who can keep His promise to bring you safe through every danger toil and snare until you awake in His presence! So come to Him for forgiveness of your sins, come to Him for refuge from the wickedness and violence of this world, come to Him for peace in the midst of your pain—the one who sees, who knows, and who reigns over all of it—come to your Sovereign Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Jude 24–25 ESV

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

The Westminster Confession of Faith says this about the sovereignty of God: “God from all eternity did by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin; nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.” (Chapter III, Article 1, “Of God’s Eternal Decree”). How does that statement fit with what Proverbs 16 tells us about God’s rule over all things?

Why is it better to believe that God sovereignly decrees our suffering rather than the belief that He is completely unconnected with it, or that He is powerless to do anything about it? How might you use Proverbs 16:4 to encourage someone in the midst of their suffering?