Jesus and the Sovereignty of God

Defining Sovereignty

Sovereignty: God’s sovereignty refers to his absolute and unrivaled rule over all his creatures and their circumstances. (Talbert, L. (2018). God’s Sovereignty over Creation. In M. Ward, J. Parks, B. Ellis, & T. Hains (Eds.), Lexham Survey of Theology. Lexham Press.)

A true definition of sovereignty claims that God has no opponents. Rather, He reigns supreme and unmatched. The unmatchable God is so, because He is Creator. Now, there are three universally held Christian doctrines pertaining to God’s sovereignty:

God is the owner and “possessor” of everything (Deuteronomy 10:14, Job 41:11, Psalm 24:1)

God is the authoritative King of the entire earth (Psalm 47:2, 7)

God is in control of everything (Job 38-39; Jeremiah 5:22, Ephesians 1:22)

It is this last doctrine which will serve as the focus of our talk today. For, we must clearly define what we mean by the doctrine that “God controls everything.”

The Issue of God’s Control Over Everything

The thought that God is micromanaging and literally controlling “everything” is one that has caused as much confusion as it attempts to provide clarity. In the face of such a claim as God controlling everything, there’s the issue of evil.

If God exists and is indeed in control of everything, why do we suffer and why “do bad things happen to good people?”

Bart Ehrman: Suffering and the Crisis of Faith

Ehrman was a devout ministry leader that studied at some of America’s most prestigious seminaries. Below is an excerpt from his book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer:

If there is an all-powerful and loving God in this world, why is there so much excruciating pain and unspeakable suffering? The problem of suffering has haunted me for a very long time. It was what made me begin to think about religion when I was young, and it was what led me to question my faith when I was older. Ultimately, it was the reason I lost my faith. This book tries to explore some aspects of the problem, especially as they are reflected in the Bible, whose authors too grappled with the pain and misery in the world.

To explain why the problem matters so much to me, I need to give a bit of personal background. For most of my life I was a devout and committed Christian. I was baptized in a Congregational church and reared as an Episcopalian, becoming an altar boy when I was twelve and continuing all the way through high school. Early in my high school days I started attending a Youth for Christ club and had a "born-again" experience—which, looking back, seems a bit strange: I had been involved in church, believing in Christ, praying to God, confessing my sins, and so on for years. What exactly did I need to convert from? I think I was converting from hell—I didn't want to experience eternal torment with the poor souls who had not been "saved"; I much preferred the option of heaven. In any event, when I became born again it was like ratcheting my religion up a notch. I became very serious about my faith and chose to go off to a fundamentalist Bible college—Moody Bible Institute in Chicago—where I began training for ministry.

I worked hard at learning the Bible—some of it by heart. I could quote entire books of the New Testament, verse by verse, from memory. When I graduated from Moody with a diploma in Bible and Theology (at the time Moody did not offer a B.A. degree), I went off to finish my college work at Wheaton, an evangelical Christian college in Illinois (also Billy Graham's alma mater). There I learned Greek so that I could read the New Testament in its original language. From there I decided that I wanted to commit my life to studying the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and chose to go to Princeton Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school whose brilliant faculty included Bruce Metzger, the greatest textual scholar in the country. At Princeton I did both a master of divinity degree—training to be a minister—and, eventually, a Ph.D. in New Testament studies.

I'm giving this brief synopsis to show that I had solid Christian credentials and knew about the Christian faith from the inside out—in the years before I lost my faith.

During my time in college and seminary I was actively involved in a number of churches. At home, in Kansas, I had left the Episcopal church because, strange as this might sound, I didn't think it was serious enough about religion (I was pretty hard-core in my evangelical phase); instead I went a couple of times a week to a Plymouth Brethren Bible Chapel (among those who really believed!). When I was away from home, living in Chicago, I served as the youth pastor of an Evangelical Covenant church. During my seminary years in New Jersey I attended a conservative Presbyterian church and then an American Baptist church. When I graduated from seminary I was asked to fill the pulpit in the Baptist church while they looked for a full-time minister. And so for a year I was pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church, preaching every Sunday morning, holding prayer groups and Bible studies, visiting the sick in the hospital, and performing the regular pastoral duties for the community.

But then, for a variety of reasons that I'll mention in a moment, I started to lose my faith. I now have lost it altogether. I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian. The subject of this book is the reason why.

In an earlier book, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, I have indicated that my strong commitment to the Bible began to wane the more I studied it. I began to realize that rather than being an inerrant revelation from God, inspired in its very words (the view I had at Moody Bible Institute), the Bible was a very human book with all the marks of having come from human hands: discrepancies, contradictions, errors, and different perspectives of different authors living at different times in different countries and writing for different reasons to different audiences with different needs. But the problems of the Bible are not what led me to leave the faith. These problems simply showed me that my evangelical beliefs about the Bible could not hold up, in my opinion, to critical scrutiny. I continued to be a Christian—a completely committed Christian—for many years after I left the evangelical fold.

Eventually, though, I felt compelled to leave Christianity altogether. I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known since childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenaged years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe. It's a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of life. In particular, I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. For many people who inhabit this planet, life is a cesspool of misery and suffering. I came to a point where I simply could not believe that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of it.

The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith. After many years of grappling with the problem, trying to explain it, thinking through the explanations that others have offered—some of them pat answers charming for their simplicity, others highly sophisticated and nuanced reflections of serious philosophers and theologians—after thinking about the alleged answers and continuing to wrestle with the problem, about nine or ten years ago I finally admitted defeat, came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic: I don't "know" if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn't the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world. And so I stopped going to church.

This is a very compelling and disappointing response to the problem of evil and the Bible’s perceived silence on it. Yet, there’s another sophisticated individual who seemingly had a similar experience. Yet, he came to a different solution.

Rabbi Harold Kushner: Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?

Rabbi Harold Kushner is a Jewish rabbi and has served as a congregational rabbi for the Temple of Israel in Natick Massachusetts. He had a son named Aaron who at three years old was diagnosed with a “rapid aging” disease and ultimately died at fourteen years old.

He could not reconcile the fact that God allowed his son’s death. Therefore, he faced two alternatives:

God is a all-powerful and not so loving God.

God is all loving and not so powerful.

Rabbi Kushner ultimate concludes that God is all loving and benevolent, but not all powerful.

Analyzing the Two Perspectives

Ehrman concludes that a good God cannot rule over a creation that is so filled with evil. Therefore, he becomes an agnostic and concludes that the Judeo-Christian tradition has a false concept of God.

Kushner concludes that the Jewish or even Christian idea of God’s complete control over everything is not legitimate. For, if He is indeed in control, His lack of control over the evil automatically counters the claim to be all-loving.

The issue with these two positions is a misconception on how God’s sovereignty is proven. They both assume that God’s sovereignty must be proven by how He manages or micromanage the things in the earth. And while the world is indeed a dark place and a poor reflection of God’s goodness, it is no proof that God is not sovereign.

To assume that God is “out of control” because things tend to go bad is not justifiable if we consider the biblical narrative. In fact, the biblical narrative proves God’s sovereignty.

Jesus and the Sovereignty of God

Death, the enemy of mankind was destined to be defeated by the death of the Son!

Hebrews 2:14–15 CSB

Now since the children have flesh and blood in common, Jesus also shared in these, so that through his death he might destroy the one holding the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.

2 Timothy 1:9–11 CSB

He has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began. This has now been made evident through the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who has abolished death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. For this gospel I was appointed a herald, apostle, and teacher,