What do we think of when we say God is sovereign? Perhaps we think of His creative power, or maybe we think of His power in general. God is sovereign because He is powerful. Or perhaps we think of His right to rule. Jesus is sitting on a throne and is called the “Lord of lords and King of kings.” (1 Timothy 6:15). If a ruler is the ruler over all other rulers, then that is a good sign that sovereignty rests upon Him.
Our 1 Timothy 6:15 passage not only speaks to Jesus’ being over all other rulers, but it makes the point that He is sovereign.
“which he will display at the proper time--he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords,” (1 Timothy 6:15 ESV).
So, we see that Jesus is not only sovereign, but He is the only sovereign. {Note: throughout the book, I will refer to the three persons in the Godhead as sovereign, all having divine traits. I make no distinction between the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit when I read about the nature of God. The purpose of this book is not to defend or explain the triune nature of the one true God. I simply accept it in this volume}.
About Jesus being the only sovereign, let’s put a peg in it and come back to this point later in the book. For now, we want to establish what the Bible says about God’s sovereignty and then dive into what that means. Our next verse, Acts 4:24, also attributes sovereignty to God:
“And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them,” (Acts 4:24 ESV).
Again, sovereignty is attributed to God, this time backing up that claim because He is the Creator. Again, more on this later in the book.
Another passage that I want to look at that specifically attributes sovereignty to God is Revelation 6:10. In this passage, the martyrs who have died for the Lord cry out to Him, asking how long it will be until He avenges their blood.
“They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10 ESV).
In this passage, sovereignty is attributed to God because He has the power to avenge those who are overpowered.
The Bible goes into much more detail on God’s sovereignty, but these three verses establish the claim that God is sovereign. So, what does that mean? What justifies God’s claim to sovereignty?
This claim to sovereignty can be made by two distinct arguments that we will spend great detail looking at. One argument is a logical argument that God makes throughout the Bible. “I am sovereign because….” He then gives reasons why we should believe in His sovereignty. For example, we will look at passages where God says He has the right over anything He has made. As Creator, He is sovereign over His creation, including us. We may agree or disagree with this logical argument, and many do disagree. Nevertheless, our agreement or disagreement with God’s logical arguments about His sovereignty does not alter the truth that He presents.
We will discuss the second argument for God’s sovereignty by looking at His attributes. For example, we will discuss the all-powerful nature of God. And if God is omnipotent, He is sovereign regardless of any logical argument. We will spend an entire chapter reexamining the book of Job, which, as we will see, is more of a book on God’s sovereignty than a book on suffering. And in that book, God says He is all-powerful, and no one can demand anything from Him.
Now these two arguments, the logical arguments and the arguments about the attributes of God will intersect and interweave throughout the Old and New Testaments. We see that God exerts His sovereignty as Creator because He is powerful enough to create everything out of nothing by His word. This all-powerful attribute gives Him the basis for the logical arguments He makes.
So, God claims sovereignty. What exactly is He claiming? In the Bible, God’s claim of sovereignty is based on His act of creation, His power over creation, and His right to rule over creation. As we will see, His attributes back up His claims of sovereignty in a perfect and preeminent fashion.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1 ESV).
At the beginning of the first book of God’s revelation to man, God lays down the foundation of His sovereignty: creation. The act of creating in and of itself is an act of sovereignty. We understand that in so many ways. In most countries, a person can receive a patent on their invention or creation. That person has the right to control their creation for a period of time. Even a young child playing with Legos can create his masterpiece and then choose to destroy his masterpiece at will. But if the child next to him creates a Lego masterpiece, he has no right to destroy someone else’s creation.
If God is the creator of all things, then doesn’t it stand to reason that He has complete sovereignty over everything He creates? Think about what has to happen for anyone to be able to speak something into existence from nothing. Ex nihilo is the Latin word we may be familiar with in this context. It means “from or out of nothing” (Merriam-Webster). For God to be able to speak something from nothing into existence, He must have power that is above and beyond His creation. At best, man, the pinnacle of God’s creation, can take the building blocks of whatever already exists to combine them into something new. Yet man is not powerful enough to create something from nothing.
Not only does God have the power to create a universe, but He must also have a will to do it. God was not coerced into creating the universe. It was a choice for Him and Him alone to make. He created because He chose to create. Man often coerces his fellow man or animals to make something. A slaveowner often made his slaves create furniture, meals, or many other things. But in the end, it wasn’t the creator who was sovereign. If you work for a company that employs you to create widgets for it, you may be the creator, but they pay you for your creative ability and exert sovereignty over your creation. But with God, He displayed both the power and the will to create.
And as we will see later in the book, God can ensure that His creation acts precisely as He intends for it to act. He directs His creation; He supports and holds together His creation, and He can determine what He wants to do with His creation. In essence, God is sovereign over creation because He can do as He pleases with His creation. Let’s see this born out.
The Potter and the Clay: Over Nations
To illustrate His sovereignty as Creator, God spoke to the prophets and used the illustration of a potter and clay. He did this with both Isaiah and Jeremiah. Let’s look at what He said to Jeremiah because He walks us through the illustration using a real-life potter and not just imagery.
“The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel.” (Jeremiah 18:1-3 ESV).
Jeremiah gets a visual lesson of God’s sovereignty. He is instructed to go to the potter’s house and watch him create a vessel on his wheel. In this object lesson, Jeremiah observes that the clay vessel has some defect. So, what happens when the potter sees something he does not like with the clay vessel he is creating?
“And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.” (Jeremiah 18:4 ESV).
The potter had some choices to make, didn’t he? He could have destroyed the clay vessel and given up on his creation, or he could have left the defect or spoil in the vessel. But in this case, the potter chose to refashion the clay into the vessel he wanted it to be. This potter was sovereign over the lump of clay. Then God speaks to this object lesson:
“Then the word of the LORD came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” (Jeremiah 18:5-6 ESV).
God is saying to Israel that He is the Potter and Israel is the clay. As their creator, He can do with Israel whatever He chooses to do with them. He can mold or fashion them into anything He wants them to be. The potter didn’t have to consult with the clay to see if it was all right for him to fashion it into something else, did he? Neither does God have to consult and agree with Israel on what He will make of it.
“If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it.” (Jeremiah 18:7-8 ESV).
God even extends His sovereignty over Israel to all nations. We will look at this in more detail later in the book, but His point here is that just as He is sovereign over Israel, so is He sovereign as the potter over all nations. He has the power to break up and destroy anytime He chooses.
Put another peg in this verse that we will discuss later. As part of His sovereignty, God is free to devote a nation to destruction, and if that nation repents, God in His sovereignty can choose to relent and spare the nation from the harm He “intended to do to it.” There is so much about free will and the sovereignty of God that many can’t wrap their minds around. And with good reason. God’s sovereignty is so far above our finite ability to comprehend that we may never have all the answers. Spoiler Alert- I will not be able to explain all there is about God’s sovereignty in this book. But I will encourage us to be slow to build elaborate belief systems based on things we think might be true. More on this later. But God not only discusses His sovereignty over nations to break and destroy them, but He also tells Jeremiah that He has the sovereignty to build and plant:
“And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it.” (Jeremiah 18:9-10 ESV).
As the potter over nations, God can also choose to build up and plant any nation. We say nations rise and fall at God’s will, which is true. God establishes the governments (Romans 13:1). Just as repentance can change the decree of God against the ones He intends to destroy, so can evil from the nations cause God to relent from the good He had “intended to do to it.”
And so, the message of the potter and the clay to Jeremiah is that God is building/planting a nation to be His instrument of wrath against Israel, which he intends to break down and destroy:
“Now, therefore, say to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: ‘Thus says the LORD, Behold, I am shaping disaster against you and devising a plan against you. Return, every one from his evil way, and amend your ways and your deeds.’” (Jeremiah 18:11 ESV).
God’s illustration here is that He is sovereign over even the nations. He can do what He intends to do to them because He is powerful enough to do it, He has the will to do it, and He can ensure that it turns out exactly as He intends. Things never get out of God’s control. He never has a miscalculation where He unleashes a monster that does more damage than He intends or inadvertently judges a nation more harshly than He intends. God is in perfect control over everything that He intends, and as we will see later, He will accomplish all of His purposes:
“remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’” (Isaiah 46:9-10 ESV).
The Potter and the Clay: Over Nature
As we said earlier, if God is the creator, then He is sovereign over His creation. Not only did He make it precisely the way He wanted it, but He instructed nature on how it was to behave. He sets the boundaries and creates what we call the laws of nature that they must follow, and nature obeys those laws. He did not endow nature with free will. It acts purely on instincts, yet God has put much of nature under man’s dominion. Man’s dominion over creation is not absolute but rests within the bounds of what the Creator has assigned. Consider the creation story in Genesis 1:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:27-28 ESV).
This dominion was given by God, Who has all dominion or sovereignty over His creation. As we will see later in the book, man has a special place in God’s creation. God made man in His image and created men to be His offspring or children. He endowed man with things He did not endow any other part of creation. As we see here, God grants man a limited portion of his unlimited dominion over creation. As we will spend much time discussing later, God also grants man limited free will from His unlimited free will.
God makes some things greater than man in certain respects (A star will overpower a man who gets too close, angels can overpower a man in a fight, and weather can kill a man when it rages). Still, there is no part of creation, including angels, that God has endowed with more glory and honor than He has endowed upon men. Even the apostle Paul says,
“for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’” (Acts 17:28 ESV).
The point here is that God, in His sovereignty, has made everything exactly the way He wanted it. Man has dominion because God gave him dominion within the limits He lays down. Man has free will because God gave him free will within the limits He lays down. Man is His offspring because God made us His offspring. But the Bible is also very clear that even though God made man in His image and has given man special glory and honor as children made in His image, we are not divine creatures. We are created beings, and divinity only rests with God.
Whereas God is all powerful because it is His eternal attribute, our power has been gifted to us and limited by God. Whereas God is all sovereign, our sovereignty has been gifted to us and limited by God. Whereas God’s free will is unlimited, the free will we have has been gifted to us and limited by God. God’s attributes are eternal and part of His nature. Ours are gifted to us by our Creator within limits He ordains.
But to the rest of nature, God’s limits are readily seen. In Genesis 1:4-5, God set the boundaries of light and darkness; in Genesis 1:6-8, God set the boundaries of the atmosphere and space over the atmosphere; in Genesis 1:9-10, God sets the boundaries between the earth and dry land (Proverbs 8:29 says that God set the boundaries of the seas at this time as well); in Genesis 1:14-19, God set the boundaries of the sun, moon, and stars as well as the seasons.
Unless God instructs differently, the creation will obey the boundaries set by their Creator. They do so because they were made to do so. God’s control over His creation is so precise that He causes everything to work in perfect unison through His creative will. The sun, though violent and inhospitable to life, will never destroy the earth because God has decreed it to serve the earth and His creation upon the earth. It will never spiral beyond God’s control or purpose.
How supreme is God’s sovereignty over His creation? Consider that the largest star we know of in the universe has a radius 1700 times greater than the radius of our sun and our sun has a radius of 109 times greater than the radius of the earth. We are talking about things so big that we can hardly wrap our finite minds around them. And the nonprofit news organization, The Conversation, estimates that there are 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. I have no clue how big that number is, but when you write it out, it looks like this: 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. I still have no clue how big that number is. To help feeble minds like mine, The Conversation says the number of stars in the universe is ten times the number of cups of water in all the oceans.
Okay, so it must be a supremely sovereign God who can speak this massive number of stars into existence, not to mention the planets, moons, and asteroids that orbit each of them, correct? It’s not just in God’s creative power that we witness His sovereignty but in His intimate knowledge of His creation that we also see His sovereignty.
“He determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names.” (Psalm 147:4 ESV).
We struggle to find names for our children, don’t we? Yet God knows every one of the stars He made, and He has given each of them names, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000+ of them. But that’s not all:
“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Luke 12:6-7 ESV).
Jesus, who is God the creator, tells us that He knows every sparrow He has created, and He even knows every single strand of hair on every person He has ever created. I have no clue how many billions of souls God has created since Adam and Eve, but His infinite mind knows every hair stand that He created on each of them.
My point in saying all this is that when we speak of God’s sovereignty, we speak of things we can hardly wrap our minds around. God is so far above and beyond us that our finite minds will never be able to understand His infinite nature fully. And this observation alone should be enough for us to acknowledge and submit to His sovereignty.
But there’s more…