The Sovereignty of God

Job 1.22 observes Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.image

Job had just lost his business and his children but still he didn’t blame God for his tragedies. Instead he proclaimed that we come into the world naked and we leave the same but God is always to be praised.

Far easier said than done by the rest of us.

Everyone believes in the sovereignty of God, His ability to do anything He wants any way He wants any time He wants. This is our universal definition of God.

When life is painful we blame Him Who created life and sustains life with not loving us, not caring for us and not acting in a good, just or compassionate way.

For many, this discrepancy between the definition of God and the action of God as far as we have defined goodness results in either hating God or proclaiming God doesn’t exist. The hypocrisy in our thinking is that while we want God to act sovereignly on our behalf we don’t want Him to act sovereignly over our lives.

Here is what the sovereign One has chosen to do: allow you and I and everyone else including unseen created beings called angels to make their own decisions the consequences of which often cause bad results in our lives.

Most of the most vile offenses that have happened in the world have been done by one person choosing to harm another. No God did not interfere either in the thinking or the doing of the evil person.

God has given us ultimate freedom of choice so that we can freely choose to love Him: for richer or poorer, better or worse and in sickness or in health.

What God offers now is comfort through our difficulties as He Himself promises to comfort us with His presence. God promises to be faithful to us no matter how hard life becomes or how good we have it.

He Himself when living among us as one of us suffered poverty, cruelty, injustice, abuse and finally murder. God is neither oblivious nor inexperienced with humanity’s evil toward humanity.

The good person understands the sovereignty of God expressed in His gift of personal choice. The good person understands since humanity is evil he does evil and God will not interfere most of the time because He prefers our freedom to choose over the need to stop our choices.

One day God promises to form a new heaven and new earth where He will physically live with us. In that place we will not be free to choose evil. In that place no one dies, no one suffers, no one is hungry, no one does anything that disobeys God or harms his neighbor.

In the meantime, when times are tough, we must decide to choose God for comfort, help, encouragement and hope knowing that He really is good and that we really are bad.

We must decide to love God or divorce ourselves from Him; we have that choice.

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