Sovereignty

I serve a sovereign God
Who no one should question
When He builds a mighty work
Then brings it down to destruction.

The sovereign God I serve
Gave Adam perfect life and peace
For him and Eve to abuse
And cause all the greatest grief.

The God I serve is sovereign
When man became corrupt,
When He flooded the whole earth,
When life ended with the abrupt,

While he preserved
One future hope for man
And gave the rest to sin.
I do not understand.

But this is the sovereign God
Who called Abraham
And gave him a promise,
Who gave Joseph to a foreign land

And with him all Israel
As servants and slaves.
This is the God I serve
Who births and brings men to graves.

This is the sovereign God
Who let His people groan,
Who hardened Pharaoh’s heart
And showed Israel they’re not alone,

Who used his people as a means
To judge the other nations,
A stiff-necked people slaughtering
Part of the same creation.

This is an awesome God
Who allowed the heart of His people
To wander farther than the deserts
From His holy tabernacle

To idols of this world
To conduct abominations
Just like the ones that they helped judge,
Worse than the other nations.

So they became judged by Assyria
And Babylon in turn,
And the Lord brought them to death,
Torment, and pain to mourn.

Then Assyria and Babylon
Were in time judged too
After being the means
For the Lord to work through.

But this is the only God
Stamping history with a sovereign seal,
A signet to the future.
And who shall appeal?

I serve a sovereign God
Who wants to show His love,
Who nailed His only Son on wood
To become a curse, enough

To redeem an unmerited people
While we were enemies,
While we were an abomination,
To give us life and peace.

There is no greater love than
When one dies for his friend.
Again, we were the enemies.
We made ourselves the fiend;

An eternal law transgressed
Eternally by mortal man.
Why this is how it must be
I may never understand,

But when Yeshua returned
From the grave of death
The heavens cried out, “Glory!”
When He took and gave man breath.

This is how the greatest love was shown,
How His highest worth is recognized,
How the moment may seem desolate
Until the achieved prize.

My God is the most sovereign.
He works all things for my good.
I love Him for He first loved me
And saved me from the flood.

Even when the earth rattles
And men fall at all my sides,
When the wind blows others away
And He raises up the tides,

I need not worry ’bout this world
When troubles come my way.
My Father cares for all my needs
Tomorrow and today.

God is my God and sovereign.
He is the Good Shepherd.
He gives and takes life.
He is aware of very bird.

But who can question Him?
Whose thoughts are high as His?
He shows mercy for His own sake,
For His glory it is.

He hates whomever He pleases,
Showing salvation in His Son
To Whom He will. None can question Him
Or say, “What have you done?”

The sovereign God has purposed plans
Greater than our thoughts.
He is the Shepherd, we the sheep.
He chose to have so wrought.

My God is in the fifth dimension
While we’re stuck in the four.
My God is weaving a tapestry.
He thinks ahead to more.

Day 4

But he is unchangeable, and who can turn him back?
    What he desires, that he does (Job 23:13).

I don’t think any believer questions God’s omnipotence. He can do anything He wants. In human minds, I think that naturally brings up the question, “Then why does He let bad things happen?” The Bible says that He desires that none should perish (2 Pet. 3:9). But people do, and in fact, most people do and will (Matthew 7:13-14). So is God really omnipotent? Absolutely. He also desires that we love Him, and I do not think love is something that can be forced. God does not want puppets to sing His praises, but people who desire to love Him. I also think salvation is a divine intervention into man’s natural sinful order and thus by definition a miracle, which means people can’t choose salvation on their own¹. A dead body can’t raise itself up, nor can a dead spirit give itself breath. Only God can do both. In one sense, it is Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37).

Churches have split over the doctrines of predestination and free will. I was raised in a church that believes in predestination, and I married a man raised in a church that believes in free will. Do I think I have the answer today? No. But I don’t believe it has to be entirely either-or. What if it’s both-and? Scripture supports both God’s sovereignty over human will and humans having the ability to make their own choices against God’s will. This is not an essential to understand, otherwise God would have perhaps made it very specific for us. But God does want us to seek it out, because He has revealed it to us in different ways throughout Scripture. Knowing this relationship of will and power between God and man does not get us into heaven, but it does help us understand God better, and consequently ourselves. On the other hand, my pastor says that if we could figure God out, then He wouldn’t be God anymore.

1. I have grown with my knowledge, study, and experience since the writing of this. I have learned that this doctrine of Calvinistic predestination, that man is spiritually dead and therefore unable to be positively responsive to the gospel, is based heavily on Ephesians 2:1. I think it’s important to take this verse in a holistic Biblical sense and compare it to other uses of the term of death, rather than taking one verse and putting all this meaning into it. In the Bible, death can mean actual death, but it can also be a positional death. For example, Jesus Himself, in his parable of the prodigal son (Lk. 15:11-32), tells it with the father saying, “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Lk. 15:32). In the parable, was his son literally dead? No. Did he choose to return home. Yes. His son was as good as dead to him, but he wasn’t beyond responsiveness. He responded to his father’s compassionate reputation and returned to him. The father did not go down to the pig stye, pull out his son, lying face down, from the mud pit, and begin shocking him with a spiritual defibrillator called the effectual call. Is God sovereign? Yes, but sovereignty means authority, not micromanagement. Secondly, we can’t take this verse in a literature spiritual death sense while treating other passages that use similar language more allegorically, or even treating other phrases in the same passage as more allegorical. In the same passage that says we were dead in our sins, it also says we are seated with Christ in the heavenly places: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4-6). Are we actually in heaven right now? No. It is a positional thing that will be fulfilled one day. If people continue on the road of sin, they are as good as dead, destined for God’s wrath. If people put their trust in Jesus, they are as good as being seated in heaven right now. That’s what this passage means. Anything more is reading into the text what is not there, I now believe after my own study. For twelve years, this was a non-issue for my family and my church, but when we moved to a Calvinist church, I was forced to study for myself (unless I wanted to regurgitate whatever they told me to believe) and I had to take a stand one way or the other. Predestination in the Bible doesn’t mean what Calvin made it mean either, and election in the Bible doesn’t mean what Calvin made it mean. Reformed theologists are good at taking a term or word and redefining it to match their theology. For example, I believe in original sin. I believe the Bible supports original sin, that we inherited sin from Adam. But my last pastor said that the doctrine of original sin also means that a person cannot respond to Jesus’ gospel without being regenerated first so that they can even choose to believe, and when they are regenerated, they will believe. Since I believe in free will, my pastor says I also reject the doctrine of original sin. He can say that because he redefined original sin. See? I say all this to clarify that I have changed my understanding of free will and predestination without changing my acknowledgement that God is sovereign. Let’s be specific where the Bible is clear. Let’s be open to reason where the Bible is more vague. I now think I struggled with understanding God’s sovereignty in my poem because I was looking at it through a Calvinist lense. I don’t struggle with it anymore. But the Bible makes it clear that God is sovereign.

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