Sovereignty

The sovereignty of God is an immensely comforting thing when I am fearful or worried--but it can also be one of the hardest things to understand when things do not go well. I suppose this is very much related to a couple other recent posts, but it is just such a huge part of my thought these past few months--since I bowed my resistant will to the Biblical idea of predestination, I suppose.

At any rate, this post by Doug Wilson, a big name in Reformed circles, talks about the sovereignty of our Lord and His bringing of things to His good pleasure. It is not about predestination, but about the lordship of God over daily life. My favorite passage is this:

Our God does as He pleases in the good things, in the pleasant things. This is an important mark of our piety -- we must always remember to thank God for our food, and drink, and marital love, and health -- the continued list of blessings is greater than we can even imagine. But our duties here are also obvious. For what we receive, we do give thanks.

But God also does as He pleases in the hard things. We live in a world where wicked things happen, and we profess to serve a good God who is omnipotent. Be a thinking Christian and stand up to the implications. The heart of our faith, the center of our faith, is the death of Jesus Christ, which was nothing less than a predestinated murder (Acts 2:22-24; 4:27-28). And yet it was the greatest act of love our world ever saw. How can a murder be an act of envy and hatred from one agent, and an act of love from the orchestrating, predestining Agent? While we are not able to do the math, we know that this is true because Scriptures tell us.