Printer Friendly VersionText: “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise. The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love” (Ps 145:3, 8).
In a large adult Sunday School class I attended, the teacher
read a passage from one of Dr. Lloyd Olgilvie’s books which concluded
with this rousing statement: “We can be sure that no matter what happens,
God Is In Total Control!”
After the drum roll of `Amens’ ebbed, a newly retired life-long
Nazarene missionary who had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, raised
her hand and asked: “If God is in total control, then why are so many
things out of control?”
Good question. And a vexing question when we confront the realities
of our dangerous world and often chaotic lives. It is a question we need to
thoughtfully consider this Sunday as we begin our series on the powerful truth
spelled out so simply and yet so profoundly by Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:19:
namely, “God Was In Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.”
Nowhere in Scripture do we encounter such a soaring affirmation
of God’s Sovereignty as in Psalm 145. Yet it also contains a verse that
opens a small window into the vast horizon of God’s heart. What we discover
is that God’s sovereignty is a `sovereignty of love.’
I invite you to stand in honor of God’s Word as we read
select portions of Psalm 145, which will be projected on our screen.
Four great affirmations of faith leap out at us from this Psalm.
I. God Is Sovereign Lord of the Universe (145:1-6, 10-13a).
That God is the sovereign Lord of the universe whose “glorious
splendor” and “greatness no one can fathom” (vv. 1-5) is beyond
question. From creation in Genesis to consummation in Revelation, the Bible
declares that the Lord is “Great and most worthy of praise” (v.
3). It celebrates “the power of [His] awesome works” and His “great
deeds” (v. 6). In a world of tyrants, terrorists, turmoil and tragedy,
there is nothing so reassuring as to know that God’s kingdom “is
an everlasting kingdom,” and that His “dominion endures through
all ages” (v. 13). When you are going down a narrow mountain road, it
is good to know that somebody’s driving the bus!
A problem arises, however, when we take what seems to be the next logical
step in affirming the sovereignty of God and assert, as we often do, that
God is in Total Control. In his mega-bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life,
Rick Warren writes:
God prescribed every single detail of your body. . . your race, the color
of your skin, your hair, and every other feature. He custom-made your body
just the way he wanted it. . . . He also decided when you would be born and
how long you will live. He planned the days of your life in advance, choosing
the exact time of your birth and death. . . . Your race and nationality are
no accident. God left no detail to chance. . . . God never does anything accidentally,
and he never makes mistakes.
This is a fresh statement of the doctrine of divine determinism,
given classical expression by John Calvin (1509-1564), the Reformation’s
most influential thinker. Calvin built his enormously popular and widely embraced
theological edifice on the foundation of God’s absolute sovereignty.
“God,” he wrote, who is “creator of all so regulates all things
that nothing takes place without his deliberation.”
As comforting as such a doctrine may be, ascribing to God total responsibility
for everything that happens is fraught with hazards and difficulties, not
the least being the unflattering and even grotesque image it paints of the
Controller. Consider these examples:
On April 20, 1999, Cassie Bernall, 17, was one of the 12 high
school students shot to death in the Columbine massacre while reading her
Bible at a library table. Cassie’s mother told a Denver Post reporter
the next day that it was all part of God’s plan. “In order to get
Cassie’s message out and to make the impact that needed to be made and
the changes that needed to be made in our world, it had to be something big.”
On May 27, 2001, the yearlong hostage crisis involving Martin
and Gracia Burham, American missionaries in the Philippines, ended in a fuselage
of bullets. Martin was killed but his wife was not. Upon hearing the news
of Gracia’s rescue, her sister in Indianapolis responded, “We’ve
known all along that God is in control. Nothing takes Him by surprise.”
On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates, devoted Christian wife and mother,
systematically drowned her five children. At the memorial service their father
Russell touched each small casket and said through his tears, “If the
Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, that’s exactly what he’s done.
He gave me all these children and now he’s taking them away.”
Barely had the twin spires of America's Cathedral of Capitalism
crashed to the ground on September 11, 2001, than Jerry Falwell, making an
appearance on The 700 Club, attributed it to God’s judgment upon America.
Pat Robertson, the show’s host, agreed.
During the same year in which A Purpose Driven Life was published
(2003), Rick Warren’s life was struck by tragedy. His wife was hospitalized
with breast cancer. That Christmas he preached a heart-wrenching sermon: “When
God messes up your plans.”
There is something eminently praiseworthy about Christians wanting
to give glory to God in bad times as well as good. Yet integrity compels us
to ask: if God incited two teenage boys to shoot up their high school, guided
the bullets that fatally injured one of His missionaries, compelled a young
mother to drown her children, directed Osama ben Laden to plan attacks that
killed over 3,000 people, afflicted a well-known pastor’s wife with cancer,
and custom crafts certain children to be born with severe handicaps while
others are placed in homes where they will be beaten and sexually abused—if
all the heart-attacks, crippling illnesses, diseases, accidents, divorces,
wars, and natural disasters that devastate and destroy human beings are God’s
doing, then who needs a Satan?
John Wesley rightly protested that to attribute such atrocities to God is
an outrage against his character and makes Him "more false, more cruel,
and more unjust than the devil…God hath taken [Satan's] work out of [his]
hands…God is the destroyer of souls." Mennonite theologian Walter
Wink adds, "Against such an image of God the revolt of atheism is an
act of pure religion."
The great biblical affirmation that God is sovereign Lord of
the Universe needs to be deepened by a profound insight into the great heart
of God offered by the psalmist, also affirmed from Genesis to Revelation and
most powerfully demonstrated on the cross is that:
II. God’s Sovereignty is a Sovereignty of Love (145:7-9).
God is the sovereign Lord of the universe. Yet the radically
new revelation about God’s essential character embodied in this psalm,
exhibited in the cross-resurrection event, and celebrated throughout the New
Testament is that God’s sovereignty is the sovereignty of love . “The
Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The Lord
is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made” (vv. 8-9).
One of Benjamin Franklin’s oft-cited aphorisms is that
to tell only half the truth is to lie. What is missing in Calvin’s portrayal
of a tyrannical and despotic God is the very heart and soul of the Christian
gospel, expressed so simply and yet so profoundly by John the Beloved: “God
is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). John does not say that God is loving, or that
love is even the greatest of His attributes. Rather, love is the essence of
His character. Love is the sun around which all His attributes orbit, and
the artesian well from which all His actions flow.
Over against the one-sided emphasis upon God’s sovereignty
represented in Calvin’s theology is the clear and unambiguous counter-testimony
of John who exults, “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at
all” (1 John 1:5). James’ exuberant witness is that God is “the
Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow”
(1:17). Because God’s love is not an abstract ideal but was incarnate
in Jesus of Nazareth, we no longer see “a poor reflection” of God
“as in a mirror,” but “with unveiled faces” behold “the
glory of God in the face of Jesus” (1 Cor. 13:12; 2 Cor 3:18; 4:6). All
the New Testament witnesses agree with Paul when he says that “In Christ
all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Col. 2:9). “To
see what God is like,” says Philip Yancey, “simply look at Jesus.”
Lewis Smedes, long-time professor of Theology and Christian
Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, tells about a searing tragedy that
caused him to question his inherited belief in God’s absolute sovereignty.
Born and raised in the bosom of Dutch Reformed Calvinism, he not only graduated
from Calvin College but returned to teach in their religion department. It
was during that decade that his whole theological edifice, built upon the
assumption of God’s “silent, strange, and secretive control,”
was shaken to the core.
After years of frustration and the failed efforts of four fertility
clinics, his wife miraculous became pregnant. They were ecstatic. Six months
along, Doris began losing amniotic fluid. The doctor was worried that the
baby would be severely malformed. After a few anxious hours, the doctor broke
into the waiting room and exulted: “Congratulations, Lew, you are the
father of a perfect man-child.”
Less that 24 hours later, their pediatrician called, urging
him to get to the hospital immediately. By the time he got there, the miracle-child
was dead. Devastated, he confesses:
On the day that our baby boy died, I knew that I could never
again believe that God had arranged for our tiny child to die before he had
hardly begun to live. . . . I am no more able to believe that God micro-manages
the death of little children than I am able to believe that God was macro-managing
Hitler’s holocaust. With one morning’s wrenching intuition, I knew
that my portrait of God would have to be repainted.
That is exactly what Psalm 145 does. It “repaints”
our distorted portraits of God until we can clearly see ”the glory of
God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
The third great affirmation of faith we find in Psalm 145 is
this:
III. God’s Loving Sovereignty Involves Risk (145:13:b-16)
When God said “Let there be” (Gen. 1:3), He gave to
the universe a certain degree of autonomy and potency. The law of gravity,
for instance, is our friend in that it prevents us from becoming interstellar
wanderers in space. On the other hand, if we leap off of the Golden Gate bridge,
gravity will kill us. When God assigned to humans dominion over the earth,
He thereby placed a certain amount of control, for good or evil, into their
hands. God limited his sovereignty at the point of creation/creature freedom.
And that is all to the good, for total control is the way of
dictatorship, not love. Love does not dominate but liberates. Love does not
coerce but gently persuades. We see this beautifully modeled in Jesus. Whatever
we say about His relationship with people, the expression total control simply
does not work. He made no effort to micro-manage the disciples’ lives.
He could not stop the rich young ruler from turning away, nor keep 70 disciples
from leaving Him when the going got tough. He could not prevent Judas from
betraying Him nor Peter from denying Him.
Rather than dominate, Jesus cut through 613 laws of Moses plus
thousands of suffocating, tyrannizing, and oppressive religious regulations
by which the Jews of His day sought to implement God’s total control
by simply saying, Love God and love your neighbor (Matt. 22:37-40). If asked,
“Precisely how do I love God truly and my neighbor rightly?” I believe
Jesus would have replied with a twinkle in His eye: “That is why God
gave you a brain, to figure out things like that.”
It is clear that what Jesus was supremely interested in was
not control but dynamic relationships. Relationships , both human and divine,
can thrive only in a context of non-threatening and non-coercive freedom.
Such freeing love, however, entails risk. Twice I relinquished sovereign control
of my car. Twice I gave my car keys to my teenage children. And twice they
totaled them. They could have killed themselves and others. But that is the
risk parents must take if their children are to ever grow up and become responsible
adults.
That is precisely the risk God took when He created humans “in
His own image” (Gen. 1:27): namely, they might exercise their moral freedom
in ways that not only would frustrate His gracious intentions but in the end
circle back to destroy themselves—which is exactly what occurred. Beginning
with Adam, “sin entered the world, and death through sin, and in this
way death came to all men, because all sinned (Rom. 5:12-17). This tragic
turn of events was never God’s original intention or purpose.
In the beginning God created a marvelous universe free of violence,
evil, and death. In the end He will inaugurate “a new heaven and a new
earth,” in which “there will be no more death or mourning or crying
or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:1-4).
Sin, in all of its toxic forms, is an alien intruder, a consequence of human
freedom misused and abused: for “the wages of sin is death” (Rom.
6:23).
It is well that we, like Job, should praise God in all of life’s
tragedies, but certainly not praise Him for them (Job 1:1-22). God has no
disposition whatsoever to “mess up our plans” as Rick Warren put
it, or to add to the suffering and loss we experience due to the fact that
we live in a fallen world under the shadow of sin’s curse. God does not
cause all things, but “causes all things to work together for good to
those who love [Him], to those who are called according to His purpose”
(Rom. 8:28, NASB).
Which brings us to our final affirmation of faith:
IV. God’s Loving Sovereignty Will Never Let Us Go (145:17-21).
Sin, death, and hell will not have the last word. For those
who honor Him , “he hears their cry and saves them. The Lord watches
over all who love him” (vv. 19-20a). We can have full confidence that
the Sovereign God whose life-giving Spirit brought light out of darkness,
creation out of chaos, and life out of death is still Lord over all the earth.
True, He has wrapped His sovereignty in non-intrusive, non-coercive, and non-threatening
love. Yet we who put our faith and trust in Him can live in the wonderful
security of knowing that “no power” in heaven or on earth “will
be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord”
(Rom. 8:39). That is where God is in total control .
Jesus told a wonderful story to illustrate how God’s loving
sovereignty works. It is the story of a self-centered son who asks for his
inheritance, in effect saying to his father, “Drop dead!” Though
deeply wounded the father gives him what he demands and lets him go. That
the wayward son might eventually come to his senses and freely return to his
father on his own is worth the risk of relinquishing total control . And,
of course, that is the way the story ends, in a warm and reconciling embrace.
Though the son does not recover his squandered inheritance, he is welcomed
home. Such love-bonds can be forged only when genuine human freedom is valued
and honored.
Among the many images of 9/11 that seared our souls were the
long-distance television shots of falling debris—No, they were falling
bodies! Bodies of people leaping out of broken windows. Jumping from 85 stories,
92 stories, 105 stories up. Hitting the street with such force that a pink
mist puffed into the air, according to the mayor.
Absolutely unforgettable was the news of one couple leaping
hand in hand. He reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and then
they jumped. Tumbling head over heels, they never lost their grip.
Who were they? Husband and wife? Office colleagues? Strangers,
standing at the lip of hell, reaching out to each other? We’ll never
know. They clasped hands so they would not die alone.
When we stand at the lip of death’s dark chasm, nothing
else will matter but Jesus. He whose hand reached out to deliver Peter from
the watery abyss will reach for ours as well. “The Lord upholds all those
who fall” (v. 14). We will not die alone.
“I give them eternal life,” Jesus promised, “and they shall
never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28).
