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From Our Banner: September, 1956.
When we take the Bible in our hands, God speaks to us; and we either accept what God has to say as true, that God is perfectly honest in what He reveals to us, or we examine what God has to say with our own powers of reason and intellect, and by this method establish ourselves as the judges of truth.
The Apostle Paul informs us that human intellect and reason are totally inadequate for the task, saying: "But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." 1 Cor. 2:14.
God does not say that we are to examine His Word, but to examine ourselves in the light of what He has revealed in the Bible. The Apostle writes in 2 Corinthians 13:5. "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?" If we follow the Apostle's suggestion, the absolute perfection of God's Word will be seen. What the Bible has to say about the corruption of our nature and its influence upon our mind, reason, affections, emotions and imagination presents a mirror-like description of our own persons.
Now let us turn to the Bible and see what it has to say about God. We discover that it teaches the absolute supremacy of God, Who overrules all things for His own glory. The exceeding brightness of His glory, encircling His absolute deity, shall avenge any attempted intrusion upon His privacy, as it is recorded in Exod. 33:20. "No man shall see Me and live."
God gathers all ages, locations and the eternity of eternities within the compass of His limitless omnipresence and omniscience; to quote Psalm 139:7, "Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from Thy presence," and in Psalm 90:2, "Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hast formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God." The prophet Isaiah writes: "Hast thou not known? Hast thou not heard that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth fainteth not, neither is weary, there is no searching of His understanding." Human intellect and reason must not only stagger, but fall prostrate before the revelation of God; for who has searched His profound designs? In His omnipotence, said the Psalmist, "He hath done whatsoever pleaseth Him." Psalm 115:3. "All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing; and He doeth according to His will in the armies of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay His hand or say unto Him. What doest Thou?" said Daniel 4:35. God determines when, where and how all events will take place and makes the wrath of men to praise Him.
The absolute sovereignty of God is not an attribute that belongs to Him, but a Royal Right, or prerogative that the limitless power and unsearchable mysteries of His attributes not only demands, but holds in incontestable majesty. And God exercises His sovereignty in determining the nature and destiny of all created beings; for all intelligent creatures, angels and men, He has established laws by which they are governed. He cast out from His broad celestial estates the angels that disobeyed Him; and drove our first parents from Eden, in a state of total depravity, when they heeded not His commandment.
In the exercise of His sovereignty, He preserves the perfection of His holiness and the awful majesty of His justice. In the Covenant of Grace, He redeems a people unto Himself from the earth, He directs them by His counsel in time and when day is done receives them into His presence. This is accomplished by the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the operations of the Holy Spirit by laws unknown and unknowable to us. "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." John. 3:8.
Thus the sovereignty of God is the central truth of the Holy Bible; and in the acceptance of the absolute sovereignty of God, the doctrines or truths of the Scriptures present neither problems nor difficulties, but secure the soul of the redeemed with all the unchanging glory of His High attributes that testify to His absolute supremacy.
The Arminian who would substitute foreknowledge for God's foreordination denies the absolute sovereignty of God and so calls in question the perfections of God's being. Thus God's activity is limited by circumstances, that is, the effectiveness of the grace of God is conditioned by sinful man's acceptance or rejection of it. While the Scriptures clearly state that man is totally depraved being dead in trespasses and sin, the Arminian takes control out of the hands of God and places that control in the hands of man.
The Bible teaches that God controls all events, for not only does He foreknow, but has foreordained "whatsoever cometh to pass." And the Arminian, even when he has wrested the Scriptures to suit himself, has gained nothing for the same problem that he has tried to solve by distorting the Word of God, still remains, that is, to reconcile human responsibility with the absolute certainty of all future events; for God's foreknowledge makes all future events just as certain as His foreordination. There can be no alternative.
The sovereignty of God makes all events certain, but that does not dispense with man's responsibility, for that which God hath ordained, He executes by means; He hath established laws by which His intelligent creature shall be governed, and man is responsible to obey God's laws. The fact that he cannot do so simply reveals the total depravity of his nature, but by no means releases him from his obligation.
God's foreordination of the salvation of Paul on the Damascus road made his redemption certain, but it was the means that God provided in the Covenant of Grace, that is, the sacrificial death of Christ that saved him. And it was Paul's responsibility to heed the gospel.
When God establishes laws and provides for the wide spread proclamation of the gospel, responsibility rests upon men. The Bible clearly teaches that man is a responsible being. The Apostle after his conversion was not free from responsibility. Paul who wrote the following words in his letter to the Eph. 1:5. "Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will," also wrote "Woe is me, if I preach not the gospel of Jesus Christ for necessity is laid upon me." It was the consciousness of his responsibilities that drove Paul ever onwards. He was three times beaten with rods, once stoned and left for dead, three times shipwrecked, in perils of the sea, of robbers, of the Gentiles, of his countrymen, in the wilderness, in the cities in labour and travail, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness, but none of these things quenched his spirit, nor freed him from the obligations to fulfil his responsibilities and commission.
The doctrine of the sovereignty of God does not in any way detract from the consciousness of responsibility. John Calvin burnt himself out in the city of Geneva, John Knox and Andrew Melville spent their lives in a continuous struggle to propagate the Gospel in Scotland, and death and exile were their close companions. They proclaimed and preached the great doctrine of the sovereignty of God; and both by precept and example, emphasized the responsibility of man.
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