Sermon Tone Analysis

*Sovereignty 11.*

Here I am up preaching, again.

You probably say, “Paul’s preaching; what will he be speaking about?

It will be the sovereignty of God again!” I’ve been stuck on the same topic for over a year now, and yes you are right: it’s the sovereignty of God again!

If you were here last time you will recall that I spoke about יהוה’s sovereignty over salvation: *[P]* “/Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne!”/

Now if God ordains and chooses those who are saved; what about the rest?

*[P]* Isn’t יהוה, by choosing some, in that same action, by default, not choosing others; and therefore also sovereign over those who are damned?

And if יהוה’s sovereignty stems from His creation, He made everything so He can do with it as He chooses, and since there is evil in the world; doesn’t this mean that God created evil, that evil came from Him?

They may seem like blasphemous thoughts but they seem to be logical conclusions of God being sovereign.

I mean, just how far does יהוה’s sovereignty extend?

So let us look this morning about “Sovereignty and the problem of evil”.

*[P]* I concluded my last message with [*Romans 11:36*/ //For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.

To Him be glory for eternity!

Amen./]

Does “/all things/” include evil?

The Westminster Confession states: *[P]* “/God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass/.”

Now that is not Scripture but a doctrinal statement – but it is an expression of what the Bible teaches on the sovereignty of God.

If you don’t believe that God ordains everything that comes to pass, you don’t believe in God!

Well, not in יהוה; but rather, a god of your own design!

If God is not sovereign, God is not God!

If there is even one maverick molecule in the universe—one atom running loose outside the scope of God’s sovereign ordination—we cannot have the slightest confidence that any promise God has ever made about the future will come to pass.

To determine the future, He must be in control of ALL.

The great message of atheism is that “chance” has causal power.

That is the dogma of evolutionists that is ubiquitous today: things came into being by chance.

The Bible talks about in [*Acts 17:24*/ //the God who made the world and all the things in it.

/(and of Him)/ being Lord of heaven and earth/] God’s sovereignty stems from His creation.

Yet again and again the view is expressed that we do not need to attribute the creation of the universe to God, for we know that it came to be through space plus time plus chance.

This is a lie!

This is nonsense!

Nothing cannot become something; no matter how long you leave it.

There is nothing that chance can do.

Chance is a perfectly good word to describe mathematic possibilities, but it is only a word.

It is not an entity, a being; chance is nothing.

It has no power because it has no being; therefore, it can exercise no influence over anything.

Yet, we have sophisticated scientists today who make sober statements declaring that the whole universe came into being by chance.

This is to say that nothing caused something, and there is no statement more anti-scientific than that.

Everything has a cause, and the ultimate cause, as we have seen, is God.

So, if God ordains everything that comes to pass, it seems that He must ordain evil.

And if God ordains evil, so the argument goes, He Himself is evil.

This morning I have brought something along to show you that may help explain: one of my loves is digging holes.

*[P]* There is a small shovel kept in the back of the car so that when we go to the beach I can get it out and dig a deep hole – great works of creation.

In fact it has been a lifelong ambition of mine to be a man who digs holes in the road.

I thought I would show you one of the holes I’ve dug today *[P]* – can you see the hole?

Of course you can’t – despite all my back breaking toil, the hole is not anything, it has no substance; it is made of nothing.

It is the absence of something!

The hole is real, it is there, you can fall in it – the holes I dig at the beach are a danger to anyone who might fall in them.

But the hole is emptiness, it is defined by the lack of what surrounds it – the hole is where there is a lack or absence of sand.

Now God is good – the theologians, with their penchant for making things complicated, say: “immutably good” – that means the goodness cannot change.

Now a good God created a good creation – that is יהוה’s witness about what He made: repeatedly Genesis chapter one says: “/And He saw that it was good/”.

It expressed the nature of the one who made it – it was good.

Good, but unlike God, mutably good.

That goodness can be altered.

Man was made with the possibility of changing in his conformity to the law of God.

A hole can be dug in that which was made perfect!

That hole is called “evil”.

Evil is defined as a negation or a lack of conformity to the standards of the good.

Did a good God, the Source of all that is, create evil?

No, He created good – evil is a lack of the goodness that He created; a hole in what He made perfect.

But like the hole down at the beach it is very real!

Evil is a lack of good, a lack of righteousness; lawlessness is a lack of lawfulness.

So you can only know lawlessness by first defining lawfulness, you can only know sin by defining righteousness; you can only know evil by knowing the good, knowing God.

Why has man no concept of his sinfulness?, because he has no concept of God, His holiness, His righteousness, His goodness.

The big question is this: “Does God do evil?”

*[P[* The Bible’s answer is absolutely clear and unequivocal: *[P]* God is absolutely incapable of performing evil.

Yet, if God is sovereign, then He ordains everything that comes to pass, and some of the things that come to pass are evil.

So, does God ordain evil?

*[P]* There is only one biblical answer to that question: *[P]* yes.

If God did not ordain evil, there would be no evil, because God is sovereign.

He ordained that His creatures should have the capacity for evil.

He did not force them to exercise that capacity, but He knew that they would exercise it.

At that point, He had a choice.

He could destroy the creation so as not to allow evil to happen.

The moment the Serpent came to Adam and Eve and began to suggest disobedience, God could have intervened – snuffed out the serpent, or Eve or Adam.

There would have been no sin.

But God, for reasons known only to Himself, made the decision to let it happen.

God did not sanction it, but He did not stop it.

In choosing not to stop it, He ordained it.

When God ordains anything, His purpose is altogether good.

Does this mean I think that in the final analysis evil really is good?

No.

I am saying it must be good that evil exists, because God sovereignly, providentially, ordains only what is good.

For example – evil was done to Joseph by His brothers but it ultimately worked for good: [*Genesis 50:20*/ //“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive./]

In terms of His eternal purpose, God has esteemed it good that evil should be allowed to happen in this world.

How would we see how good the good is without seeing the alternative, in the absence of that good?

Paul shows us this principle in [*1 Corinthians 11:19*/ //No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval./]

How would we see God’s abhorrence of evil and His righteous wrath without there being evil to display it upon?

How would we know the greatness of God’s love, grace, mercy, His heart to redeem without evil and the fall?

We needed the hole, the absence of who God is in order to appreciate the beauty of His being.

That does not mean that the sins that I commit, insofar as they contribute to God’s providential plan and government of world history, are actually virtues.

Judas’ treachery was part of the Divine providence in God’s plan for redeeming the world.

Judas could not have delivered Christ to Pilate apart from the providential decree of God.

We know that this was the predetermined counsel of God, and yet God did not put evil into the heart of Judas.

God did not coerce Judas to do his diabolical sin.

Therefore, Judas cannot stand up on the last day and say, “If it hadn’t been for me, there would have been no cross, no atonement, and no salvation—I’m the one who made it all possible.”

What Judas did was utterly evil, the Bible says: [*Matthew 26:24*/ //The Son of Man is going just as it is written about him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed!

It would be better for him if that man had not been born.”/

], but when God ordains all things that come to pass, He ordains not only the ends but also the means to those ends, and He works through all things to bring about His righteous purpose.

One of the most comforting verses of Scripture is: [*Romans 8:28*/ //And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose./]

Only a God of sovereign providence could make a promise like that.

This statement does not mean that all things /are/ good, but that all things work together /for/ good.