An AI-produced transcript of my 9/24/17 sermon:
500 years ago, this October, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. And so this is the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation this year. It’s an event in history truly worth celebrating. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Bucer, and a host of other Reformers are rightly regarded as heroes of the faith. It’s important for us to know who they are, to know their stories, to know their beliefs. What convictions drove them? How did God use them? What did they teach? And what did they do?
The Great Reformation could really be called the Great Recovery because in so many ways that’s what it was. It was all about recovering and rediscovering and reclaiming great biblical truths that had been lost or compromised. Great biblical truths that the people of God need to know for their salvation, for their comfort, for effective and faithful living as citizens of God’s kingdom.
One of the great truths taught in Scripture that had actually been taught by many of the great theologians in the early and medieval church like Augustine, and then lost by the time of the Reformation, that was then rediscovered by the Reformers, is the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of God. This teaching on God’s sovereignty was so central to virtually all of the Reformers that Reformed theology has become synonymous with believing in God’s sovereignty. There’s actually a lot more to the Reformed faith than just God’s sovereignty, but the Reformed faith has become virtually synonymous with this belief in the sovereignty of God.
The Reformers certainly had their differences in a lot of areas and on various theological issues, but here they were all united. Here they contended as one man for the faith and for the truth of God. They were united in teaching God’s sovereignty, including God’s sovereignty in salvation. Of course, God’s sovereignty is most associated with John Calvin, and the term “Calvinism” has actually come to be used as a label for those who believe in God’s sovereignty, even though, again, there’s really much more to Calvinism than just believing in God’s sovereignty.
But it wasn’t just John Calvin among the Reformers. This was a prominent theme for virtually all of the Reformers to teach on from God’s Word. It was certainly there for Luther. In fact, one of Luther’s greatest works was written in response to one of the great scholars of the day, Erasmus. It’s a book that that was titled “The Bondage of the Will.” It is a defense of God’s absolute sovereignty in salvation. Man is in bondage to sin since the fall, and God has mercy on whom he will, he shows mercy to whom he will, and he hardens whom he will harden. Luther says to Erasmus, “your thoughts of God are too human.” You must look at God the way the Scriptures present us to him as the sovereign king over all, as a God who is sovereign in mercy, sovereign in salvation.
Now, I know a lot of you are already familiar with this truth of God’s sovereignty. Predestination, the five points of Calvinism, providence — these are all familiar to you, and that’s wonderful. I know for some of you, when you became a Calvinist, it was almost like a second conversion experience, because coming to understand the sovereignty of God really does reorient your worldview at the deepest level. For others of you, this may be new, and I want you to understand you don’t have to agree with every single thing, you don’t have to have answers to every single question that might be raised — that’s okay. This is one of those things over which Christians have differed. But I hope by the time we come to the end of this this morning, you will see the beauty and the wonder of God’s sovereignty, and how useful this doctrine is in our lives as Christians every day.
What do we mean by the sovereignty of God? What did the Reformers mean by the sovereignty of God? Even though this teaching has been controversial at times in church history, it is, quite frankly, very easy to find in the Scriptures. And so the best thing to do is to turn to the Word. I want to give you some passages here with a little bit of commentary. We’ll play Bible hopscotch — I’m just going to jump from one passage to the next, where this truth is clearly taught.
In Isaiah 46:9-10, God says, through His prophet, “I am God, and there is no other. I am God, and there is none like Me. For I declare the end from the beginning and from ancient times, things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I shall do all My pleasure.” In effect, God is saying through the prophet Isaiah, this is what it means for God to be God. It means God is sovereign. He’s the sovereign Lord. He says, “My plans come to pass. My purpose will stand.” You and I can’t say that. A lot of our plans fail. A lot of our purposes get thwarted. You get frustrated because you’re not sovereign. You don’t always get your way. But God does not get frustrated. He doesn’t have that problem. God is God because He’s sovereign. And because He’s sovereign, He’s happy. God never has a crisis. God never gets surprised by something. God is never caught off guard. That’s Isaiah 46.
Psalm 115:3 says, “Our God is in the heavens He does as He pleases.” This is a great definition of God’s sovereignty. It means God rules His creation. God is in heaven reigning over all. He does with His creation as he pleases.
In Daniel 4, we find Nebuchadnezzar, a pagan king, converting to the worship of the true God and confessing this truth. He came to see that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is sovereign. As an arrogant pagan emperor, he took credit for all his great accomplishments, building a statue to himself so that he might be worshipped. But God humbled him. God dehumanized him for a season, making him bestial. But when He finally returned to his senses, he recognized the true God: “I bless the Most High and praise and honor Him who lives forever, for His dominion is an everlasting dominion and His kingdom is from generation to generation. All the inhabitants of the earth are counted as nothing. He does according to His will with the army of heaven and among the peoples of the earth. No one can restrain His hand or say to Him, what have you done?”
Nebuchadnezzar confesses the absolute sovereignty of God. He confesses God rules over all of history and all of creation. All the actions of men and all the actions of angels are under His control. The rising and falling of nations. It all happens according to His plan. Nebuchadnezzar, of course, in confessing this, recognizes his own authority and his own empire are under God and exist only at God’s good pleasure. He recognizes God is God, which means God is sovereign.
Further, God’s sovereignty means there’s no such thing as chance or fortune or luck. Proverbs 16.33 says, “The lot is cast” — this would be like rolling dice — “but every decision is from the Lord.” In other words, every time the lot is cast, the Lord controls the outcome. Every time the dice are rolled in Vegas, it’s under God’s control. Nothing happens by mere chance. It’s always part of God’s plan.
Or take Proverbs 19.21. The wisdom literature is full of confessions of God’s sovereignty because to be wise, you must humble yourself before God and see that God is sovereign. Proverbs 19.21 says, “A man plans his way, but the counsel of the Lord comes to pass.” Recognizing that the free actions of men are actually predetermined by God is wise. Yes, we cause things in the creation. We plan things in the creation. But God is the ultimate cause of everything. His plan that always comes to pass. So the free actions of men are predetermined by God and used by God to fulfill His plans. Our plans don’t always come to pass. God’s plans always do come to pass.
James can be understood as a commentary on the Bible’s wisdom literature, In chapter 4, James writes, “Don’t say tomorrow we will go and do thus and such because you don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Your life is a vapor.” That’s from Ecclesiastes — your life is vaporous. “Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wills, if the Lord wills it, we shall live and do this or that.” James says, “This is wisdom — don’t boast in your plans because they may not come to fruition. Don’t boast in your plans because God is sovereign. He’s in control. He’s in control of every single event in history. Everything unfolds according to His eternal plan.” And so whatever you intend to do, remind yourself, it will only come to pass if God wills it.
Ephesians 1:11, Paul says, “God works all things according to the counsel of His will.” When Paul speaks of the counsel of God’s will, it’s basically like saying God has a script and this script is going to be acted out in history. God has a blueprint for everything that will come to pass. He has a design for history that goes right down to the details and will be fulfilled. From the greatest events to the smallest events, from the largest star to the smallest subatomic particle, it’s all under God’s control. It’s all under God’s sovereignty. No matter what happens, everything is always going according to God’s plan. Even those things that seem to be contradictory to God’s will and to God’s goodness happen according to the counsel of His will. This means we must trust that God has a good plan that includes those things in His world that are evil.
Proverbs 21:1: “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord like a river channel” It doesn’t matter if it’s Barack Obama or Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un, God is in charge of the rulers of the earth and He directs their actions as He wishes. He rules the rulers. He’s sovereign over the heart of the king.
Proverbs 16.4 says, “The Lord made everything for Himself, even the wicked, for the day of wrath.” Again, we see here everything serves God’s ends. Everything serves God’s purposes. He even uses wicked men and their wickedness as part of His plan. Even the wicked will serve God’s purposes. And of course, He does so. He uses the wicked and their wickedness without sinning Himself. As one of the Reformers said, God uses sin sinlessly.
I think we have a great illustration of this in the Joseph story. Joseph’s brothers had sinned against him. They had sold him into slavery wrongfully and then lied about it to cover it up. But through a strange twist of events, Joseph ends up in charge of Egypt as Pharaoh’s right-hand man. And as it turns out, he ends up saving his family during a time of famine. And when he finally reveals himself to his brothers, he says, “you sold me into slavery, but God sent me here to save many lives.” You sold me into slavery but God was behind it all, sending me here that many people in the end might be saved. He says in Genesis 50, “what you intended for evil, God used for good.”
Joseph’s brothers and God were involved in the same action of selling Joseph into slavery and everything that happened downstream from that. They meant it for evil but God did it for a good purpose. God ordained all of it, all of these events in Joseph’s life, including all the ways he would send against so that many people might be saved. God had a good purpose and the evil he included in the life of Joseph. In fact, one thing I think that’s interesting is that Joseph, knowing that what happened to him was part of God’s grand plan and design for his life, forgave his brothers. It’s easier to forgive people who sin against you if you recognize that their sin against you is part of God’s plan for your life and is going to be used by God for your good.
I think the Job story furthers this point about God using sin for good in his ultimate plan. We know from the opening chapters of the story that Satan is really behind Job’s misery. The Sabaeans come and steal Job’s oxen. His flocks are destroyed by fire. The Chaldeans slaughter his servants. A tornado takes out his children. Satan himself strikes Job with a painful skin disease. And yet when Job, who is called a righteous man, attributes all of this not to the Sabaeans or Chaldeans or wind or fire, not even to Satan, but goes to the ultimate cause of it all, the Lord. He says, “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Because Job knows God is sovereign, he can find comfort in the midst of his pain. He says, “shall we not accept good from God and not evil?” He knows behind Satan’s work and behind all of these calamities, is the sovereign hand of God. And of course, that is our only comfort. If God’s not behind our suffering, there is no way to have comfort in the midst of disasters. There would be no guarantee that good will come out of them.
The supreme example of God including human evil in His righteous plan and using it for good is the crucifixion. The cross was the greatest act of human injustice and wickedness imaginable and yet God planned it down to the details. The very details were foretold in prophecy and they were fulfilled when Jesus is nailed to the cross. God planned it all. He planned to work through the actions of the Pharisees and Pilate and Judas and the Roman soldiers to bring about His plan of salvation.
And so when Peter is preaching in Acts chapter 2, he says to the very people who crucified Jesus, “Jesus was delivered to you by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God and you have by lawless hands crucified him.” He says, “You acted wickedly in crucifying Jesus but when you did so you were unwittingly fulfilling God’s purpose.” The cross fulfilled all these prophecies. It fulfilled ultimately God’s plan of salvation. It was all foreordained by God. It doesn’t cancel out their wickedness. What they did was really wicked. They’re responsible for their wickedness. But it also was used by God for the good of His people to bring about salvation.
And of course all of this helps us understand perhaps the most famous passage concerning God’s sovereignty in all of Scripture, Romans 8.28. It would be great to look at this verse in its wider context, especially as it flows into Romans 9, but just one little snippet of it. “God works all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” What does this promise mean? It means no matter how many bad things happen to you, God uses them for good. What a comfort this is!
John Calvin says God governs the whole world for the sake of our salvation. God rules over the whole cosmos for the sake of bringing good to us. Matthew 10 Jesus gives the same kind of comfort, but in His typical way of using a really specific example, Jesus says “are not two sparrows sold for one penny and yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from the will of your Father.”
Jesus’ point is this that God is paying attention to the sparrows and if He’s overseeing the sparrows, caring for them and providing for them, how much more does He pay attention to you and oversee your life? How much more does He in His providence care for you and provide for you? There’s comfort in this knowing that nothing happens apart from the will of our Heavenly Father.
There are passages that describe God’s control of different aspects of His creation. There are passages that describe God’s control of the weather. It’s interesting in the case of Job, Job’s children were destroyed by the wind — and yet Job confesses that God controls the wind. Isaiah 10 shows God controlling wars, raising up a king sending him to actually punish his own people, but then punishing that king because he became arrogant. Amos 3 says if calamity comes upon a city, the Lord has done it. Amos 4 says God controls plagues. We could go on and on and on — in scripture after scripture, on page after page of the Bible, it’s plain the Lord has planned and controls everything that comes to pass.
This is true when we talk about salvation as well. God is sovereign over salvation. He dispenses salvation. He works salvation. He gives salvation as He pleases. And He has freely chosen a people to save out of the mass of fallen humanity — a great multitude no man can number.
In Ephesians 1, Paul says God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, predestinating us to adoption as sons according to the good pleasure of His will. God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world freely and unconditionally. God chose us and united us to His Son. He predestined us for adoption that we would become sons of God through faith.
Acts 13:48 is really interesting. Paul has preached in Antioch. Some believed and some didn’t. Luke, the narrator of the book of Acts, says “as many as had been ordained to eternal life believed.” When John Calvin starts his discussion of election in his Institutes, he starts out with this empirical observation, that when the gospel is preached, some believe and some don’t. Why do some believe the gospel when it’s preached and others do not? Is it because those who believe are smarter or perhaps they’re more moral than others? No, Scripture is clear we’re all spiritually dead, enslaved to sin and Satan. The reason some believe and others do not when the gospel is preached is because of God’s work — those who are brought to faith were appointed by God to eternal life and so God works faith in them as they hear the word. It’s the outworking of what the Reformers call unconditional election.
God chose us based not on anything in us, including foreseeing some decision we would make in the future. That would actually be a post-destination, not predestination. That would make us God’s electors rather than God’s elect. No, God freely and unconditionally chose a people according to His good pleasure and Jesus the Son died for those people and the Holy Spirit works in them through the means of grace to bring them to faith.
God is absolutely sovereign. He’s sovereign over history. He’s sovereign over creation. He’s sovereign over our individual lives. He’s sovereign over salvation. But obviously this is a teaching not without its difficulties. And that’s why it’s been controversial at times in church history. Questions abound. People ask if this is true what about free will? Does this make us robots? Or does this make us puppets with God pulling the strings? And further, if God is sovereign over all of our lives and all of our actions in this way how can we be accountable for our actions? And what about the problem of evil? If God’s plan includes evils and the calamities that happen in history, doesn’t that make God the author of evil? Doesn’t that make God responsible for evil? And what about God’s sovereignty in salvation? If this means that God chooses who is saved and who isn’t, how is that fair? How is that just?
I’m not going to try to answer all those questions for you this morning. Sermons can’t do that. If you want to talk about it more come find me. There are a lot of great books to read. There are a lot of good conversations we can have about these things. But I do want to give you a couple of analogies from Scripture that are very, very helpful in piecing all of this together.
We know we’re on the right track because these questions I just raised about accountability and about evil and about the justice of God choosing some while passing by others, are questions that Scripture itself raises, particularly in Romans 9.
Romans 9-11 is really a key section in the book of Romans. It’s really the fullest discussion we have of these issues in all of Scripture. And the point of these chapters is not to give us some kind of abstract discussion of God’s sovereignty or a kind of systematic theology of election. It’s really the next step in Paul’s discussion in the letter of Romans.
In the first eight chapters of Romans, Paul spells out this glorious salvation that God has accomplished through His promised Messiah Jesus Christ. But then there’s this little problem — God’s covenant people, the Israelites, have mostly rejected Jesus. Does this mean that God’s plan has somehow failed or that God has not been true to His promises? Does Israel’s unbelief mean that God’s promises and plans have not come to pass? How do we understand Israel’s rejection of the Messiah?
Paul shows us Israel’s rejection of the Messiah in his day was part of God’s grand plan all along. And in the end all Israel will be saved. God will prove His righteousness in the end. Indeed I think what Paul’s doing in Romans 9-11 — showing that God’s ultimate purpose is the formation of a new Israel.
And so in Romans 9 Paul tells the story of election as it unfolded in history. Paul shows we can never have a claim on God’s mercy. The really the amazing thing is not that God chooses to save some and leave others in their sin but that He chooses to save anyone at all.
But in explaining how God shapes the histories and destinies of both individuals and nations in these chapters, Paul uses one key illustration drawn from the Old Testament that I think really helps us as we wrestle through the big questions that are raised here. Paul says God is the potter and we are the clay, and He fashions each of us as He wills for His own purposes. He makes some into vessels for honor and others into vessels of dishonor. Paul says that is the potter’s right. The potter has power over the clay. The potter has the right to do with the clay as he wills.
And in verse 20 of Romans 9, the clay tries to talk back to God and say, “why does He still find fault? Why does God still find fault, for who resists His will?” Now that very question presupposes God’s absolute sovereignty. It means we’ve been teaching the right thing if we get that question. And so the question is raised. How can God blame me for my sin? How can God hold me accountable for His sin? When I was just fulfilling His purpose anyway. When God’s the one who crafted this particular lump of clay this way.
And Paul basically says, Shut up. Be quiet. You can’t talk that way. He says “oh man who are you to talk back to God? Will the thing form say to him who formed it, why have you made me thus?” God is God. God is the potter and God has His prerogatives. And so if God wants to raise up a Pharaoh so that he can manifest his power in destroying that same Pharaoh, God can do that. If He wants to harden the heart of Pharaoh (who of course is also hardening his own heart) God can do that. God formed Pharaoh into a vessel of wrath to make his power known. That doesn’t sit right with us. But that’s what God has done, and we have to humble ourselves before God as the potter and the sculptor of the destinies of every nation and every individual.
God’s design as the potter is to put on a grand display of who He is. It is to make all different kinds of vessels to show His power and His wisdom as the potter. He wants to show off His mercy and salvation and He does so in those He prepares for glory. And He wants to make His power known and His justice known in the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. That is God’s great purpose.
Think back to Proverbs 16:4 — really kind of a one verse summary of Paul’s discussion in Romans 9. God has made everything for His own ends, even the wicked for the day of wrath. Everything God does serves His purposes. Everything God does serves to display His glory — the awesome beauty and wonder and wisdom of who He is as a God who rules over all. A God who reigns, a God who saves, a God who destroys, a God who serves, a God who judges, a God who redeems. He is the potter and we are the clay.
That’s the first analogy. God has the right as the potter, as the creator, to form us for whatever purpose He desires. Paul says “what if God desires to show Himself?” Well He does desire to show Himself, so that we ,the vessels of mercy He has prepared for glory, might bask in His glory and behold His glory.
Now, that may not be a complete answer to every question that can be raised but I think it’s a helpful analogy for understanding God’s sovereignty. There’s another analogy Scripture uses that I think also helps us. It’s in Psalm 139. David is contemplating God as His creator — he is the God who fills all space with His presence, he is a God of love, a God of kindness, a God of wisdom. In the midst of all of this, David says “in your book were written all the days fashioned for me when as yet there were none of them.”
David pictures God as an author having written a book — a book that contains the story of David’s own life. David pictures his life as a story and God is not merely a character inside the story, He’s the storyteller. David says he looks at his life as a story. Behind every story is a storyteller. God is the author of his life story. And so David says, essentially, “before I was even born God wrote the story of my life, the plot of my life with all its twists and turns, with all its ups and downs, and, yes, the ending of the story — it was all scripted by the divine author ahead of time.: He says my life is a book, a story authored by God.
We tend to think of our lives in narrative form, don’t we? Life is a story, with plot that gives meaning and purpose. Your life has a narrative flow to it. God is the author. God is the storyteller. God has written the script. I think this analogy also helps us solve some of the apparent difficulties with this doctrine.
If we’re characters in God’s story, think about the relationship of an author to his story. Take The Hobbit by Tolkien — take one episode in that story. Why does Bilbo Baggins tell riddles to the dragon when he meets the dragon in his lair? You can answer that question in different ways. You could say, “well Bilbo is a rather clever hobbit and he enjoys a good riddle and so it was his choice to tell riddles because it’s an aspect of his personality. It was his free choice to tell riddles because that’s who he is he’s a hobbit.” That’s one way to answer the question.
But you can answer that question in another way. You could say Bilbo told riddles because Tolkien, as the author of the story, as the creator of Bilbo and the one who has written his story, predestined Bilbo to tell riddles. Tolkien ordained for him to tell riddles. Tolkien wrote the story this way — and that’s why Bilbo tells riddles. That answer is true too because Bilbo doesn’t exist Middle Earth doesn’t exist apart from Tolkien. Tolkien created Middle Earth. He created Bilbo Baggins, he ordained or predestines everything that happens there in that world.
Both of those answers are true: you can answer in terms of Bilbo’s free will and his personality, or you can answer in terms of the author’s purposes and intentions. This is what theologians and philosophers call compatibilism — this notion that our choices are both freely made according to our preferences and predetermined by God as part of his plan. Even if we can’t fully explain how both are true, they are. Another word sometimes used for this is concurrence — concurrence says God is the ultimate cause of everything but there are real secondary causes, real creaturely causes, so that God and the creature can cause the same event in different ways. God does not cause events from outside of the creation as if he were manipulating us like puppets; rather God is in his creation, acting in his creation, working in his creation, as the ultimate cause of everything. But he works in each aspect of his creation according to its nature. The creatures themselves have a real kind of secondary power of causality as well. Again and again, Scripture asserts both that man is a free and responsible creature, accountable to God for his actions, and that God foreordains all that comes to pass, including the free choices of men. So no, we’re not puppets on a string with God manipulating us; we are characters in God’s story. We can’t fully explain how all this works — how God’s sovereignty and human responsibility fit together — so there’s all kinds of mystery here, but it clearly what Scripture teaches.
When Paul comes to the end of his discussion of God’s sovereignty in salvation and in history in Romans 11, he recognizes he has not answered every question. There is still mystery — and so he exclaims, “oh the depths of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out.” There’s no way we can fathom all that God does. Martin Luther says “if God’s justice were such as he could be judged just by human reckoning it clearly would not be divine and it would in no way differ from human justice but in as much as he is the one true God, wholly incomprehensible and inaccessible to man’s understanding, it is reasonable indeed inevitable that his justice should be incomprehensible.” Luther goes on to say his judgments are unsearchable — if we could search them out they wouldn’t be unsearchable! What is man compared to God? No, we don’t have answers to every question, and we don’t deserve answers, we can’t demand answers. We live with mystery. We humble ourselves before this truth. We recognize God is God and we are not.
God’s story for our lives often includes hard things — great evils and great trials — but we trust that all of these events are part of a beautiful story God is telling. I think The Hobbit is such a wonderful book — but think about all the evil things that happen in it. Tolkien caused the war of five armies, which caused a great loss of life and property, including the death of the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield. Tolkien created Smog the dragon and caused Smog to destroy the city of Laketown. Now it would be wrong to say that Tolkien is guilty of these things and to press charges against Tolkien for destroying the city of Laketown or for murdering Thorin Oakenshield, even though he wrote those things into his story. But those different dark threads are woven together into a beautiful tapestry. Tolkien has a good reason for the bad things he includes in the story. And so it is with God — we may not always know what that reason is, but God has a good reason for the evil he includes in the story he has written. He’s not the author of evil as such, but he uses evil for good in his story. God doesn’t always tell us what those reasons are for including evil. Deuteronomy 29 says the secret things belong to the Lord our God. He has reasons and we must trust that his reasons are good. Calvin quotes Augustine saying “by an inexplicable manner of operation that is not done without the will of God which is in itself even contrary to his will because without his will it could not have been done at all, and yet God wills not unwillingly but willingly, for God for as the God of goodness would not suffer evil to be done at all unless as the God of omnipotence he could bring out of that evil good.” As the God of goodness, he would not include evil in his story unless, as the God of omnipotence, he could bring good out of that evil. He brings light out of the darkness; he brings good out of evil; he uses evil for good. God is the author of the world’s story. We are characters in his story. We just have to know God has a good purpose and design in everything he does.
So, quickly then, what are some things this might mean for us? I’ve already hinted at how this truth can impact our day to day lives, but let me point you a few other directions. Calvin says this teaching on God’s sovereignty produces the most delightful benefits. Calvin says there is nothing more useful than this doctrine — he says “the doctrine of God’s providence makes one thankful in prosperity, patient in adversity, and gives us a wonderful security about the future.” This teaching is important because it assures us of the graciousness of our salvation. This is what the reformers meant by “grace alone.” God is sovereign in salvation and that means we make no independent contribution to our salvation because there’s no independent anything in God’s universe. The Reformers anchored their teaching on salvation in this truth of God’s gracious and unconditional election of a people in Christ. But this didn’t drive them to despair, as if the question “how can I know I’m elect?” could not be answered. The Reformers said you can know you’re elect not because you can have access to God’s secret decree but by looking to Christ who is the elect one. Calvin called Christ “the mirror of election.”
At the same time, this truth that assures us and gives us confidence, it puts us in our place and it puts God in his place. It cuts out from under us any self righteousness because it reminds us that our whole salvation from beginning to end is God’s work. We were chosen by the Father in the Son from before the foundation of the world; we were purchased by the Son when he offered his sacrificial blood to the Father on the cross, laying down his life for his sheep; and we are brought to faith and repentance and enabled to persevere when the Spirit is poured out upon us through the Son in an act of irresistible grace. It is humbling to know our utter dependence upon God’s grace for our salvation. Every stitch in the garment of salvation is sown by God.
This also gives us great confidence in the things God has called us to do. It makes us bold in prayer and in evangelism. This teaching, rightly understood, does not make us lazy. It does not mean we resign ourselves passively to whatever happens — that would be fatalism, not Calvinism. Calvinism, following scripture, teaches us that God ordains the ends and the means to those ends, and so if God has ordained for you to have your daily bread, he probably ordained for you to work each day as well to earn it. If God has ordained for you to have faithful children, he probably ordained for you to do a lot of discipline and a lot of instruction with your kids along the way. If God has ordained for you to receive certain blessings, he probably ordained for you to pray for them because those who ask are the ones who receive. If God has ordained the salvation of the nations, then he has ordained that we preach the gospel to every creature and that we send missionaries to the ends of the earth.
The flip side of this is that if God were not sovereign, there would be no reason to think he could answer our prayers or keep his promises about saving the nations. If you’re getting in your car to go down to the beach on vacation and you pray for safety as you pull out of the driveway, what are you praying for? Your prayer only makes sense if God in some way oversees and controls all the other cars on the interstate — otherwise why pray that prayer?
Finally, I think this truth gives us great hope. It is encouraging to know that God has written our stories. To know this God is the author of our story fills us with peace and joy no matter our circumstances. It makes us fearless. There’s 17th century diary entry from a soldier who says he’d rather face a thousand Turks than one Calvinist who believes he’s doing the will of God because that one Calvinist who thinks he’s doing God’s will becomes an unstoppable force. He knows God is with him. God has given us in his word a sneak preview of how the story is going to end — we know that this story has a happy ending. We know glory awaits. And so we can persevere in the present, no matter what obstacles or trials or difficulties God has written into our stories, whatever dark threads he’s woven into the tapestry, we know that God will work it all out for our good and for his ultimate glory in the end. Because God is sovereign, he is happy, and because God is sovereign and happy, he can guarantee to us a happy ending as well. This is the promise of God’s sovereignty — it’s the guarantee of a happy ending.
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