What Does It Mean That God Is Sovereign?

by R.C. Sproul

The problem with nothing is that when we say, “There is nothing,” we are speaking nonsense because the verb is is a form of the verb to be, and the one thing that nothingness lacks is “be-ness.” So, we can’t speak of nothingness, and we can’t say, “There is nothing” or “There was nothing,” because to say that there is such a thing as nothing would be to attribute something to it, when nothing is not.

There isn’t anything that expresses more dramatically the holiness and majesty of God than the idea that God is sovereign over nothing, because it means that God in His greatness alone has the capacity of being within Himself, in and of Himself eternally, independently, without any assistance from matter, energy, or anything outside Himself.

“In the beginning.” Eternity has no beginning. Genesis begins with a statement about the beginning not of eternity but of time, the beginning not of God but of the created realm.

So to talk about the beginning of anything, there must first be something that eternally transcends nothingness, that which eternally is in the beginning—God.

What is that going to remind you of? Motion, life, being. You could not wiggle your finger if there were no source of motion, if there were no source of life, if there were no source of being. If you can wiggle your finger, then God is sovereign. It’s that simple, because without sovereign being, there is no being. Without sovereign being, there is no life. And without sovereign being, nothing can move. Simple and profound.

In stark contrast to that is the biblical teaching that whatever God creates, He sustains. And not only do we owe God as Creator our own origin of human existence, but we also owe our Creator our moment-to-moment existence. That is to say, we cannot exist for the next five seconds without the sustaining power of God. What God creates, He sustains and upholds by the power of His might.

If God is out of the picture, so is life. If God disappears, so does all motion. And if God should die, all being disappears with Him. Whatever God creates, He sustains. Whatever He creates, He owns, and whatever He owns, He rules. He rules over all things.

God is sovereign, not we ourselves, and His sovereignty extends to all things, not only the creation of the world but the sustaining and governing of the world, and what we describe as the laws of nature only describe the ordinary ways that God in His sovereignty governs nature.

But if God doesn’t ordain everything that comes to pass, then God isn’t sovereign. And if God isn’t sovereign, then God is not God.”

But it is good that there is evil, or evil could not be, because all things are under the scope of God’s sovereignty, including our wickedness, which He uses for His righteous purposes.

If you pray that God would bless a nation, certainly in your prayer you must allow for the possibility that He might not, that indeed, if He’s capable of bringing prosperity and peace to a nation, then He must also be capable of withdrawing that blessing and even bringing calamity and wrath on it.

Not only do all things come from Him, but they come by means of His power. To Him: the purpose for all things is not me. It is not you. It is Him. All things are from Him, through Him, and to Him, or we could say for Him. And it ends with a doxology: “To Him be glory forever.” Soli Deo gloria, to God alone the glory.

Every time we discount the scope of the sovereignty of God over all things, we rob Him of His glory.

The first thing we have in view when we’re talking about sovereignty is the power of God. When we say that God is sovereign, we are saying that His power is supreme in all reality, and no power in heaven or on earth can possibly resist the power of God. If there is a conflict between His power and lesser powers, the outcome is not in dispute. God’s power is ultimate. His power is sovereign.

Second, we reference His authority, His intrinsic and inherent right to impose obligations on His creatures, to bind our consciences, to proclaim our duty by saying to us, “Thou shalt not do this or thou shalt do that.” God has sovereign authority over me. If there is a conflict between what I want and what God commands, where does the authority reside? We don’t have to debate that among Christians. God possesses sovereign authority, and that authority in no way rests on my agreement or submission to it.

But our Lord says, “You can’t.” And we didn’t. He uses a universal negative proposition: “No one can.” It’s not “No one may.” “Can” has to do with power, with ability. Nobody, Jesus is saying, has the ability in and of himself to come to Jesus unless a necessary condition is met.

It pleased the Lord to rescue you from death, not because of any foreseen righteousness in you but according to the good pleasure of His will. And the only reason He did that was to honor His Son, to make Him the firstborn of many brethren and so that our Lord could see the travail of His soul and be satisfied. You are the gift of the Father to the Son, and the only merit that enters into this transaction is the merit of the Son, not yours and not mine.

Man’s freedom is limited by God’s sovereignty (not the other way around).

So if we really believe in the sovereignty of God, we will not only believe that God is sovereign in His power and in His authority, but we will also see that He is absolutely sovereign in His grace.

In His sovereignty, God has the capacity and ability to work through the sinful decisions and wicked choices of His creatures to bring about His sovereign will, which is altogether righteous.

What God gave human beings in creation was the ability to make choices, but that ability was not unlimited. It was limited. The truth is that God is free and His creatures are free, but God is more free than His creatures are.

He didn’t destroy my freedom. He elevated it, because until He did that, I was a slave to my own wicked inclinations.

Free will does not mean autonomy; nor does it mean that as a creature you have the ability to incline yourself either to the good or to the bad with equal power. God says that by nature in your sin you’re a slave. You still have a will, you still have the ability to make choices, but your choices are wicked. You are morally incapable in and of yourself, until you are enabled by God the Holy Spirit, ever to choose the holy things of God.

You will choose according to the strongest inclination that you have at the moment. That’s the way human choice operates, and God knows that. And God has the wisdom and the power to work through our desires to bring about His plan.