What Does It Mean That God Is Sovereign?

by R.C. Sproul

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.

If there ever was such a time where nothing was, absolute nothingness, what would there be today? Nothing. Because the one absolute axiom of logic and of science is the principle ex nihilo nihil fit—“out of nothing, nothing comes.” And if there ever was a time when there was absolutely nothing, then nothingness would reign supreme. Nothingness would be immutably nothingness, sovereignly nothingness. And there would be no possibility of anything’s existing.

If anything exists, then something, somewhere, somehow must have what Thomas Aquinas called “necessary being,” which means the power of being that is not dependent or derived but is located within oneself. And if it is essential and intrinsic to something to be, then that being must be an eternal being.

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.

While the philosophers were debating these things, Paul told them that there is One who is eternal, whose power is so powerful, whose sovereignty is so great that He transcends being, motion, and life, because apart from Him nothing can be, and apart from Him nothing can move.

A point of singularity that was around for eternity would never explode. It would remain eternally inert unless acted on by an outside force that has the capacity of movement. Something must have the ability to move within itself. Something must have life within itself. Something must have the power of being within itself, or quite simply, nothing could move, nothing could live, nothing could be.

The divine imperative is spoken, and by the power of the Almighty’s Word, the lights come on and the ocean begins to teem with life, and motion and being fill the universe because of this great God in heaven who has the power of being within Himself and who alone has the ability to call worlds out of nothing, to bring life out of death, motion out of inertia, being out of nothingness.

Just looking at creation should drive us to our knees. In creation we see reflected unspeakable, ineffable majesty, sovereignty, dominion, power, and glory. That’s our God, without whom we can’t wiggle a finger. But because we can wiggle our finger, we know the God of heaven.

Fallen humanity knows that if we can do away with the Christian doctrine of creation, if we can do away with the very first verse of the Old Testament, then we can destroy Judeo-Christianity at its root and enjoy the freedom of doing anything we want to do. The attack on creation is fallen man’s attempt at a declaration of independence from the Creator.

What God creates, He sustains and upholds by the power of His might. We understand that we can do nothing apart from the sustaining power of God, as the Apostle Paul said to the Athenians on Mars Hill: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

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.

Christians also believe in free will, but the free will that we believe in is not the humanistic or pagan version of it.

One secular idea that has been pervasive in the church today is the humanistic doctrine of human freedom that says that our will, even in our fallen condition, remains indifferent and equally able to incline ourselves to the good or to the evil.

It ignores the biblical revelation that though we have the power of choosing, our choices are in bondage to sin. Only the power of God the Holy Spirit can rescue us from that bo...

Some say God is sovereign, but God’s sovereignty is limited by human freedom. If that were the case, then who is sovereign?

We have been given a measure of freedom by our Creator, but our freedom is always and everywhere limited by God’s freedom.

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 th...

If there is one maverick molecule in this universe running free from the sovereign control of God, we have no reason to believe any future promise that God has made, because that one maverick molecule may be the very thing that will destroy those plans.

“God from all eternity did . . . freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass” (WCF 3.1).

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.”

We then examined more carefully what the confession really means. It goes on to say that secondary causes are not eliminated; nor is violence done to the will of man. God is not the author or doer of sin. Centuries earlier, Augustine said that as Christians who believe in a sovereign God, we have to affirm that, in some sense, God must ordain whatsoever comes to pass.

Some people are quick to bring up the concept of God’s “permissive will.” This concept has been invented as a way to excuse God from responsibility for those things we don’t want to assign to Him. But God knows what’s going to happen before it happens. He knows what I am going to say before I say it. He knows what I am going to do before I do it. Does God have the power to stop me? Does God have the right to stop me if He so chooses? If He permits me to commit a sin, He has chosen to permit me. If He chooses to permit it, He deems it w...

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.

It was an unthinkable idea to the American public that God could possibly be involved in such a calamity, because apparently they never read Isaiah 45: “I am the LORD, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; . . . I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and I create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things” (Isa. 45:5–7).

Now, the same people who were praying for God to bless America were the people who thought it completely impossible that God could judge America. 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.

But our understanding of God has degenerated into a cosmic bellhop, a celestial Santa Claus, who exists to serve our needs and to give us nice things when we inquire after Him, but we will not bow before His sovereignty that extends over all things.

Every time we sin, we challenge God’s sovereign right to command what we should do. Some Christians believe that God is sovereign over nature and history and morality but not over His grace. They deny that He has the eternal inherent right to give His mercy to whom He will give mercy.

I’ll conclude with Romans 11:36: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” From Him: He is the source, the author of all that is good, true, beautiful, and real. Through Him: by means of His sovereign power and agency. 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.

“You are required to believe, to affirm, to teach, and to preach everything the Bible teaches, not what you want the Bible to teach”—I

The truth of God never depends on my submission to it for its truthfulness.

Recently I was reading Calvin’s careful exegesis of John 6 and Romans 9, where he made the casual observation, as Augustine did, that this doctrine of predestination is taught in sacred Scripture. And it suddenly hit me that all these years I have been telling people it’s somewhat difficult to perceive in Scripture and that I understand the struggle we have with the doctrine.

All that time I didn’t realize that as I was trying so hard to be nice to people, I was slandering the Holy Spirit. I was accusing God of being muddled, of being less than clear in this doctrine that Martin Luther called the cor ecclesiae, “the heart of the church.”

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.

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.

We believe that God is sovereign in His power. We believe that God is sovereign in His authority. But here is where the disembarkation point rests. Is God sovereign in His grace? Does God determine from the foundation of the world who will be redeemed, or does the determining factor of our salvation rest with us rather than with Him?

Ultimately, is salvation of the Lord or is it of man? Is it of His grace, sovereignly distributed, or is it by...

Pelagianism and humanism have always insisted that the decisive critical point is in the will of man. That is simply not Christian. That is an affront against the sovereignty of God’s grace. And today, the church is being held in a death grip by the ancient Pelagian heresy that casts an...

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