The other day I somehow stumbled upon @ZachRamsay. I think maybe cause he requested to follow me on twitter. One of his tweets peaked my interest so I followed the link which led me to this blog post called What Do You Mean When You Say God Is Sovereign?. It's been something that I've been thinking about a lot in the last several months, as I'm sure you know, with being sick and in MPD. The post outlines four different understandings of Sovereignty: meticulous sovereignty, providential sovereignty, providential oversight & influential oversight. I have feared meticulous sovereignty in the past and I think I tend to believe in providential sovereignty, but sometimes wonder about providential oversight.
I was thinking about this specifically last week. I had a conversation with a coworker last fall about prayer & fasting and was reminded of it. I mostly believe in providential sovereignty. God has something already ordained to happen and then He moves my heart to pray/fast for that thing to happen before it did. But then I was reminded of times in the OT when people would pray/fast specifically to change God's mind about something. I guess I get confused sometimes about that. How do the two work together?
I know that God is omniscient and is way beyond intelligent and doesn't necessarily fit into these categories. Sometimes when I'm trying to understand it I think about a world Robert Jordan created in his fantasy novel series Wheel of Time that I read when I was 13 or 14. Basically there's this portal that moves people into an alternate space of time - a place where in the past something happened differently and this world was created based on how the implications of that difference. In modern history, for example, there would be an alternate world that looked very different because Hitler died of venereal disease before WWII happened. In the book there were like infinity of these other worlds based on major and minor decisions that were different from the "real world". When I get really confused, sometimes I pretend that since God is omniscient it's possible that he has allllll of those possibilities in mind and operates using all of that knowledge to work out his active will.
For those of you who actually read this, of those 4 explanations of Sovereignty which do you tend to believe is how God operates?
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8 comments:
Haha. You have a much more spiritual blog than me. I ask people how often they vacuum. And you ask people their understandings of God's sovereignty. I wonder who will get more answers though?
you will haha. for sure. No one comments here anymore. p.s. I HATE THAT.
I will make a better comment as soon as I read the post you linked to...as of now, consider this a spam
I believe I land more on the providential sovereignty, but I also think that to a degree providential oversight makes sense. but in the end I most likely land closest to providential sovereignty.
Ok, Jess. Because you said you wished people would comment, here is my super long comment.
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I actually think that the four views are tied together more than people might initially think.
If God exercises providential sovereignty, that means that nothing happens apart from His will, and that everything that does happen is only "allowed" because it's according to His will. The "difference" between providential vs. meticulous sovereignty is that "secondary causes" are the direct, active cause of the effect. But who created every single secondary cause in the universe? God did. Who sustains every single secondary cause in the universe? God does.
Who fashioned the exact nature of every single secondary cause in the universe, so as to determine how it would act and "choose" in the future? God did. God did not "roll some dice" when creating the universe, or human beings, or the angels or demons. He didn't have some random number generator that fashioned "free wills" independently from His intentional design. No. Even if you believe that God created beings that have chosen evil (e.g. demons, or humans that fell into sin in Eden), it wasn't because God set them loose and they chose evil, and God just threw up His hands and said, "Well, I knew that was going to happen, but really - you can't say I'm directly responsible for how things are not." No, I don't think so. Because God is in control of everything, even if He causes things to turn out a certain way using what we would call "indirect" means, there's no real difference from if He did it "directly" Himself. Because He controls everything. He made every single indirect "cause", or at least the earlier causes of that "cause". I think the only difference between God being the "direct" cause vs. "indirect" cause of something is moral culpability.
God does not carry out sin as an act of His will/power. But God does ordain sinful actions, I believe, in the sense that He decides it will happen (as a result of sinful moral agents, whom are responsible for the sin that they carried out, but which God also ordained or decided would happen).
Anyways, I'm going to cut short here, but in summary here's what I believe God reveals to us in His Word (and which I think is evident through philosophy/logic as well):
God is in control of everything, which means that every single detail, including sin, has been decided by God will happen. That's different from saying that God does the sin. He just decides that it will happen and makes sure it happens (but as a result of sinful moral agents - e.g. me – and whatever other causal factors that are involved).
Basically, if you believe in meticulous sovereignty to the degree that God actively and personally carries out every single thing in the universe, including sin, then it would seem you believe that God commits sin, too. Which is unbiblical and wrong. God has purer eyes than to even look upon sin (that’s from Hab 1:13, I think). So, obviously, God must be capable of creating volitional beings (that have a will and can make moral choices) that commit sin.
If you believe in providential sovereignty to the extent that you think those moral beings can make choices somehow independently – even in the slightest – from God’s Will, then I think it’s because of a lack of understanding that God made their will in the first place, along with all other causal factors. So God is responsible for that sin happening - there’s no way it could have turned out any differently. Another way of saying it is that there’s no way that moral being would have chosen anything differently, because God made sure it all the causal factors would be such. This is why I think meticulous and providential sovereignty basically imply each other, although the dominant ultimate cause is God deciding specifically how everything and how every will shall be.
So when something bad happens, even as a result of sin, it’s not because God allowed it but really didn’t want it to happen. It’s because God allowed it AND specifically wanted it to happen, and made sure it would happen – but for some good, true, and right purpose. And I don’t think we will really understand or experience how good, true and right it really is until we’re in Heaven. This doesn’t change the fact that it was still a horrible act of sin. It just means that God redeems it and glorifies Himself through it.
And so I think understanding the specificity of God’s sovereignty over all things, including sin, gives us comfort & security and helps us trust Him in all things and all circumstances.
For people who hold to providential oversight and influential oversight to the EXCLUSION of meticulous & providential sovereignty – I think they’re ignoring the fact that God created all the factors that they are saying are the cause of a particular effect. And they’re ignoring the fact that God decided exactly how the factors would interact to cause that effect. And so they’re ignoring the fact that God must have wanted that effect to happen and that there’s no way in Heaven nor Hell that that particular effect would not have happened. Even IF some of those factors included moral, volitional beings making a choice that they are responsible for.
This short Piper article could help, btw:
http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/787_does_god_emcauseem_sin/
yeah I pretty much have come to believe that I think. That by virtue of the fact that God doesn't intervene to stop sin all the time he is in some ways allowing it. Although I guess in my mind God "allowing" it seems so much different than Him ordaining/appointing people to carry out various sins. Especially when those sins hit home. Granted, every Christian who has been sinned against, as they deal with the implications is glorifying God as they are being sanctified and made more like Christ.... buttttt it still seriously sucks when you're first dealing with it. I can understand why answering this question can be a serious stumbling block for some people.
how can you say no one comments here? i comment allll the time.
planning to read this for real when i havent been up all night
kthxbai
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