What Are We Even Talking About: A friend recently ended a question about sovereignty with these words: “I do believe in God being Sovereign and I also believe God can do whatsoever He pleases.” There is absolutely nothing wrong with that statement. In fact, it is wonderfully true. But the more I thought about it, the more another question came to mind: How did we ever become accustomed to speaking about God as though this needed to be said?
We are talking about God. The One whose understanding is infinite. The One who calls the stars by name. The One without whom not even a sparrow falls to the ground. The One who brought this staggering universe into existence in all of its vastness and microscopic complexity, with an order and precision we are still struggling to comprehend. Before a God like this, how did we ever become comfortable speaking as though His power or authority might somehow need to be defended, limited, or explained?
Perhaps the deeper problem is not simply that we think too little about God’s sovereignty. It may be that we have become accustomed to thinking about God as though He were somehow like us. We have an astonishing tendency to make God in our own image and then become troubled whenever He refuses to remain there. We imagine Him as a larger, stronger, wiser version of ourselves, only with infinitely more power. We enlarge our own reasoning, our own moral instincts, our own ideas of fairness and justice, and then imagine that somewhere at the top of all of that stands God. But God is not man enlarged.
He does not answer to a standard above Himself, and He certainly does not stand before the tribunal of His creatures waiting for us to decide whether His ways meet with our approval. And this is precisely why revelation is so absolutely necessary. Our instinct is to begin with ourselves. We reason outward from our own experience, our own limitations, our own sense of justice, our own understanding of what seems reasonable, and then we project those things upward and call the result God. Scripture does the opposite. Scripture does not begin with man and work its way upward. It begins with God. “In the beginning God.”
That changes everything. And perhaps much of our confusion begins right there. We keep trying to understand God by beginning with ourselves, when Scripture requires us to begin with Him. We take our moral instincts and place God beneath them. We take our ideas of fairness and ask whether God conforms to them. We take our limited perspective on history, suffering, evil, mercy, judgment, and salvation, and then wonder whether His ways can be justified before us.
At some point, without even realizing what we have done, we have reversed the order entirely. The creature begins examining the Creator. Man becomes the measure, and God is expected to explain Himself before standards drawn from our own minds. But Scripture turns that whole arrangement upside down—or rather, puts it right side up again. God is not standing before us to be judged. We stand before Him. “Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself.”
Perhaps that reaches closer to the heart of the problem than we realize. We keep imagining God in categories drawn from ourselves, and then struggle when the God revealed in Scripture refuses to fit inside them. And the more seriously we take that, the stranger some of our religious conversations begin to sound. We speak of an infinite God, an omniscient God, an omnipotent God, the Creator and Sustainer of all things, and then cautiously add, “I believe God can do whatsoever He pleases.” Of course He can. He is God. What are we even talking about? Perhaps the deeper question is not merely how sovereign God is, but how our thoughts of Him ever became so small in the first place. MPJ