The Sovereignty of God
Romans 9:14-23 What therefore are we
to say? There isn’t any injustice on
God's part, is there? Of course not! For He says to Moses, "I will have
mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have
compassion." So then it is not of the one who wills nor of the one who
runs but of God showing mercy. For the
scripture says to Pharaoh, "For this very thing I have raised you up, that
I might show in you my power and that My Name may be proclaimed in all the
earth." So then whomever He chooses He has mercy on, and whomever He wants,
He hardens (their heart). You will say to me therefore, "Why then does He
yet find fault? For who is able to stand against His will?" O man (i.e.
human), who are you to answer back to God? Will the thing formed say to the One who
formed it, “Why have you made me so?” Doesn’t the potter have authority over the
clay out of the same lump to make one vessel for honor and one for
dishonor? And (what) if God, desiring to
show His wrath and to make known His power, has borne with great patience vessels
of wrath prepared for destruction and that He might make known the riches of
His glory on vessels of mercy, which He has prepared for glory?
There is a story
in the Book of Esther about a queen with that same name. She lived in the ancient nation of Persia ,
modern day Iran . There were many Jewish people living in Persia at
that time and throughout its kingdom, which covered much of the Middle East . She
was one of them, though it was often considered wise in those days to keep that
a secret. And she did.
One
of the leading figures in that kingdom hated the Jews and was able to pass a
law that on a certain day would have permitted anyone to kill any and all
Jewish people. As a Jew, and I hope it
was not just for that reason, Esther felt compelled to go to the King and plead
for the life of her people. The problem
was that you just didn’t go in to see the King, unless you are asked. And that included the King’s wife. If a person did so, the King was just as
likely to have you executed as to allow you to speak. And Esther the queen, the King’s wife, felt
that her odds were not much better than anyone else’s. In fact, she hadn’t even seen him for a month
as it was.
Is
there anything wrong with this picture?
Quite a few things come to my mind.
The scene is so foreign to our modern minds, yet somehow I think we are often
well able and willing to project this image onto God. After all, He is the King of the
universe. He is the Almighty. And He certainly is the absolute Ruler of
everything. From this point it is very
easy to believe that there can be all kinds of reasons that we would either not
know of or understand why God would deny a person who asked for healing.
And Paul’s
argument here from the Book of Romans doesn’t seem to do much to paint a
different picture. We see God sitting in
heaven dispensing His will on human beings in ways that at first glance are
completely incomprehensible to us.
We
believe that He is the sum and summation of all wisdom and understanding, but
for the life of us, if everything that happens is His will, much or most of it
makes absolutely no sense to us at all.
Whole books, and many of them, have been written trying to make sense of
all the tragic and rotten things that happen in our world, and many of them to
good, godly, or others whom we would consider totally undeserving of all this
evil and pain.
But
our focus here is on healing, and specifically healing for those people who
have come to know God through Jesus Christ.
This is not to say that healing is not available or meant for others,
but the source of our information for seeking and applying healing is from the
Bible. So we will not be trying to
answer all of life’s tough questions here.
We need to know if our odds of being healed are greater than the odds of
Esther keeping her life after entering the king’s chambers uninvited, whether
healing is God’s form of the state lottery, where people win all the time but
more often than not they don’t. We need
to know if we can have hope for healing, or if it is just as likely that there
will be some divine, higher purpose for us to live in pain and die a miserable
death. Far too often that seems to be
the case.
If
I had known thirty years ago that I would be writing a book on healing, maybe I
would have kept track of all the people that I knew or heard of who died far
too young and died in ways that made you really wonder what God was thinking
when He allowed it to happen.
You
may have guessed by now that this book will attempt to show that healing is
something that God wants for all of His people. There has been so much confusion and muddled
thinking about this subject that we have lost the clarity of seeing God’s
purposes in the world and in His Word. The
sovereignty of God is another one of those issues where we seem to have missed
the whole point of what this is supposed to have on our lives. It is not meant to be a source of hesitation
in knowing what God wants for our lives but rather an assurance that He will
indeed do what it is we are trusting Him for.
What
confuses us is that we have seen too many times where people were not healed,
and surely the reason had to be God’s decision rather than anything on our
part. And this passage from Romans would
be the Scriptural support that we would use to support that belief. God has mercy on whom He wills, and He must
not have chosen to do that in this case.
Our
first concern here is to try to see what Paul was talking about in the first
place. Was he saying that God’s will can
be like the wind, constantly shifting and changing? While we may know that the wind usually comes
from the west, there is no rule that says that it has to and it may at any time
come from another. So too, while we may
know God’s general desires and plans, in any given circumstance, His will may
be entirely different from what we were expecting.
The
verses we quoted from the Book of Romans were from chapter nine of that
book. Now you can’t just start reading a
book in chapter nine and try to interpret it without having some basic
knowledge and understanding of what was happening in the first eight
chapters.
Paul
the author was a Jew. He was a very
devout and learned Jew. He was a leading
figure in their religious establishment.
Since then he has become a Christian, a very devout and learned
Christian, a leading figure in the Christian movement.
The
questions that Paul was addressing here were: If the Jewish faith had been
given by God, and the Jews were God’s chosen people, how did this Christian
thing fit in? What about all these
Gentiles that were now calling themselves God’s people? What happened to all these laws and
ordinances that God gave for His people to follow? For two thousand years, the Jews were the
apple of God’s eye. Now in the matter of
one generation, they seemed to be on the outside looking in and Gentiles who
were known for their pagan debauchery were pouring into God’s Kingdom. What was happening?
In
chapters nine through eleven of Romans, Paul was focusing his attention on
these matters. There was a certain pride
that the Jews felt in being God’s chosen people. What they failed to understand was that this
chosenness was not meant to be understood as something of merely physical
lineage. God wanted to show them that
the important thing was their hearts, not their ancestry. In practical terms, what was happening was
that Gentiles were coming to God in great numbers and the Jews who were not
embracing this new Christian faith felt excluded.
The
Jews prided themselves on their observance on God’s laws, while the Gentiles lived
their lives unconcerned with their rituals.
But now they seemed to be in God’s favor, while the Jews were not. Why?
They were trying to establish their own righteousness, and the Gentiles
were embracing the righteousness that God was offering to them in Christ.
The
Jews were offended and angry. Paul told
them not to react so strongly so quickly.
God was sovereign. If He wanted
to show mercy to the Gentiles, He could do that. The mercy here shown to the Gentiles was not
individual, arbitrary, random acts of mercy but God’s whole program of bringing
salvation to the world rather than seemingly limiting it to one nation.
There was also
mention made of a hardening of the heart, both in the case of Pharaoh in the
time of Moses and of the Jewish people themselves at that time. The question here, of course, is: was this
hardening something that God brought about to prevent either Pharaoh or the
Jews from seeing the truth and repenting and turning to God? The first thing about hardening something
that we should note is that hardening preserves the condition of the thing the
way it was. It doesn’t change the way it
was; it keeps it the way it was. So when
Pharaoh's heart was hardened, it was not like he wanted to repent and God
refused to let him. He didn’t want to
let the Israelites go, and God just solidified that position.
Pharaoh may have
let the Israelites leave earlier, but not because Pharaoh saw the evil in
slavery and wanted the Israelites to have the freedom to serve their God. Pharaoh may have let the Israelites leave
earlier, but not because he believed that their God was the true God and he was
ready to forsake the Egyptians gods to follow Him. God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart only made
him stronger to do what he wanted to do all along: keep the Israelites as
slaves.
But what about
this hardening of the Israelites? Was
God keeping people from coming to salvation who wanted to? Actually quite a few of them had already come
to Christ, Paul himself being one of them.
Paul also made it quite clear that unbelief and flawed attempts at
self-righteousness were chronic conditions in the Israelite community. Did this hardening prevent people from coming
to Christ, or did it serve to heighten the contrast between the two groups so
that the differences became apparent to anyone who was watching? In fact, Paul said that this hardening would
serve to provoke the Israelites to jealousy.[1]
Jesus had told a
parable about four kinds of people and how they respond to the Word of God.[2] Many people can respond favorably to the
message, but they have no depth either of their understanding or commitment to
the truths of the gospel. There was much
in the new Christian movement to attract others to join them, so I can see a
certain wisdom and logic in trying to minimize that at the start. Is this the reason that there was some
hardening of the hearts of Israelite people at that time? I cannot say for sure.
But what has
happened is that we have taken these two instances of God sovereignly acting in
the affairs of humankind and understood them as evidence of God working in an seemingly
arbitrary fashion all the time. Now we
don’t call it arbitrary. We would call
it examples of His infinite knowledge and wisdom making decisions about things
that we would consider undesirable, because of some higher good that we may
never know about.
What has
followed from that is that we have lost any certitude about knowing God’s will
in our lives. At the human level, we say
we know somebody by how well we can predict what they will say or think. We end up realizing we know very little about
God, because we can never predict what He will do or say. We have His Word as a record of what He has
said and done in the past, but instead of seeing that as a picture of what God
is like, instead we see a God who has done all kinds of once-in-a-lifetime
miracles all for unique or seldom ever repeated circumstances.
All we are left
with is the mantra Trust God, meaning
that whatever happens is His will and somehow you need to learn to like
it. None of this had anything to do with
what Paul was writing about in this book.
True, what God
did when He showed mercy to the Gentiles surprised everyone. Yet there were passages all through the
prophets that talked about such a thing.
The details were missing and the time when this would occur. But it was certainly not out of character for
God to do it.
Those who would
use this passage to say that we can never be sure that God wants to heal us miss
the whole point of what Paul was trying to say.
When Paul noted that God has mercy on whom He wills, that is not to say
that anyone who wants God’s mercy may not receive it. It means that a lot of people who never even
thought about it have found themselves the recipients of it. When Paul noted that God hardens whom He
wills, He hardened nobody who hadn’t already set their life on a course that
was contrary to what God had wanted for them.
Paul did note
that the Israelites of his time had a zeal for God, but not according to
knowledge.[3] This can be understood in two different ways:
one is that they should have known better, and the other is that they just
didn’t know it at all. The one we would
consider blameworthy, and the other not.
So the question is: should the Israelites of Paul’s day have known that
they could not and were not meant to attain righteousness by doing the works of
the law?
I am not sure I
could make the case from the Bible that that indeed was the case. I won’t even try. But when righteousness is from the law, when
we start thinking that our standing with God is based on our performance, we
have become either or both morally blind to our true nature and spiritually blind
to God’s true nature. If we can think
that we are so perfect or that God doesn’t see or care about all those hidden
desires of our heart, we make it quite clear that we don’t understand God at
all. And when we think God is interested
solely in rituals and rules and not in a heart that loves and trusts Him and
wants to know Him, then we have an empty religion and we should know better.
So when Paul
said that the Israelites were ignorant of God’s righteousness, I can only take
this to mean that they should have known better. God didn’t have their hearts but only
heartless obedience, which isn’t really obedience at all. We have taken Paul’s teaching about mercy and
judgment and made it into a picture of a God who is impulsive, unpredictable,
and arbitrary. Instead of God being
Someone we can know, He then becomes Someone utterly unknowable.
We
have taken the idea of God’s infinite wisdom and knowledge and made it out to
be something so utterly unfathomable that it bears no resemblance to anything
that we would or could call good. Any
evil can hold a higher good, and any good can hide an inner evil. So we embrace the evil and spurn the good,
because we no longer feel we can be any judge of what we see and experience.
Our
prayers start becoming more general, as we become less and less sure of what
God might want to do in any given situation.
We want His will to be done, and we say it constantly, as faithful
servants. The problem, of course, as we
will see elsewhere, is that, since we never seem to know ahead of time what God
may want, we can assume too quickly that what we are seeing and experiencing is
what God wants for us. We can easily
become content in situations that God may want to change, because we don’t know
if God wants to change them.
There
is another way that the sovereignty of God is understood that is sometimes
mentioned in discussions about healing.
We know that his will cannot be thwarted, that He will do all that He
has purposed, that He raises up kings and kingdoms, and He bring them
down. We know that He works all things
according to the counsel of His will.
We
don’t know what will happen in the future, but we do know everything that has
happened in the past. This view of the sovereignty
of God would say that everything that has happened was God’s will.
We
may not understand why these things happened.
We may believe that people exercise their free will in making their
choices. But looking back, if something
happened, it was ordained by God long ago to happen as it did.
We
feel free to make our choices, but ultimately these too are somehow not only
foreknown but also somehow orchestrated to produce the desired ends. If, or since, God ordained the ends, then He
must as well ordain the means.
If
Aunt Bessie was not healed, it must not have been God’s will, because He did
not ordain the means of that healing, whether it be the faith, the prayers, or the
treatment. It just wasn’t His will for
reasons we will or may never know this side of heaven, or ever. Frankly, it’s none of our business, unless He
chose to tell us.
So
when Aunt Bessie died, that was God’s will.
Nothing we could have done would have stopped that. It was just meant to be.
This
view of God is important to many people for several reasons. They feel it defends God from charges of impotency
and indifference. God is often said to
be either unable to prevent tragedies or unwilling to.
In
this view, He is quite able to, and if He appears just unwilling to help out
someone in need, it is just because He has something more important to do. Somehow, in ways we may never understand, His
leaving some evil to play out is needed for some higher purpose, if we could
but trust Him for it.
This
view also helps to protect people from the unbearable burdens of guilt. When we stand powerless before some evil to
stop it, where, if only we had more faith or had prayed more, harder, better,
we could have made the difference in someone’s life, we don’t want the
blame. We can’t live with that. So if it happened, God must have wanted it
so.
But
is this so? Two problems come
immediately to mind. We feel this
position is needed to shield God from charges of being either unable or
unwilling to protect people from evil.
Now He faces a new challenge.
Looking
back on the world, all that has happened, the obvious question is: is this the
best that God could have done? He says
that He wants people to believe in His Gospel, yet millions die everyday
without having heard one word about it.
The
Bible may talk of God’s love, but the Bible itself says that it does no good to
say you care about someone if you don’t actually do something to help them.[4] You may say that Jesus’ death shows God’s
love and was the greatest thing He could do to help people, yet if people don’t
know about it, apparently they are not helped by it. So if everything that has happened so far in
history was God’s will, then much needs to be explained.
On
a more personal level, when I look at my life, I can see so many ways my life
is less than ideal, so many ways I would think I should be better. I may think I am doing the best that I can,
but I know that if I had more of God, or if He had more of me, I would live a
life that is more fruitful for His kingdom.
But as each succeeding moment becomes the past, I can only conclude that
God must not have wanted me to be more fruitful, otherwise He would have had
more of me.
Now
even I can see the flaws of that thinking, but to be consistent, I can see no
other conclusion.
So
are we saying that God is not sovereign?
Not at all. We just need to understand
what is meant by that.
As
I write this, I am a manager overseeing a department with 6 other
employees. I cannot control every act
and thought of my employees, and I have learned to live with their unique strength
and weaknesses. I cannot allow myself to
get too emotionally involved in the day-to-day operations of the department,
otherwise I would become upset at all the ways we are performing less than
ideally. I keep telling them that this
is a work in progress. I know the end I
want to reach, and we are heading in that direction.
God
created a perfect world, and He watched the first humans mar that innocent
beauty by their lack of trust and rebellion against His will. God seems quite able to exist emotionally
with all the ways we humans live our lives in ways contrary to what He wants
for us and for His world. He has an end
in mind, and the world is heading in that direction.
There
was a television program in the 60’s and early 70’s called Mission : Impossible. Every week the head of a secret task force
was given an assignment. It was never to
assassinate some evildoer, but through his personal knowledge of the target and
of human nature, he was able to predict and consequently maneuver this person
to do whatever it was he wanted him to do.
This person was never coerced, but through the interactions of the
members of this task force with the person, every move he made was anticipated
and guided to the desired end. The man’s
free will was left intact, and the desired ends were achieved.
God
is certainly not surprised by the choices we make. Given His personal and intimate knowledge of
who we are and of human nature, I believe it is safe to say He foreknows
everything we will do before we do it. To
what extent He brings stimuli into our lives to prompt the desired response is
a matter of speculation. Judging from
the state of the world today, He seems less interested in producing certain
outcomes of events as He does in the natural growth of our personalities.
In
other words, God seems well content to live with a world of injustice,
stupidity, violence, and false views of reality. God seems well content to live with my
mistakes, my failings, and my fears. We
may say that He does not want these things, but the prevalence of all these
things shows that either He wills what He doesn’t want or He doesn’t will what
He does want.
In my own life, I
can see how my life has been directed many times and in many ways by events out
of my control. If I had not been fired
from a job I had, I may never have pursued writing as I have. This book may not have been written.
But
the choice to persevere or to quit, to have hope or grow despondent, to believe
in His word and act accordingly – these are all choices that I make, and God
seems perfectly willing to accept whatever it is that I choose. The events of my life have played out so
slowly, it is hard to think of God as a micromanager.
So
how does all this relate to the question of healing? I have failed in many ways many times in my
life. I have done things and made
choices that have changed me and changed others. If I were to live in the past, I could become
very depressed. Like Peter walking on
the water, if I don’t keep my eyes on Jesus, I would sink in the sea, a broken
and bitter man.
There
are people who have died, whom I have never told about Jesus. And I could have. Are there people who could have been healed
and weren’t, because they or others either didn't know what to do or just
simply failed to do it? Yes.
Should
this fill us with guilt and shame? No
more than the countless other times we have failed in some way in our
lives. Sickness and healing stand out
from other situations, because pain and suffering and death get our attention
more and thus seem more serious of a problem.
While the tragic car accident that serves to wake us up to the fragility
and transience of life, sickness and healing, or the lack therefore, can jolt
us out of our ho-hum, everyday existence to ponder the deeper questions of life
and our place in it.
We
often don’t see the need to develop our relationship with God until life forces
us to think of deeper things. Oftentimes
we may find that we have awakened too late to make the necessary growth and
adjustments to meet the challenges before us.
Instead of letting guilt consume us for our failing, we need to let our
failures be the inspiration for our resolve to never let it happen again. Like so many other areas of life.
Whatever
we may say about the sovereignty of God, we can never say that God wanted us to
fail in our responsibilities, to lose hope in our problems, to doubt in the
darkness, to give up just because things were tough. Whatever we may say about the sovereignty of
God, the fact is that God tolerates a lot of things in the world that He does
not want. Since He is not surprised by
any of them, He can use them to bring out His will in other things, but let’s
just not say that because He tolerated them, or allowed them, that He wanted
these things to happen.
Every rotten
thing that ever happened in life from the beginning, every war, every murder,
every rape, every starving baby, every act of abuse, God has allowed. Otherwise, they would not have occurred. But the fact that He allowed them does not
mean that He wanted them. It just means
that we live in a broken, fallen world, and these are all necessary parts of
that.
We will make
mistakes. We will hurt people. We will fail them. We will miss opportunities to do good, and
people will suffer as a result. They may
even die. All we can do is use these
failings as opportunities to learn and to do better the next time. When these times happen, we could live in the
past and grieve forever. It is then that
we can ask God to heal the hurt, so we can go on. But it would be wrong to avoid the hurt by
saying that God never wanted things to be different anyway.
You may think
you are doing the person a favor by saying that, but in the long run you won’t
be helping them. You will be encouraging
them to accept things that are less than God’s best. Instead of seeing something that they may
need to learn about, they will say that there is nothing to learn. “I am good
enough just the way I am.”
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