The sovereignty of God is perhaps one of the most frequently contested attributes of God, and who would the contestants be? Those whom God has created, namely man and angels. Both constitute classes of beings who are not always willing to let God be God. They would, were they able, dethroned the Deity and sit in His place themselves. So, let’s define what is meant by “sovereignty”. To say that God is sovereign means He has the power to exercise full authority and supremacy over all He has created, and He also possesses the moral right to do so. Many have been the numbers of men and angels to challenge God’s sovereignty. Surely, as history has borne out, all attempts to dethrone the Deity have met with abject failure. But this doesn’t prevent men and angels from their tireless and futile efforts to do so.
The biblical possession is unmistakably clear: God created and, thus, is entitled to exercise dominion over what He Himself brought into existence. That which would have no being is rightfully subservient to that which gave it its being. The principle is stated in Romans 9, when the illustration of the clay pot and the potter who made it is invoked. “Can the pot rightfully say to the potter, “Why have you made me this way? Does not the potter have absolute dominion over the clay, to fashion it as he will into what he will?” Does the pot have rights? Must the potter bend his will or wishes to accommodate the pot? And were the potter made to do so, who would then be the true sovereign? And, be advised, more than one sovereign is a contradiction in terms. Multiple sovereigns is an oxymoron. Sovereignty required singularity for its very meaning and existence.
Because God is the sovereign with the full authority to order all things after the counsel of His will, He may or may not acquiesce to the needs or wishes to those He created. It’s His call; it’s always His call. This, in part, is what sovereignty is all about. God possesses both the power and the authority to do His own will. “Power”, in the Greek, relates to “energy, strength, or force”. The word in Greek is “dunamis”. It’s the word from which our words “dynamite, dynamo, dynamic” come. The Greek word for “authority” is “exousia” from which we get the English word “execute or executive”. An executive has power, too, but it’s a different kind of power than “dunamis”. God is sovereign, which means He possesses in full measure “dunamis’ and “exousia”, power and authority. God’s “exousia” gives Him the executive power to decree or make decisions, and His “dunamis” power gives Him the strength or energy to enforce, or bring to pass, whatever is required to fulfill the demands of His own decrees. And, in the midst of all this decreeing and executing, He also possesses the full moral authority for doing so. This is our sovereign God who works all things after the counsel of His own will.
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