I haven’t blogged for a couple of days because I’ve been having a very interesting discussion with some folks on and offline regarding the Sovereignty of God and our relationship with Him. This encompasses some pretty heady topics: salvation, predestination, spiritual gifts, intercessory prayer, and all that good stuff. Some people content that God is in complete control of all of our affairs, such that we don’t have the ability to come to God out of our own free will or the capability to do works on earth via supernatural power given to us by the Holy Spirit. My position is that while God is indeed in complete control, he allows us room to come to Him or to reject Him (not in terms of salvation but in terms of divine purpose) on a daily basis, and He actually does want to equip us with power from the Holy Spirit in order for us to live out the Christian life and have a dramatic impact on the people and world around us.

This post marks the beginning of a series I’m starting entitled What is the Sovereignty of God? I think this is a huge and very timely subject right now, because the world is currently undergoing such a rapid expansion and collision of thought, finance, technology, and culture that it’s almost more than we can comprehend with our finite minds. In all of this global turmoil, one overarching question stands out: Why Are We Here? Only that’s the wrong question. The real question is this: Why Were We Created?

The reason for our creation and hence our destiny and purpose for the future is directly tied into the understanding of God’s Sovereignty. I truly cannot claim to understand what it means to say that God is Sovereign. I don’t honestly think any human mind can fully comprehend what that means. All we can do is to find that place of tension, that place of acceptable paradox, where enough of the truth is know that it makes sense and allows us to move forward in peace and confidence.

The theological debate concerning God’s will vs. man’s will has been going on for centuries. I can’t solve the conflict. I’m not even sure it needs solving. Maybe it’s good to continue having this debate. I don’t want to go too far in either extreme. But I think that there’s a difference between being extreme and being honest about believing in a concrete idea. We can’t just walk around believing in…nothing because we don’t know what’s true or false.

So, over the next few posts in this series, I’m going to examine what the Bible says and what other theologians who I feel are trustworthy men and women of God say about the Sovereignty of God, free will, spiritual gifts, and predestination. It will be challenging, it will be complicated. But at the very least, I hope it will be enlightening. And I hope I can learn as much as I can teach as I walk through this important and exciting subject.

Come, and let us reason together.