God Makes It All Happen

How do we explain the existence of the world?

Did it just happen? There's no supreme being, folks. There's no being. There's nothing. And if there's something, there must be something that has the power of being, or nothing would be. It's that simple.

You don't have to have a Ph.D. in philosophy. Let me say it again. If anything exists, then something must have the power of being within itself, or nothing would be. That's simple.

It's that simple. But walk into most classrooms today, and you'll hear that simple truth described as nonsense. Take the universe, for example. They say it came to be by the chance explosion of particles. Life? The random mutation of cells. Morality?

Unfixed and defined individually. But today, on Redoing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul shows us that God is the supreme being. He is in charge, and He also requires our submission. In our first lecture on the providence of God, I mentioned that one of the dominant concepts for the last couple of hundred years in Western society is the idea that we live in a closed, mechanistic universe, that there was no possibility for intrusion from outside, and that everything operated here according to naturally fixed laws, so that the universe is sort of like a machine that functions by its own inner machinations. But even those who introduced that idea as early as the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century still posited the idea of a God who built the machine in the first place, that they still couldn't get away from the need for the idea of a Creator, because those people were intelligent thinkers and scientists, and they said, look, we couldn't have a scientific world to be observing if there isn't some kind of ultimate cause for all of these things. And I won't get off on that tangent here except to say that it was tacitly assumed that even though an idea of an involved providential governor of the daily affairs of life was being questioned and challenged, it still was tacitly assumed that there had to be a Creator above and beyond the creature or the created order.

And of course, now that is in the focal point of dispute in our own days. But in the classical concept of providence with respect to Christian theology, the idea of God's providence is very closely bound up with His role as the Creator of the universe. Because as I said, it's not simply that God creates the universe and then turns His back on it and loses touch with it, nor is it simply that God sits on His throne in heaven and watches this machine work by its own inner mechanism as a disinterested or hamstrung spectator who is powerless to tinker with the machine at any point whatsoever. Rather, the Christian notion of God is a God who, even though He is the primary cause of the universe, He is also the primary cause, now listen carefully, of everything in the universe and everything that takes place in the universe. Again, the foundational principle of Christian theology is that nothing, no thing in this world has intrinsic causal power. Nothing has any power save the power that is vested in it or loaned to it, if you will, or worked through it, through it, which ultimately is the power of God. Now that doesn't mean… I'm not saying that I don't have any power to do anything or that you don't have any power to do anything.

I say you don't have it in and of yourselves. You don't have it by your own strength eternally, and that's why theologians and philosophers historically have made a crucial distinction between primary causality and secondary causality. The fact that God is primary means He's the first cause, He's the author of all that is, but not only back then in time, but that He continues to be the primary cause of human events and of natural occurrences.

Now that primary cause doesn't exclude secondary causes. It doesn't mean that He works apart from us or that there's no such thing as a causal nexus in nature, that yes, we're saying that when the rain falls, the grass gets wet, not because God makes the grass wet directly and immediately without the falling of the rain. It's the rain that causes the grass to get wet, but the point I'm saying is that the rain couldn't fall, and even if it did fall, the grass couldn't get wet if it weren't for the causal power of God that stands over and above that secondary activity that's taking place. Now a modern man has cut it off at the knees and says, we have the rain, we have the wet grass, and we don't need the primary cause.

We can just go along fine with secondary causes and never mind the primary causes. Now the simple concept that we have here is that what God creates He sustains. What God creates He sustains. So one of the important subdivisions under the concept of providence in theology is the concept of divine sustenance, divine sustenance. That is, God is not the great watchmaker who builds the watch, winds it up, and then steps out of the picture. But what He makes He preserves and He sustains. In fact, one of the first words, in fact the first verb that we find in the Bible is the Hebrew word barah.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And that word barah carries within it in the Hebrew concept this idea of sustaining. I like to illustrate that by the difference in music between a sustained note and a staccato note, and I'll use my colleague here to help me illustrate this. If we will, let's take a simple little sound or word, Bob, like beep, and I'd like to ask you to sing that for me in staccato fashion. That's just a little too legato. Let's get it more staccato. Beep. Keep going. Beep, beep, beep, beep.

We've got the real live roadrunner right here in this. Okay, beep, beep, beep. That's the staccato, that short crisp beep that you hear in music. And then if we want to sustain the word beep, how would it go? Beep.

We hold it. Now the concept that the Hebrew language has here in the book of Genesis in the word barah, translated create, is that it's not staccato. It's not an in the beginning God beeped everything into being, but rather barah means that what He makes He holds, keeps it, maintains the power of its being. Again, one of the most profound and profoundly important theological concepts in all of the world is the whole concept of God as the author of being. You could not be without a supreme being because you don't have the power of being.

I mean, again, if any pagan, if any atheist in the United States of America would think about being seriously and logically for five minutes, it would be the end of atheism, because everyone knows as well as they know anything that no one in this world has the power of being within himself. And yet somewhere there must be one who does have the power of being within himself or it would be absolutely scientifically impossible for anything to be. There's no supreme being, folks. There's no being. There's nothing. There's nothing. And if there's something, there must be something that has the power of being or nothing would be. It's that simple.

You don't have to have a PhD in philosophy. Let me say it again. If anything exists, then something must have the power of being within itself or nothing would be. That's simple. The point we're making here is the Apostle Paul says to the pagans of his day, to the Greeks, the Areopagus, they're in Athens, and they had their altar to the unknown God.

Do you remember that? He said, whom you worship in ignorance, I declare to you in power that it is in Him that we live and move and have our being. If God ceased to exist for a second, the universe would perish with Him, because the idea is that God not only creates and that we're not only dependent upon Him for our origin, but also since we don't have the power of being in and of ourselves, we couldn't be for a second without His sustaining power. And that is part of God's providence. Now, when we talk about God's sustaining the world that He has made and the world that He observes, that He sees and knows everything that is going on within it, we now get to the heart of the concept of providence, and that is that God governs His creation. That's the central motif of the concept of the providence of God, namely that the providence of God has to do with God's government of the universe, the government that He exercises over His creation. Now, the time that we have left in this segment, I'd like to just mention a few things about the character of God's government of the world, His providential government. And the first thing I want to say is that God's government is permanent. Every four years or eight years, we have a change of government in our country here in the United States. A new administration takes over.

We've limited by constitutional amendment how many years a chief executive, a president can serve as the supreme governor of the United States, and the same thing has to do with the terms that are established for legislators and so on. So, by human standards, governments come and governments go so that no governor in this world is permanent. Now, there's a kind of analogy here with God that God, who is seated as the supreme governor of heaven and earth, also must put up with people who are disenchanted with His rule, object to His policies, who resist His authority, who revolt against Him, but the one thing that even though God's very existence can be denied, His authority can be resisted and disobeyed, the one thing that cannot possibly ever take place about providential government, ladies and gentlemen, is it can never be overthrown.

My favorite text to indicate that is the second Psalm which begins with this question. Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the Lord and against His anointed one. Let us break their chains, they say, and throw off their fetters.

Let me just stop at that point. The image of the second Psalm is the image of a summit meeting of the powerful rulers of this world. They come together to enter into a coalition, a kind of military axis, to plan the overthrow of divine authority.

It's as if a summit meeting took place and all of the powerful nations of the world brought their nuclear arsenals together and took their intercontinental ballistic missiles and aimed them to converge at a point where the throne of God resides so that they could blast Him out of the heavens. And then as they say here in the text, saying, we can break His chains and cast His cords of the fetters from off us. And this conspiracy of the kingdoms of this world, according to the Psalmist, is against God and against His anointed.

In the Hebrew that is against His messiah, against His Messiah. We'll see in a few moments that the thread that ties together the tapestry of the Old and the New Testament is ultimately a political thread, cosmically political, because the central motif of sacred Scripture, I believe, is the concept of the kingdom of God. And what was at issue here in chapter 2 of the Psalms was the kingship of God, God's right to rule the rulers of this world. Notice the reaction of God to this earthly conspiracy. Kings of the earth set themselves, you see, they agree with solemn pacts and treaties, and they affirm each other's strong determination that they're not going to waver from their resolve to overthrow the King of the universe. God looks down at all these assembled powers in the nuclear armaments pointed in His direction, and it says, the Lord sits in His heaven and does what? Trembles in fear.

No, it says that the Lord sits in His heaven and laughs. God sits in heaven and sees the collective rebellion of the human race pointed towards His authority, and He looks, and He says, ha, ha, ha, ha, you people. Because all He has to do is like a bartender with the ant on the bar, just put his thumb down, and all of the missiles of this world are vaporized.

He doesn't even have to move his thumb. He can just look in that direction, and by the glance of his eye, battle is over. Then, his laughter ends. It says he rebukes them in his anger. He terrifies them in his wrath, saying, listen to this, ladies and gentlemen, I have installed my King on Zion, on Zion, on my holy hill.

You know, again, I'm frequently amazed at the difference of accent that I find in the pages of sacred Scripture and what I read in the pages of religious magazines and periodicals and what I hear preached in the pulpits of our churches. The image of God that we have is a God who is benevolent, He's kind, a celestial bellhop who we call when we need room service, cosmic Santa Claus who is at our back and call, and who is so pleased to do whatever we ask Him to do, and we portray God as one who pleads with us to change our ways and come into fellowship with Him and who invites us to come to Christ and all of that. We don't usually hear of the portrait of God who commands obedience. What God is saying is, here, hey look, I rule the universe.

I have installed my Son on this throne. I have given Him all authority on heaven and earth. You bow down to Him. God never invites people to come to Jesus. He commands it with divine authority and convicts you of treason at a cosmic level if you refuse. If you refuse to submit to the authority of Christ, you're not going to be in trouble with me, and the church isn't going to bother you, and you live in a country where the government's not going to put you in jail. All you're taking on is the Lord God omnipotent. From God's perspective, to refuse to submit to the lordship of Christ is an act not simply of a lack of conviction or a lack of information. God regards it as immoral, as evil, flowing from a spirit that is unwilling to submit to the authority of God.

That's what's so scary about Alts. And you see the tone of that here in the psalm when he said, look, I have set my King on my holy hill. Again, back at the Areopagus when Paul debated with the Greek philosophers, when he said, the former days of ignorance, you know, God overlooked, God was patient, long-suffering, you know, condescending to people's lack of information or their indifference, and He weighed it, and He gave them evidence afterwards.

He says, but now, the days of that overlooking are over. Now God commands all men everywhere to repent. We don't hear that anymore, do we, that it is a duty, a moral obligation to submit to Christ. It's not an option with God. So, the second thing I want to say, and I have to hurry here, is the governing providence of God is sovereign.

And that's difficult for us to understand because we live in a democracy, and we have a built-in allergy to sovereignty. We have a social contract where no one can reign except by the consent of the governed. That's not the way it is with God. God doesn't need our consent in order to govern us. He made us, and He had an intrinsic right to rule over us, because He ultimately alone has an eternally divine right to rule. And I'll say this in the third thing, that the governorship of God is an absolute monarchy, an absolute monarchy with no external restraints imposed upon the ruler such as a balance of power with the House of Representatives and the Senate and the Supreme Court. God is the President, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court all wrapped up into one because He is invested with the authority of the absolute monarchy. Now, let me just say, as I said a moment ago, that I think it's very important for us to understand and easy for us to overlook, because we have this allergy to monarchy that the central motif of this book is the motif of the kingdom of God. Have you ever heard the kingdom of God described as a monarchy? It's not a very popular message today, but it is the truth.

It's there in Scripture, and the good news is that God is a loving and gracious King. Thanks for listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Tuesday. Dr. R.C. Sproul is walking us through his series, The Providence of God. To imagine that God is the King of God, everything does make many people uncomfortable.

But in this series, R.C. helps us make sense of that, and we'd like to send you this complete six-part series on audio CD. Simply request The Providence of God when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. There are a couple of ways you can reach us to make your request and give your gift. You can find us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can go to our website at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us at 800-435-4343.

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Before we go today, here's R.C. with a final thought for us. The history of the Old Testament is the history of the reign of Yahweh over His people. The central motif of the New Testament is the realization on earth of the kingdom of God in the coming Messiah, whom God exalts to the right hand of authority and invests Him and crowns Him as the Lord of Lord and as the King of Kings. And that is a political concept in the highest sense of the word, because what we're talking about here is not religion. We're talking about the ultimate political structure, the one to whom we owe ultimate allegiance and ultimate obedience. One of the great ironies of history is that when Jesus, who was the cosmic King, was born in Bethlehem, the world was ruled by a man named Caesar Augustus. And properly speaking, the word august is appropriate for God and for God alone, because it is the Lord God Omnipotent who reigns. And when we declare that, when we declare that He reigns, does that mean He rules over every single detail in creation? R.C. will discuss that tomorrow, and I hope you'll join us for Renewing Your Mind.