“For God so loved the world He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” John chapter 3 verse 16, The Bible
The Sovereignty of God and how that limits any answers human beings can give to life’s big questions
In Job chapter 5 the big mistake Eliphaz made was not that his theology was in itself wrong. Job 5:26 ties in with the promises of Lev 26:3-13 and Deut 28:1-14. The Old Testament gave Eliphaz and Job’s other friends good grounds to believe that Job was suffering because of his sin.
The mistake Eliphaz made was that he tried to restrict God to only being able to behave in a certain way and follow certain rules, rules that Eliphaz understood. However, what Eliphaz could not know was that his understanding was based on the revelation God had made of Himself at that time, a very partial revelation. It was sufficient for a man to come to know Him, but not sufficient for a man to fully understand Him.
What set Job apart from his friends is that he did understand the Sovereignty of God. He did understand that God has the right to act in any way He chooses. God has the right to give, and He has the right to take away, as Job expresses in chapters 1 and 2. While Job’s friends give a mechanical rule – if you do this and that, Job, then God must do this and that, therefore you must have sinned, so if you just do this and that all will be well again – Job understands that God cannot be bound by human rules, and struggles instead with the question of how God can do such a thing and still be good.
What Job was groping for is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In the Person of Jesus Christ, God revealed Himself to be Good, Pure, Holy, Righteous, Merciful, Just, Compassionate and Kind. He also revealed Himself in the Person of Christ to be a God of Wrath and Judgement. But finally, He revealed Himself in the Person of Christ to be a God of infinite Love. In the death of Jesus Christ for sinners, and His resurrection from the dead, we have the final and unanswerable proof of the great love of God for His creatures.
The revelation God gave us of Himself in Jesus Christ was far superior to the revelation Old Testament believers had. But we still do not know enough to fully understand God. As human beings we can’t. We know enough to come to Him, we know enough to have a relationship with Him, we know enough to repent and believe and become heirs to His Kingdom. But we still do not know enough to fully understand Him and His ways – He has not revealed everything to us, only what we need to know to turn to Him and follow Him and know Him in this life.
Therefore our answers to any great questions are always going to be limited to what God has revealed to us about Himself and His ways. In the final analysis there is only one way we can ever react to circumstances we cannot understand fully with our current framework. We have to say – in Christ God has revealed Himself to be a Good, Holy, Merciful and Righteous God of Love. I do not fully understand these circumstances, but I do know what God has revealed about Himself in Christ, and so I will accept these circumstances and trust in my Heavenly Father that what He has done is right.
The great danger we face as human beings is that in our arrogance we want to believe we have come to understand all there is to know about God. Like Eliphaz, we want to bind God to rules we have a grasp of, we want to restrict God to our framework. But this is enormously dangerous, for a number of reasons:
- Those who believe they understand God will no longer fear Him. Human beings who think they have God all tied up, who think they know how God must act in any situation, will lack a reverent fear of the Holy and Sovereign God of the Bible. More than that, they will no longer know the God of the Bible, but a false god of their own making.
- God has revealed to us what we need to know about Himself. He is God and we are human, and because of this we cannot tie a lot of things up. For example, God is Three but He is also One. God is utterly Sovereign, yet human beings are totally responsible before Him. We cannot tie all the truths of the Bible up in a neat doctrinal framework, but we must accept them all to be true. If we insist on trying to tie up all that God has revealed to us with human logic then we will only listen to the parts of God’s Word we want to be true. We will filter the rest out through our own limited framework.
We live in an age of reason, and it is important that our faith is based on reason. God does not ask us to make blind leaps of faith, and to believe truth for which there is no evidence. He would not have given us brains if He wanted us to do that.
Our faith must be based on reason, it must be based on evidence, but it must go far beyond that. God has given us His ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ we know Who God is. Not only has He revealed Himself to us in Christ, He has also provided in Christ the way for our sins and disobedience to be forgiven, and for us to be reconciled with Himself. We can know Him intimately, we can have a closer relationship with Him in Christ than we can have with any human being, we can love Him deeply. But we can never in this life fully understand Him. We cannot tie Him down to any framework we put together, no matter how much truth it contains.
Finally, when faced with a turbulent world and the echoing question ‘Why has God allowed this?’ we have to answer –
The Bible gives us a lot of the answers but not all of them. However, in the Person of Christ God has revealed to us that He is Good, Holy, Righteous, Just, Merciful and above all that He is Love. Therefore we can trust our Holy and Righteous God with these circumstances we cannot understand.
It is this kind of faith that God wants from His people. This is the faith that made Abraham, Enoch and Job men who were counted as friends of God, even though the revelation they had received was far more limited. This is the faith we can have if we will abandon our human arrogance, and the human wisdom that in the end is only folly, and if we will trust with our lives and our eternal souls the God who revealed Himself to us in Christ.