Sovereignty: More Than Just Theology

God is sovereign.

It should be just that easy, but most people need a little explanation to get the full impact of that truth. This is His Creation; it is not merely a static collection of various bits of matter. It has a soul, as it were, a distinct moral sense that derives from the character of our Creator. His revelation requires that we treat all Creation as living because it carries the divine spark of His eternal Presence.

We humans are also living entities within this immeasurable living bubble of time and space. God’s Presence is here, but is rooted somewhere else, outside of Creation. If He were to bring His true Presence to bear, Creation would dissolve, so He tends to work indirectly in our universe. That’s the business of angels and demons, themselves parabolic abstractions of things we cannot possibly understand.

Everything exists on multiple levels. You can connect directly to God through a faculty far above intelligence and sensory input; you can perceive the moral imprint of His character in Creation; you can watch stuff with your senses and try to process it with mere intellect; you can just go by mere appetites and emotions. More, there are various paths which connect one or more of those levels in ways no one can describe. We can discuss the various threads of human awareness only in theory, because in actual practice it works altogether simultaneously.

The bulk of our interaction with Him is through His revelation on one hand, and our complex connection through the Spirit on the other hand. His revelation should serve mostly to inform our minds, a means of preparation to operate according to His divine character. That moral character is how the universe runs, so it should be obvious that we start first from seeking to understand that moral character. This allows the will to make sense of what the Spirit does in moving in our spirits. Most of this, in turn, depends on the structure provided by a sense of calling.

It’s supposed to be messy and shot through with multiple human failures. The fundamental issue is not the results of our actions, but our moral development. We are the battlefield, not the world around us. As noted previously, questions of being and doing are all the wrong question. It’s a matter of commitment and heart’s desire. Recall that I’ve said your heart is literally a sensory organ, too. It’s not even a matter of moral understanding, but commitment — your will is in your heart. You can do the wrong thing, but still be righteous because you were so intent on pleasing God as best you knew at the moment.

At the same time, we are supposed to maintain an awareness of the world at large, particularly in how most of our fellow humans have none of our moral discernment. They aren’t necessarily immoral, just morally confused. They don’t operate on our multi-level sense of commitment to One who made all things, controls all things, and exists externally to everything He made.

You would be a fool not to realize that people in positions of power are planning and executing some truly hideous, morally evil things. You’d also be a fool to imagine they are all on the same sheet of music. Every person involved in positions of power will tend to honor various conflicting commitments. Everyone is an agent of someone else, and sometimes double and triple agents, if not even more confused than that. There are a thousand contextual conspiracies that rage in the background all the time, and people who are making and dissolving alliances, and lying about them differently to different people, etc.

So if you were to visit that secretive biology lab owned by the US military in a certain West African country, you would find the handful of people working there representing all sorts of varying allegiances all at once, and shifting among them moment by moment. Could the current Ebola virus be a product of intentional evil from that lab? I’d say there’s a very good chance of it. Or maybe it was just an accident. Maybe it was something we can’t describe. Could it be some portion, or maybe all, of the mainstream news reports about Ebola cases in the US be lying? Again, there’s a good chance of that. None of this requires the full knowledge of those whose hands do the deeds.

What difference does it make? The answer to that depends on your calling and where God directs your attention. Just what else are the evil folks at the top planning for us? There’s nothing wrong with trying to keep track of the things that come to your attention. For example, at least a broad sample of elite rulers on this world do share a passion for reducing human population by about 90%. How they plan to go about reducing the population varies all over the map of possibilities. People in positions of direct power, and folks who influence them from the background, have all kinds of thuggery in mind.

There’s a sense in which every conspiracy you hear about is probably at least partly true. If one person can imagine it, someone else is probably hoping to do it. Whether or not their hopes have any bearing on world events is another thing. God steers a lot more things on more levels than you and I could possibly know. What those folks manage to do is really up to Him.

And those of us who consciously belong to Him have nothing to worry about. That is, the sum total of our conscious awareness rests not in the fear of what evil men plot, regardless of their competence and power to actually carry it out. What God permits is in our best interest, because we can rely on Him to watch over His best interest. And without fail, what’s good for His glory is good for us.

Again: God is sovereign. You be faithful.