The Sovereignty of God

But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased. PSALM 115:3

Edwards did not arrive at the sovereignty of God as an inherited opinion. He arrived at it after years of resisting it, and the record of that resistance is one of the most valuable things he left us.

A doctrine he hated

In the Personal Narrative he describes his younger self’s objection with startling candour. The teaching that God chooses whom He will save and passes by others appeared to him horrible. He could not make it fit with anything he wanted to believe about God, and he argued against it in his own mind for a long time. Then something changed, and he was careful to describe the change accurately. He did not say that he found a knockdown argument. He said that the doctrine came to appear to him exceedingly pleasant, bright and sweet — that he came to delight in the absolute sovereignty of God. That sequence is important, and it recurs throughout his theology. The resolution was not intellectual capitulation. It was a change in what he found beautiful. He began to want a God like that. Any reader wrestling with these doctrines should note the pattern. Argument has its place, and Edwards was a formidable arguer. But he did not believe anyone was ever finally reconciled to the sovereignty of God by being out-reasoned. Something has to happen to the taste.

What Scripture claims

The claim itself is not obscure. It is stated repeatedly and without qualification.

And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou? DANIEL 4:35

For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy …So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy. ROMANS 9:15–16

Edwards preached on these texts directly, notably in God’s Sovereignty in the Salvation of Men. His handling of the standard objection is characteristically severe and characteristically clarifying. The objection is that this is unfair. Edwards’s answer is that the objection misunderstands what is owed. Justice would give every sinner condemnation; nobody receives worse than justice. Mercy, by definition, is not owed to anyone — the moment it is owed it has stopped being mercy and become wages. God wrongs no one by giving some what none deserve.

Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? ROMANS 9:20

He was aware this does not remove the difficulty from the heart. He did not pretend it did. What he insisted upon was that the difficulty is not an injustice in God but an offence to our sense of entitlement — and that our sense of entitlement is itself part of what needs saving.

Why it is a pastoral doctrine

It would be a mistake to file this under abstract theology. For Edwards it was intensely practical, and in two directions. It kills despair. If salvation depended on the sinner’s capacity to generate faith, then the hardened, the addicted, the long-resistant and the intellectually proud would be beyond hope, because they cannot. But if God is sovereign in salvation, no one is beyond reach. Edwards prayed for the most unlikely people in his parish with real expectation, precisely because the outcome did not depend on them. And it kills presumption. If God’s mercy is free, it cannot be commanded, scheduled or taken for granted. The man who assumes he can repent at a convenient time has misunderstood what repentance is and who grants it.

Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. ISAIAH 55:6

One caution, which Edwards’s own practice supplies better than any argument. Nobody preached God’s sovereignty more insistently, and nobody pleaded with sinners more urgently. He saw no tension whatever between the two, and he would have regarded a man who used divine sovereignty as a reason not to evangelise as having failed to understand it. The same Scripture that declares God’s absolute freedom in mercy commands us without qualification to call everyone.

Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. REVELATION 22:17

Hold both. Edwards did, all his life, and he never showed the slightest anxiety about it.

Sovereignty in providence

Edwards did not confine this doctrine to the question of who is saved. He applied it to everything that happens, and it was in the ordinary disasters of his own life that he had to prove whether he believed it. Scripture’s boldest statements on the subject concern the worst event in history. Peter tells the Jerusalem crowd that they took Jesus and crucified Him — genuinely guilty, genuinely responsible — and in the same breath that this happened by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God (Acts 2:23). The church at prayer says the same thing more explicitly still.

For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus …both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, for to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done. ACTS 4:27–28

The murder of the Son of God was the freely chosen wickedness of specific men, and it was the settled plan of God for the salvation of the world. Scripture asserts both without embarrassment, and Edwards took that as the pattern for every lesser instance.

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. GENESIS 50:20

Joseph does not say his brothers meant one thing and it happened to work out. He says God meant it — the same act, two intentions, one wicked and one good. Edwards had occasion to apply this. He was dismissed at forty-six from the most influential pulpit in the region, by his own congregation, after twenty-three years, with ten children still at home and no income. His letters from that period show a man genuinely wounded and genuinely settled. He went to a frontier village, and there wrote the four books on which his reputation now chiefly rests. Had he remained at Northampton, with its committees and its constant demands, it is unlikely he would have written any of them. He did not know that at the time. Nobody does.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. ROMANS 8:28

That verse is not a promise that events will be pleasant, nor that we shall be told the reason. It is a promise that there is one — and that the God who governs the crucifixion of His Son is not likely to have lost control of our smaller catastrophes.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Identify which part of God’s sovereignty you resist. Say it plainly to God rather than pretending agreement you do not feel. 2. Ask not to be argued into this doctrine but to be given a taste for it. That is the prayer Edwards’s own experience suggests. 3. Name one person you have written off as beyond conversion. Begin praying for them again this week on the ground that the outcome does not rest on them. 4. Where you have been presuming on a future opportunity to get right with God, stop presuming. Act now. 5. Refuse the false choice. Pray as though everything depends on God, and speak to people as though the command to call them is absolute — because both are true.

A PRAYER

Lord, You do as You please in heaven and on earth, and there are days when I find that hard rather than comforting.

I will not pretend. Where I resist Your sovereignty, I confess it to You instead of arguing with You.

Do for me what You did for Your servant: not merely convince my mind, but change my taste, until the truth I found threatening becomes the truth I find sweetest.

And let this doctrine make me bolder, not idler — hopeful for the hardest people I know, and urgent with them, because mercy is Yours to give and You have told me to call them. Amen.