God's Sovereignty, Man's Freewill

January 25th, 2025
by Dr. D. Lance Waldie

Romans 9:23-24 …God did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory— 24 even us, whom He also called…

The profound truth in this passage is that God chooses some for salvation while leaving others in their sinful state. This infuriates many and causes them to question either the truth of the Bible or the character of God. But God being God, He demonstrates His glory in His actions, showing believers how thankful they must be for having been mercifully chosen by Him. In the end, it appears the vessels of God’s mercy will peer over a great chasm from heaven looking down into the eternal lake of fire and be awestruck by God’s grace, realizing that the lake of fire was their destiny, that is until God mercifully saved them. Though more than a few professed Christians rail against this truth, this is the revealed purpose of God in holy writ! Admittedly, it is difficult doctrine. Peter himself commented on some of Paul’s writings when he wrote, “There are some things in [Paul’s writings] that are hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16).

Can we harmonize God’s sovereignty with our freewill? Sadly, no. Man may not like what God has done or decreed, but God is unmoved. Commenting on this, Martin Luther wrote, “Mere human reason can never comprehend how God is good and merciful; and therefore you make to yourself a god of your own fancy, who hardens nobody, condemns nobody, pities everybody. You cannot comprehend how a just God can condemn those who are born in sin, and cannot help themselves, but must, by a necessity of their natural constitution, continue in sin, and remain children of wrath. The answer is, God is incomprehensible throughout, and therefore His justice, as well as His other attributes, must be incomprehensible. It is on this very ground that St. Paul exclaims, ‘O the depth of the riches of the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!’ Now, His judgments would not be past finding out, if we could always perceive them to be just” (Bondage of the Will, pp. 314-15).

Food for Thought

Jonathon Edwards wrote: “It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably radiant, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested and another not at all… Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it. There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired, and the sense of it not so great…So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect” (Concerning the Divine Decrees, p. 528).