“Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). The implication of this text is that God has the right and power to do whatever makes Him happy. That is what it means to say that God is sovereign.
Think about it for a moment: If God is sovereign and can do anything He pleases, then none of His purposes can be frustrated.
The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations. (Psalm 33:10–11)
And if none of His purposes can be frustrated, then He must be the happiest of all beings. This infinite, divine happiness is the fountain from which the Christian Hedonist drinks and longs to drink more deeply.
Can you imagine what it would be like if the God who ruled the world were not happy? What if God were given to grumbling and pouting and depression, like some Jack-and-the-beanstalk giant in the sky? What if God were frustrated and despondent and gloomy and dismal and discontented and dejected? Could we join David and say, “O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1)?
I don’t think so. We would all relate to God like little children who have a frustrated, gloomy, dismal, discontented father. They can’t enjoy him. They can only try not to bother him, or maybe try to work for him to earn some little favor.
Therefore if God is not a happy God, Christian Hedonism has no foundation. For the aim of the Christian Hedonist is to be happy in God, to delight in God, to cherish and enjoy His fellowship and favor. But children cannot enjoy the fellowship of their Father if He is unhappy. Therefore the foundation of Christian Hedonism is the happiness of God.
But the foundation of the happiness of God is the sovereignty of God: “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). If God were not sovereign, if the world He made were out of control, frustrating His design again and again, God would not be happy.
Just as our joy is based on the promise that God is strong enough and wise enough to make all things work together for our good, so God’s joy is based on that same sovereign control: He makes all things work together for His glory.
If so much hangs on God’s sovereignty, we should make sure the biblical basis for it is secure.
THE BIBLICAL BASIS FOR GOD’S SOVEREIGN HAPPINESS(1)
The sheer fact that God is God implies that His purposes cannot be thwarted—so says the prophet Isaiah:
“I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.’” (Isaiah 46:9–10)
The purposes of God cannot be frustrated; there is none like God. If a purpose of God came to naught, it would imply that there is a power greater than God’s. It would imply that someone could stay His hand when He designs to do a thing. But “none can stay his hand,” as Nebuchadnezzar says:
His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?” (Daniel 4:34–35)
HIS SOVEREIGNTY COVERS CALAMITIES
This was also Job’s final confession after God had spoken to him out of the whirlwind: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2). “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3).
This raises the question whether the evil and calamitous events in the world are also part of God’s sovereign design. Jeremiah looks over the carnage of Jerusalem after its destruction and cries:
My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns; my bile is poured out to the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city. (Lamentations 2:11)
But when he looked to God, he could not deny the truth:
Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come? (3:37–38)
“SHALL WE RECEIVE GOOD FROM GOD AND NOT EVIL?”If God reigns as sovereign over the world, then the evil of the world is not outside His design: “Does disaster come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?” (Amos 3:6).
This was the reverent saying of God’s servant Job when he was afflicted with boils: “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10). He said this even though the text says plainly that “Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and struck Job with loathsome sores” (Job 2:7). Was Job wrong to attribute to God what came from Satan? No, because the writer tells us immediately after Job’s words: “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:10).
The evil Satan causes is only by the permission of God. Therefore, Job is not wrong to see it as ultimately from the hand of God. It would be unbiblical and irreverent to attribute to Satan (or to sinful man) the power to frustrate the designs of God.
WHO PLANNED THE MURDER OF CHRIST?
The clearest example that even moral evil fits into the designs of God is the crucifixion of Christ. Who would deny that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas was a morally evil act?
Yet in Acts 2:23, Peter says, “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.” The betrayal was sin, but it was part of God’s ordained plan. Sin did not thwart His plan or stay His hand.
Or who would say that Herod’s contempt (Luke 23:11) or Pilate’s spineless expediency (Luke 23:24) or the Jews’ “Crucify, crucify him!” (Luke 23:21) or the Gentile soldiers’ mockery (Luke 23:36)—who would say that these were not sin? Yet Luke, in Acts 4:27–28, records the prayer of the saints:
Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.
People lift their hand to rebel against the Most High only to find that their rebellion is unwitting service in the wonderful designs of God. Even sin cannot frustrate the purposes of the Almighty. He Himself does not commit sin, but He has decreed that there be acts that are sin,(2) for the acts of Pilate and Herod were predestined by God’s plan.GOD TURNS IT WHEREVER HE WILL
Similarly, when we come to the end of the New Testament and to the end of history in the Revelation of John, we find God in complete control of all the evil kings who wage war. In Revelation 17, John speaks of a harlot sitting on a beast with ten horns. The harlot is Rome, drunk with the blood of the saints; the beast is the Antichrist; and the ten horns are ten kings who “hand over their power and authority to the beast…[and] make war on the Lamb” (vv. 13–14).
But are these evil kings outside God’s control? Are they frustrating God’s designs? Far from it. They are unwittingly doing His bidding: “For God has put it into their hearts to carry out his purpose by being of one mind and handing over their royal power to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled” (Revelation 17:17). No one on earth can escape the sovereign control of God: “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will” (Proverbs 21:1; cf. Ezra 6:22).
The evil intentions of men cannot frustrate the decrees of God. This is the point of the story of Joseph’s fall and rise in Egypt. His brothers sold him into slavery. Potiphar’s wife slandered him into the dungeon. Pharaoh’s butler forgot him in prison for two years. Where was God in all this sin and misery? Joseph answers in Genesis 50:20. He says to his guilty brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”
The hardened disobedience of men’s hearts leads not to the frustration of God’s plans, but to their fruition.
Consider the hardness of heart in Romans 11:25–26: “Lest you be wise in your own conceits, I want you to understand this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved.” Who is governing the coming and going of this hardness of heart so that it has a particular limit, and then gives way at the appointed time to the certain salvation of “all Israel”?
Or consider the disobedience in Romans 11:31. Paul speaks to his Gentile readers about Israel’s disobedience in rejecting their Messiah: “So they [Israel] too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you [Gentiles] they also may now receive mercy.” When Paul says that Israel was disobedient in order that Gentiles might get the benefits of the gospel, whose purpose does He have in mind?
It could only be God’s. For Israel certainly did not conceive of their disobedience as a way of blessing the Gentiles—or winning mercy for themselves in such a roundabout fashion! Is not then the point of Romans 11:31 that God rules over the disobedience of Israel and turns it precisely to the purposes He has planned?
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MERE COINCIDENCE
God’s sovereignty over men’s affairs is not compromised even by the reality of sin and evil in the world. It is not limited to the good acts of men or the pleasant events of nature. The wind belongs to God whether it comforts or whether it kills.
For I know that the LORD is great, and that our Lord is above all gods. Whatever the LORD pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. He it is who makes the clouds rise at the end of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses. (Psalm 135:5–7)
In the end, one must finally come to see that if there is a God in heaven, there is no such thing as mere coincidence, not even in the smallest affairs of life: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD” (Proverbs 16:33). Not one sparrow “will fall to the ground without your Father’s will” (Matthew 10:29, RSV).
(1) For a much fuller defense of God’s sovereignty in all that He does, see John Piper, The Pleasures of God:
Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 2000), 47–75, 121–55 and The
Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1–23 (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Baker, 1993). See also Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan), 315–54; John M. Frame, The Doctrine of God, Theology of
Lordship Series (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2002), 47–79, 274–88, 313–39, and the
relevant chapters in Still Sovereign: Contemporary Perspectives on Election, Foreknowledge, and Grace,
ed. Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce A. Ware (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000).
(2) For an explanation and defense of this statement, see appendix 3, “Is God Less Glorious Because He
Ordained That Evil Be? Jonathan Edwards on the Divine Decrees.”
Taken from: http://www.desiringgod.org/books/desiring-god
By John Piper. ©2015 Desiring God Foundation. Website: desiringGod.org
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