In today’s Western church, we are generally told to trust solely in the sovereignty of God, instead of, by implication at least, the Word of God.
There’s a big, and deadly, difference between the two approaches.
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Because of the yawning chasm between the “very great and precious promises” (2 Pe. 1:4) in the word of God and the experience of almost all modern believers, Western theologians apparently felt the need to come up with a solution that both preserved some type of belief in inerrancy and God’s integrity, but at the same time did not place the blame for failed promises on their congregations.
This is because nobody likes to be told that the failure of God’s promises in their life is due to their being part of a “twisted and perverted generation” in their lack of faith, as Jesus angrily labeled His own beloved disciples. See Mat. 17:17.
And so a concept referred to as “faith in the sovereignty of God” was forcibly stitched together from snippets of Job and other books and stretched across the chasm to see if it would hold. We are now told by many evangelical leaders of the awesome rest that is ours, despite our trials, if we just train ourselves to get comfortable with God’s providence, whatever the outcome of those trials might be.
Frankly, it would be hard to imagine a more dishonest approach, because it’s hard to imagine anyone really saying with even a hint of honesty that he or she is ‘good’ at the end of the day with God, in His sovereignty, ordaining the kidnapping and rape of a daughter or the drawn out death of a cancer-stricken spouse.
Unfortunately, even some of the big Christian music hits reflect this theology, proclaiming that even if God doesn’t ‘move the mountain’ we prayed about, we will still trust Him and worship Him. In other words, He may be faithless, but we are faithful.
Tragically, this is where we are in the Western church.
And as a result, our spiritual Goliaths stride to and fro over our lives tormenting us daily with failure, fear, unforgiveness, and the like, and we hide, defeated, dejected, and despairing, because our theology says that God’s very great and precious promises are only for heaven and not for today.
And even worse, the clear message to us churchgoers is ultimately this: right now, until heaven, you are on your own, and the Lord, because He is sovereign and ordains all things, is potentially your greatest tormentor.
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The Universe is in the midst of a massive conflict, a holy war, and the battleground is on earth in the
souls of men. Once we understand and accept this basic fact, life becomes a lot more comprehensible.
The Lord has given us many “very great and precious promises” upon which to take our stand while this conflict rages in ourselves and our loved ones – promises of rescue, wholeness, freedom, healing, and deliverance. See, e.g., Psalms 25, 27, 34, 35, 37, 40, 91, and 121, just to name a few.
Because most of the Western church has elevated human experience over the Word of God as authoritative for our lives, we have concluded that God didn’t really mean what He said in these Psalms, unless He was referring to life in heaven when we leave this vale of tears. Accordingly, in the here and now we no longer are taught to place our faith in these words, or adhere to the accompanying exhortations to “resist the devil” and to “stand firm” against him.
We are told to passively accept whatever comes down the pike “as an exercise of God’s sovereignty”, which, of course, if carried to its logical conclusion would mean we shouldn’t fight it either in the spiritual realm through prayer or the natural realm by, for example, going to a doctor.
We may toss up a few prayers to see if they stick, but our confidence has been siphoned away by the theology of helplessness with which we’ve been saddled by today’s religious luminaries. Therefore, we don’t persevere, we don’t fast, and we quickly lose all hope.
And in reality, neither the promises nor the exhortations make much sense if the Lord Himself is actually responsible for our torment and the ultimate outcome. As a result, Satan, the real culprit, continues on with his deadly work unchallenged and never threatened, while he encourages us in our deep heart to blame God for whatever cruelty Satan himself is able to inflict.
Faith in God’s word to Abraham, not in God’s “sovereignty” as defined today, is what carried Abraham through the ordeal of not only waiting for Isaac to be born, but of preparing to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22, because Abraham was convinced that God would have to raise Isaac from the dead to keep His blood covenant promise that “all nations would be blessed in [Isaac]” (Hbr. 11:18).
That is the only way Abraham was able to carry on obediently with God’s command to slay his son, at least until the angel of the Lord stopped him. He was focused on the stakes involved with God actually breaching the blood covenant, and he concluded that it would be much easier for God to raise Isaac from the dead than to breach His covenant promise concerning Isaac’s future offspring (Hbr. 11:19)
Likewise, the Lord knew that the Wilderness Jews, after crossing the Red Sea, would need faith (i.e., courage) to enter the land of the giants in Canaan and prevail against them. God’s gift of the land of Canaan to Abraham was expressly set forth in Genesis 15. God’s failure to deliver the land to Joshua and Abraham’s offspring would have meant a breach of the blood covenant. This is why the Lord was so angry with the Wilderness Jews when they first failed to enter in the land, such that the whole generation over the age of twenty perished after spending another 40 years in the desert. (See Numbers 14.)
That generation became fearful and paralyzed, believing God meant ill for them and their children. They simply refused to believe He would uphold His end of the covenant and give them victory over the giants. And Psalm 95:10 says that the Lord “loathed” that generation because of this faithlessness until the day all of them had died out.
Other heroes of the bible were keenly aware of the blood covenant and the stakes in the event of a breach by the Lord. The three young Jews thrown into Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace were no doubt aware of the numerous psalms promising rescue, and in addition the specific promise of Is. 43:2: When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, Nor will the flame burn you. As a result they could categorically state that God would rescue them – “no ifs, ands, or buts.”*
*See part 2 of the website article “The Theology of Helplessness and the section therein entitled The Faith of Shadrach and Company for a further explanation.
David himself expressly relied on the blood covenant, God’s oath to Abraham, to summon the courage
to challenge Goliath. David was a mere slip of a boy of around age sixteen in 1 Samuel 17, but noted to all of the Hebrew soldiers listening that Goliath, the giant “defying the armies of the living God”, was “uncircumcised” (1 Sam. 17:26, 36).
What David was saying was that Goliath had zero right to the land of Canaan, because God had sworn by a blood covenant to gift the land to the circumcised, Abraham and his offspring – David and the rest of the Hebrews. For this reason, David knew that God had to give him the victory over Goliath, regardless of what his common sense was telling him, and God did.
Jonathan, son of Saul, took the same approach when he decided for himself and his armor bearer to take on a Philistine garrison of twenty men: Jonathan said to the young man who carried his armor, “Come, let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised…”
David and Jonathan and Abraham relied on exactly what God had said, not some practically amorphous concept of God’s sovereignty. And God gave each of them the victory.
Now we know that over the centuries Israel and Judah lost some battles in the promised land, and we ourselves may have experienced many troubles from which we perceived no apparent rescue, which then tempts us to discount or doubt the continuing validity of the blood covenant or the reliability of the covenant promises liberally sprinkled throughout the psalms and elsewhere. But should we?
Perhaps the best explanation for Israel’s lost battles is not God’s faithlessness, but the faithlessness or lack of obedience of the relevant Hebrew leaders, such as Saul, Ahab, and others. Likewise, the best explanation in our personal lives when it seems that the promises fail is often faithlessness or sin in our daily walk, or lack of obedience to God’s prescription for victory. Wasn’t the reason for Israel’s initial defeat at Ai their disobedience to His specific command to forego any contraband? See Josh. 7:1-26.
Let us be clear: when we doubt God based on our experiences, we are choosing our own mind as the ultimate authority for our lives. When we exalt our own mind and experiences over the word of God, trusting our assessments over His word, and make them authoritative for us, we have rejected and dethroned God and enthroned ourselves, our own minds, in our own lives.
Fortunately, the Lord in His mercy gives us many examples of the faithlessness or disobedience of the heroes of the faith, from Abraham to David to Peter, and yet He still gave them the victory when they stepped out in faith because He knew their heart. If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself (2 Tim. 2:11-13). If our heart is right, regardless of past sin or failures, we can be confident before Him as we step out in faith. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight. 1 Jhn 3:21-22
Clearly, past “failures” of any divine promise cannot ever be due to God’s faithlessness to the blood covenant promises because we can see that the universe which He upholds is still here. In other words, He is not a liar and has not lied. He has never breached the covenant before today, which should lead us to safely conclude that He will not breach it in the future.
What He asks from us is obedience, as obedience is the key to the Kingdom and its blessings. Obedience to God’s word, in turn, is based on a belief that God’s word is reliable and true. When we so choose to believe, we receive the gift of faith to do the “greater works” (Jhn 14:12) Jesus promised, which comes to us as a “conviction” or “assurance” as Hebrews 11:1 says.
And obedience not only in believing but acting in accordance with His methods for achieving the result. This is where we often miss the boat, thinking that warring against our oppressors in the demonic realm is somehow unsophisticated, medieval, or foolish. As a result, we are disobedient to His methods, preferring instead to hope and pray for a lightning bolt from the blue, which has no New Testament precedent. As a result, the healing promises fail. (Please see Dr Rapha’s Miracle Elixir: https://healingisgodsjustice.org/dr-raphas-miracle-elixir/.)
On more than one occasion the Lord gave specific instructions to Joshua and David as to battle strategies. See 2 Sam. 5:23-24; Josh. 8:1-21. They dared not disobey, knowing that failure would follow if they did, for they feared the Lord.
The Lord is calling us back to believing His Word and relying unequivocally on His promises, to being obedient in all aspects of our walk, that we may “overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.” (Rom. 8:37)
The End