Do you want to start an argument in a Bible study? The next time you’re there, just say, “I know. Let’s discuss the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of human beings!”
That normally does the trick.
Of course, we should never want to start an argument, but sometimes it’s just unavoidable. Like politics and religion, the question of how God’s sovereignty and our responsibility fit together cowers in a dark corner, never to see the light of day.
So is the sovereignty of God one of those subjects that we should avoid? Is there no answer to the question of how God’s supreme authority and our responsibility resolve their conflict?
Join me on this theological journey, and we’ll discover the answer together.
“The system of truth revealed in the Scriptures is not simply one straight line, but two; and no man will ever get a right view of the gospel until he knows how to look at the two lines at once.”
A Defense of Calvinism
— Charles Spurgeon
Introduction: The Unresolved Tension
Why is this such an uncomfortable subject? The answer is simple. People don’t like unresolved questions, so they try to answer questions to which they have no answer. This is dangerous and has caused conflicts in the church that should never have arisen.
Let me give a couple examples with our subject in mind.
Arminianism
Arminians put a strong emphasis on the responsibility of human beings. Because of this, they break the tension between God’s total sovereignty and man’s responsibility by leaning on “free will.” Human beings freely accept or reject God’s gift. Free will means we can either believe in faith or go chuck it. After all, why would God give us a choice if we can’t make a decision?
There are more than a few issues with this idea. First, it’s difficult to pin down a specific theological argument in the Bible that supports “free will.” I once asked a friend where in the Bible it specifically talks about free will. His answer was “everywhere.” I asked him to give me a specific passage that clearly proved free will. He couldn’t.
Why? The Bible doesn’t support the concept of free will. If it did, it would give it a name like “free will.” But the Bible and logic both deny that anything like that exists. Romans 3:10-12 aside (which decries the idea of a truly free will), we find that human beings are described as being in “bondage” and “slaves to sin” before they were given “freedom” through Christ. (See Romans 6:6ff for more). This doesn’t sound like freedom. It sounds like slavery.
Even real life doesn’t mesh with the idea of free will. We are free to do as we will. Until we aren’t, of course. We are free to drive a hundred-fifty miles per hour on the freeway until law enforcement has us doing zero miles per hour in a jail cell. From womb to tomb, we are controlled by someone or something. This isn’t pure free will. It’s freedom to do whatever we can.
And that’s the key. We have free will so far as we will do what we most want to do. However, sin constantly drives us to act selfishly. We are under its duplicitous spell, and it drives us to do what we most want to do: defy God (Yes, this is a reference to Romans 3 again).
This may look like free will from our standpoint. It isn’t free will in reality. Arminianism gives too simple an answer to a very complex and nuanced question.
Hyper-Calvinism
The other group that weighs in heavily includes those who see everything as a result of God’s sovereign will. Because of this emphasis, salvation becomes a process in which we have no part. Faith is simply a window dressing for salvation. It looks like us, but it’s only God in disguise.
It is true that God is one-hundred percent sovereign, even in salvation. In fact, Ephesians 2:4 goes so far as to say that God “chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” If simply read and not overanalyzed, this clearly demonstrates a specific and determined course of action God took before anything was created. He chose us.
But does this imply that faith is simply a superficial part of God’s plan of salvation? What’s more confusing is that Paul goes out of His way to say in the very next chapter, “For by grace you have been saved through faith” (Ephesians 2:8a, NASB 95).
Some point to the second part of the verse as proof that faith is all about God and has nothing to do with us: “and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8b, NASB 95). Because it isn’t from us, we have no active role in salvation. God does the heavy lifting, and we’re along for the ride.
Here’s the issue: if faith is nothing, why include it so prominently in the clearest (and, now, most famous) biblical formula on what salvation is? If God’s already chosen (and He has), why must I believe in faith? Why must anyone believe in faith?
The Bible never says faith is simply a window dressing. It never even implies that faith in any way conflicts with God’s sovereign plan. In other words, hyper-Calvinism also falls short by leaning on an answer that the Bible never specifically gives.
The Answer Is…?
So here’s what we know. God chose us before we were born. That is true. We are required to choose God through faith despite our sinful proclivities and the overwhelming sin nature that squats inside our souls. We are responsible. God is sovereign and remains just through the whole process.
Confused? Yup. Me too. Until I realized that not all mysteries have to be solved.
Biblical Mystery vs. Philosophical Speculation
Some people love mysteries. I’m one of them. I like trying to solve them before anyone else. In fact, I drive my family crazy when I’m constantly “thinking out loud” about how all the facts fit together (and consequently, ruin the ending).
Here’s the thing: the modern mystery was created to be solved. It entertains by leading us on a journey of facts and circumstances so that we discover a resolution to the story.
In other words, we want to know “whodunit.”
The Fallacy of Philosophical Speculation
What is a philosopher? It’s someone who strives to answer the unanswerable. It’s someone who wants more than just the story. They want to know the ending to the mystery.
Because of this, they become “sanctified chefs.” If the answer isn’t readily apparent, they take facts, mix them all up, bake them, and feed them to us on a silver platter.
Many times, their answers make sense. An Arminian who says that God would never give us a choice that we can’t make makes perfect sense from a human standpoint. Free will follows a logical path for a human being trying to make sense of salvation.
A hyper-Calvinist would contend that, because the Bible says we are unable to choose God (see Romans 3 again!), faith is simply something that God does for us. We have no part in faith because it is a sovereign act of God.
Both ideas sound biblical and logical. Both ideas fall short. These folks try to take a few facts and fill in the rest of the blanks so that they can answer an unanswerable question.
The True Nature of Biblical Mysteries
Not all mysteries are created the same. Biblical mystery presents itself in a very different way than our western thinking allows. We think of mysteries as something we don’t know but will soon because we’ll work hard to find the answer. The Bible defines a “mystery” as something that wasn’t known, now is, but may still not be fully explained. There are many of these kinds of “mysteries” in the Bible.
For instance, the Trinity comes readily to mind. How can God be one and yet three? Do we serve one God? Yep. Is that one God three Persons? Yep again.
How can both facts be true? To our human mind, these ideas seem to conflict.
But they don’t. They are simply a mystery.
How about the incarnation? Jesus is one hundred percent God. Yessiree! He’s also one hundred percent man. Wait a minute. I was never good at math, but isn’t that two hundred percent? How can that be? That’s a logical impossibility!
But it isn’t. It’s simply a mystery.
Inspiration explains how God gave us the Bible. God didn’t just whisper in the ear of each writer and have them mechanically write everything down as if they were taking dictation. He allowed their own experiences, vocabulary, and ways of thinking to bleed into the text. That’s why every biblical writer sounds different. They were all different people.
Yet, God gave them every word. The Bible isn’t just God’s Word. It’s also God’s words. There is nothing in the Bible that God didn’t sovereignly deem necessary. That’s why the Bible is perfect. It was breathed out exactly the way God wanted it (2 Timothy 3:16).
Wait a minute. If Paul wrote Ephesians, and God did too, how can we honestly call the Bible God’s Word? Shouldn’t it be called God’s (and to a lesser degree, Paul’s) words? What was this, a collaboration?
It isn’t collaboration. It’s inspiration, and we don’t know how God pulled it off. It’s simply a mystery.
You get the idea. There are many doctrines in the Bible that we know exist, but we can’t explain. They are a mystery to us this side of heaven.
How God can be sovereign and we be fully accountable to believe in faith is that kind of mystery. God doesn’t give us the mechanism to explain it. So trying to explain it is both useless and dangerous.
Sovereignty Without Fatalism
What does this all mean? It means we don’t have to come up with imaginative fixes like “free will” to explain how God rectifies the seemingly contradictory nature of sovereignty and human responsibility. In our mind, tension exists. In God’s mind, it’s all resolved, and He is glorified in it.
At the same time, it also means we don’t have to sacrifice human agency at the altar of God’s sovereignty. Our God isn’t a fatalistic God. He still holds us responsible. We shouldn’t assume that God drags us into heaven against our will.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still His will that brings us in. The Bible tells us that much (John 6:44). Yet, our own will is somehow involved in the process. We just don’t know how that happens.
God baked both ideas into salvation without giving us a logical or biblical solution to explain it. He’s God. He doesn’t have to explain it. We are fully responsible regardless of whether God chooses us or not.
This is why Spurgeon’s quotation that I introduced earlier is so important. Let’s consider it again:
“The system of truth revealed in the Scriptures is not simply one straight line, but two; and no man will ever get a right view of the gospel until he knows how to look at the two lines at once.”
There are two lines of thought: God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. They aren’t parallel. They overlap each other. As Spurgeon explains, we must accept the fact that what looks like one line is actually two. We don’t have to explain why they look singular. We simply accept that there are two lines that lead to one truth.
Spurgeon had it right. This is exactly how God presents the tension between sovereignty and human responsibility.
Trusting God’s Justice in the Tension
God must remain just. So simply explaining that God chooses us without accounting for a human element dances dangerously on the precipice of unbiblical teaching. How can God strip us of all responsibility and then hold us responsible?
If you think this isn’t fair, you’re almost right. If God were fair, we would all be in hell right now. Fairness isn’t the issue, but God’s righteous nature is.
God’s righteous nature demands He always act justly (see Psalm 7:11, Daniel 9:14 and 1 John 3:7 for more). He won’t demand something when He knows we cannot meet the criteria. Yet, we still remain unable in our will to meet those standards.
How does God resolve this? We know He does because He is just. He will always act as His righteous nature motivates Him.
Here’s the problem. He doesn’t tell us how, and that drives some of us to want a nice long stay in our happy place.
Here’s the trick. Ask yourself: “Do I really believe God is righteous? Do I believe His just nature will always win the day?” If the answer to both questions is “yes,” just accept that He will remain just in the way He deals with us. That’s the simplest and most faithful way to view this issue.
Spurgeon had something to say about this too:
“When you go through a trial, the sovereignty of God is the pillow upon which you lay your head.”
Simply trust God. He won’t let us down. He’s always just. He always loves us. He’s always perfect.
Is This Anti-Intellectual?
So some may see what I just presented as a kind of anti-intellectualism. At the very least, it’s simply theological “fence sitting” so that we don’t have to answer the question. At most, it’s nonsensical dribble that body slams logic and biblical truth.
Okay. Fair enough. Let’s make one last plug before we close the door on this discussion:
This is all about perceived tension. Tension isn’t anti-intellectual. It exists in many forms throughout the Bible, as we’ve already seen. Tension simply means we don’t understand everything God does because He doesn’t always tell us how or why He acts. This creates a conflict in our mind that we define as “tension.”
The strange fact is that the Bible teaches this tension between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility:
“Seek the Lord while He may be found; Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way And the unrighteous man his thoughts; And let him return to the Lord, And He will have compassion on him, And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:6–9, NASB 95)
Did you catch that? God’s ways and means are incomprehensible to us. At the same time, God calls us to seek Him as if He were attainable. How can both be true simultaneously?
Don’t know. Don’t care. God’s Word says both are true. That’s all we need to know. That’s not anti-intellectualism. That’s biblical truth.
So What?
Why is this so important? Can’t we just agree to disagree? We certainly can and should if conflict arises. Salvation isn’t necessarily dependent on a complete understanding of God’s sovereignty.
At the same time, allowing our interpretation to extend beyond what the text actually says is a dangerous delight. It’s fun to engage in “sanctified speculation.” But when speculation becomes doctrine, we’ve made a grave error and are playing fast and loose with Scripture.
When it comes to Scripture, we really shouldn’t say the quiet part out loud. The quiet part belongs to God. Leave it with Him.
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