God's intervention and His Sovereign

Do we value God’s controllable sovereign rather than an uncontrollable God?

Does “our” controlling means that God would be, in effect, to control God?

True knowledge of God is to understand how we may know God depends on what God lovingly wants for us and from us.

Does self-revelation leads to improper motives, such as selfish and arrogance, in our response to that revelation?

Are we saying that God exists without knowing God as Lord?

Can we reasonably make demands on God in favor of our preferred ways of knowing God?

What are our intentions in having knowledge of God?

Do we aim to use it for our own honor and self-promotion, treating it as self-credit rather than as an unearned gift?

Who is entitled to decide how one may know God —humans or God?

Are we missing the real point of knowledge of God that He is all-inclusive kingdom rather than agents of our own exclusive kingdoms?

Are there Christians calling God’s authority into question?

Knowing God as Lord requires our sincerely committing ourselves to God as follows: “Not my will be done, but Your will be done,” “Not my kingdom come, but Your kingdom come.” We must understand that God gives us an opportunity to achieve, without coercion, enabling us, through knowledge of God, to be rescued without coercion from our will. The Holy Spirit enables us to have our wills transformed, not just our intellects (our thoughts and beliefs). God is calling us to transformation away from our self-centeredness “will” toward the unselfish, loving character of God and His will. God's ways of imparting vital knowledge of God do not meet our natural expectations. This is in keeping with God’s offer of redemption by grace in hearing the Gospel rather than by earning in hearing the Gospel. God meets, convicts, and redirects our will through the conviction of the Holy Spirit. This is BOTH sides of this relationship, two wills and are personal between Savior and sinner.

Often when some Christians try to reassign God’s authority to themselves; they seek to be ultimately self-governing and self-defining. They typically favor their own kingdom over the true God for maintaining authority, or lordship, over their lives that they seek success, happiness, honor, and self-approval. They exchange God’s supreme reality for a false substitute.

Scripture can teach both that God providentially brings all things to pass in conformity with His eternal purpose and that the prayers of men can have a significant affect in the unfolding of world history. Understanding this relationship between the sovereignty of God and the prayers of men begins with recognizing the comprehensive nature of God’s eternal purpose. The “all things” which God works out “according to the counsel of His will” (Eph 1:11) includes the means that He uses to bring about His ultimate ends. God uses the sun to bring light to the earth, He uses doctors to restore people to health, and He uses prayer to bring about many things He has purposed in eternity past.

Within the broad field of God's sovereign, things will happen according to His will and His plan. God will yet have His way HOWEVER, at the same time, as responsible beings, we must make our choice in the present situation. Human's destiny revealed by God, human's destiny is restricted by sin at birth, and human's destiny recovered by Christ at re-birth. All of that happens in God's control.

If you say that God cannot control all circumstances, then He cannot control His prophecies. There are over three hundred prophecies about the Messiah in the Old Testament. It is certainly reassuring to know that God has ultimate control of history, especially when current events may lead one to conclude otherwise. We come from the world's setting that is controlled by God that lead to the fulfillment of a Hebrew prophet's statement that He would be born in Bethlehem; all the way down to the circumstances of His birth, His life, His death, His Resurrection and His Future. Before Christ's death, trying to understand what Jesus said to the Pilate in John 19:11 "You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin." Which means God have complete control of what was going on in Christ's situation. In John 19:28 Jesus recognized that all of the prophecies were fulfilled up to His death except for one. Human's destiny revealed by God, human's destiny is restricted by Adam's sin at birth, and human's destiny recovered by Christ at re-birth spiritually. Jesus said clearly about a penny's worth of sparrows compare to us. Matthew 10:29: Are not two sparrows sold for a penny ? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. If God can control with those two sparrows, then He will do the same for His creatures around the world including Satan.

In between the Fall (Adam & Eve) and the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ is this present-evil age. Our society (sinful world) is characterized by lies, it is characterized by deception which lead by Satan's agenda.

A.W. Pink writes,
God has decreed that certain events shall come to pass, but He has also decreed that these events shall come to pass through the means He has appointed for their accomplishment. God has elected certain ones to be saved, but He has also decreed that these ones shall be saved through the preaching of the Gospel. The Gospel, then, is one of the appointed means for the working out of the eternal counsel of the Lord; and prayer is another. God has decreed the means as well as the end, and among the means is prayer (The Sovereignty of God, 171).

All God's creatures are subject to God's control and authority.

Proverbs 16:9 We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps.

Proverbs 20:24 A man's steps are directed by the LORD. How then can anyone understand his own way?

Proverbs 21:1 The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.

Jeremiah 10:23 I know, O LORD, that a man's life is not his own; it is not for man to direct his steps.

One of the greatest and most essential attributes of God is His sovereignty; God rules over all things and controls all things. God also uses providence to accomplish His will in the world. God directs and uses events to accomplish His own Will which meant: "the providence of God." Romans 8:28 says, "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." All things are controlled by God to work together to fulfill His eternal purpose for His Will.

We all need to understand Paul's Statement to the leaders in Luke's Acts 17:
22Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

24"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.' 29"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man's design and skill. 30In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."