God's Love in Sovereignty
“May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.”
— Ephesians 3:19
We can never fully understand God’s love (Eph. 3:19). Nonetheless, we can seek and appreciate the understanding we do gain of it. A reflection of God’s love is demonstrated in the way He uses His sovereignty. He is able to do anything; to give you a desire to move in His Will without your consciousness of it, to shift anything into position, to bring two people into alignment, and yet He moves and shifts with grace and peace. His will and purpose prevail, and are unavoidable. This is apart of what characterizes His sovereignty. He is able to do anything but exist as one He is not.
God wills good, and causes only good. How can we trust that the bad that happens is not caused by God? By trusting His character; His holiness, that He can only be good. His will is defined by and flows from His character. If His sovereignty partners with His will, and His will is defined by His character, and His will determines what happens, then a good God will only will for good and bring about good.
If God truly exists, then He exists as He says He does—holy. If He did not exist as He says He does, then there would be no God existent as we have come to understand Him based on His self-orient revelation. Thus, in the hypothetical case that God does not exist as He says He does, there is technically no “God”— not no “god”, but no “God”, the uniquely existent being, for God does not lie. If God is not good, then God is not God, and God does not exist. The reality that trumps hypotheticals is that God is good as aligns with His self-orient self-description, and He is God, and He does exist. God's goodness, character, and existence are interdependent and interconnected. There is no way for God to exist without the purity in morality and goodness He describes Himself to have.
God wills for good to happen, and does not will for bad to occur. He wills for healing and freedom, and does not will cancer and rape. Experiences happen due to other factors, such as principles of the physical world that govern anatomy, and the free will of man. Sickness, He is able to supernaturally impose upon with healing. Free will, not so much. Why is this so? God abides by His principles, the foundation of the universe, and will not go against them. It is important to note that, by logic and reason, due to God’s omniscience and infinite wisdom, unique to Him, He is the only one who can truly determine for sure if an experience is good or not. It is also noteworthy that though God's good, pleasing and perfect will is unable to source or play a part in bring about bad occurrences, He cannot help but play a part in using those experiences to produce a good outcome.
In closing, I return to the beautiful initial thought, the source of the river of this piece: A reflection of God’s love is demonstrated in the way He uses His sovereignty.
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