God's Right

It is difficult to go anywhere good in your relationship with God until you recognize that He really is God.In other words, He's not you. You are a creature. He is the Creator. And there is a difference between the two.Perhaps one theological word that really helps us get an idea of what it means for God to be God is the word sovereign or sovereignty. The sovereignty of God means that He has the complete, total, unforced, uninfluenced, right to do with the things He has created exactly what He wants to do with them.Maybe you will want read that again. It's very important and it's very difficult for us to accept. Or maybe just let Jonathan Edwards explain,"...the sovereignty of God supposes, that he has a right to dispose of all his creatures according to his mere pleasure...His right is absolute and independent.Men may have a right to dispose of some things according to their pleasure. But their right is not absolute and unlimited. Men may be said to have a right to dispose of their own goods as they please. But their right is not absolute; is has limits and bounds. They have a right to dispose of their own goods as they please, provided they do not do it contrary to the law of the state to which they are subject, or contrary to the law of God. Men's right to dispose of their things as they will, is not absolute, because it is not independent. They have not an independent right to what they have, but in some things depend on the community to which they belong, for the right they have; and in every thing depend on God. They receive all the right they have to any thing from God.But the sovereignty of God imports that he has an absolute, and unlimited, and independent right of disposing of his creatures as he will."I once heard Jonathan Gerstner say that someone told him they were never so close to not being a Christian as when they first came to understand the sovereignty of God, to which he responded, you were never so close to actually being a Christian, because while certainly even as Christians we might sometimes struggle with the sovereignty of God, at the end of the day, it is difficult to worship God, until you recognize, He is God.