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Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your kind welcome, and all of you for your invitation to this conference today. I look forward to getting to know as many of you as is possible in the brief time I shall be with you. We are met, as you have heard, to discuss and to think about the sovereignty of God in general, and this morning in particular, the sovereignty of God in the created universe. I want to deal with it this morning, for my part, under three or four different heads. I want to discuss with you the fact of God's sovereignty in the created universe, then to say something about the gospel that it is, certainly the implications that it holds for man.
Fourthly, some brief remarks on the problems that it sometimes raises, even for believers. And finally, the future that it guarantees. The sovereignty of God, then, in the created universe. Shall we begin by reading two typical scriptures, the first of them a Psalm. Psalm ninety five. um Psalm ninety five. Reading on into Psalm 96. Oh come, let us sing unto the Lord.
Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving. Let us make a joyful noise unto him with psalm. For the Lord is a great God and a great king above all gods. In his hand are the deep places of the earth. The heights of the mountains are his altar. The sea is his, and he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. O come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
Psalm ninety six. O sing unto the Lord, a new psalm. Sing unto the Lord, all the earth. Sing unto the Lord, bless his name, show forth his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the people. For great is the Lord and highly to be praised. He is to be feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Honor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. Give unto the Lord, ye kindreds of the people, give unto the Lord glory and strength.
Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name. And alongside of that hymn of praise, praising God's sovereignty in the created world, let us put a very different scripture, the book of Job and chapter forty. Job forty and verse six. Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, Gird up thy loins now like a man.
I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou even discern now my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me that thou mayest be justified? Or hast thou an arm like God? And canst thou thunder with a voice like him? Set thyself now with excellency and dignity, and array thyself with honor and majesty. Pour forth the overflowings of thine anger, and look upon everyone that is proud and abase him. Look on everyone that is proud and bring him low, and tread down the wicked where they stand. Hide them in the dust together, find their faces in the hidden place.
Then will I also confess of thee that thine own right hand can save thee. Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee. He eateth grass as an ox. Lo, now his strength is in his loins and his force is in the muscles of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar, the sinews of his thighs are knit together. That give us good understanding of his holy word. The Bible in general, and the Old Testament in particular, everywhere declare that God is the creator of the universe.
But in addition, and more to our point this morning, the Old and New Testaments declare that not only is God the creator of the universe, he is sovereign in the universe he has made. We live in a fascinating world, a world of fantastic beauty, and on the other hand, a world full of danger, sometimes also apparently cruel, and a world that is manifestly temporary and is headed finally in the dim and distant future for destruction.
As we look upon this world, not only its beauty, but perhaps even more so its danger, declare to us that it is the work of godhood. Paul the Apostle reminds us that the created things display not so much the love of God, for the love of God you will have to look elsewhere, but the created world points to the divine power and godhood that lies behind our universe. I say it is sometimes the very danger of our world, its incredible unlikelihood in and of itself, that point us to the fact that there is a creator behind it.
This was the lesson, I judge, that God spoke to Moses when at the burning bush he commissioned him to go upon his dangerous task of confronting Pharaoh. And as you well remember, to go in and confront and defy Pharaoh of Egypt was in itself a highly perilous task. And to counter the fear of meeting Pharaoh, God instilled into Moses' heart a certain remembrance of the fear of this universe in which we live. What a dangerous place it is if it goes wobbling its way through space, following the sun on the sun's own spiral course to who knows where in the universe.
And God said to Moses, Moses, now throw down your rod that is in your hand. And when he threw it down, that innocent shepherd rod forthwith became a serpent, a dangerous, poisonous serpent, and Moses fled from it in alarm and fear. He hadn't realized that he held anything so lethal in his hand as that innocent looking shepherd's rod, but lethal it was. Now modern science has shown us how lethal a possible shepherd's rod could be. Why this little pencil I hold in my fingers? Could its atoms be split and its nucleus spitted? Where would it not blow us to in all this vast universe?
How come it that these so potentially dangerous things hold together and make life possible on our planet? Moses said, God, put your hand within your bosom. Now draw it out, and when he drew it out, the hand had become leprous. Moses was again filled with horror and fear. His hand hitherto had been so healthy. I do pray, remember for a moment what delicate, what fantastically complex machinery it is that keeps your hand, even yours, healthy at this moment. Those cells of which it is composed are complex beyond our imagination, and the more science studies them, the more complex do they appear.
Should any one of those tiny mechanisms go wrong, it tells disaster. That is not to be wondered at. What is to be wondered at is, how do such complicated mechanisms keep standing together to make life possible on this planet? And not one cell, but multi-millions of cells. As he says, God, throw a rod in that river and put some of the water on the land, and forthwith the water became blood. We in our modern world, with all our worries about pollution, are quick, I hope, to see this point.
The balance of the forces of nature is exceedingly critical. Say, what is it that keeps our planet so specially favored, so delicately balanced, in the middle of what is a hostile universe. What keeps its forces so balanced that there is enough air to breathe and wholesome water to drink? The wonder is that there is any world at all when one considers its constituents and its, uh, surroundings. In a very dangerous way, it is thus poised and put together.
Point us to the fact that behind this miracle, there lies infinite power. There lies God. I have a biologist colleague, biochemist rather, and from he is an atheist, but he never can resist pulling my Christian leg whenever we sit down to lunch together. He regards my faith as utterly naive, but he says, on the other hand, that if anything were going to make him believe in a creator, it would be not the normal things that people quote, the beauty of the the the the beauty of mother's love, human kindness.
It is rather the beauty of the sheer physical universe, how its systems repeat themselves so wonderfully. How comes it that the spring is so glorious and that it happens, and happens so regularly and constantly? If this universe were the results of a mindless piece of chance, it would be a difficult problem indeed to account for the fantastic beauty of the thing, for its coherence, for its maintenance. Yes, the Bible proclaims that behind this world there is a creator, and claims also that the created universe bears witness to divine power and godhood.
But what the created universe in and of itself would not point out or guarantee to us, that Holy Scripture declares that God has not only made this universe, he is sovereign in its control and administration. Now, that is not to deny that God may have delegated certain powers to his people. We know from the book of Genesis and from our common experience that God has delegated to man considerable powers in the running of this world. Man, when created, was given the brief that he was to organize, to subdue, to develop the little planet on which God had put him.
The book of the Revelation, helped as it is in highly metaphorical and symbolic terms, talks of certain angels that are in control of the rivers, the famous rivers of, of the East. What its figurative language exactly means is a matter of opinion, I s- I, I submit. But it would not be, uh, uh, an unbiblical principle, would it, to suppose that God may well have delegated some administrative powers in this universe to created beings. Our New Testament epistles talk of exalted created beings that are more than human.
It talks of principalities, powers, mights, dominions, authorities, and the names and labels it uses to describe them are all of them, we observe, administrative and governmental terms. How far God has delegated those powers, again, is a matter upon which scripture does not, as far as I can discern, merely indicate. Maybe in our question sessions, some of my learned colleagues will satisfy your answers on your questions on that score. In the book of Job, for instance, we read how Satan had to apply for permission to afflict God's servant Job.
It is, if I may remark so, it is a tremendous comfort to the believer to know that Satan cannot deal with the believer just as he will. And for those special trials that he is allowed to bring upon the believer's life, he is required to ask. We see him in the book of Job, by repeat, asking God's permission to touch his servant Job. And God gave him permission, restricted and conditioned, but permission nonetheless, now to do this and now to do that in the realm of the physical.
Remember that our Lord, in speaking to Peter of the pile that was about to come upon him, informed Peter and the rest that Satan had desired, that is to say, Satan had asked to have them, that he might sit them at ease. The New Testament thus underlines what the Old Testament tells us, that in the affairs of life, when it comes to engineering trials for the believer, Satan has to ask the divine permission. But when he asks and receives permission in the case of Job, then we read there came calamities upon Job, upon his house, upon his plot, upon his body, a whirlwind here, a grievous disease there.
It remains perhaps an open question. How much power Satan or other created beings have upon the actual immediate workings of the physical powers of the created universe. Have they much or little, the Bible maintains that God is and ever remains sovereign in the maintenance and the ordering of the universe that he has made. And did you therefore think and rejoice with me over the gospel that this is?
With what history? pessimism in our hearts should we sit here this morning, if we were not persuaded by God's self-revelation that God is sovereign in his created universe? You who have loved life, have enjoyed its beauty, and see it beginning to slip away from you now that you have turned middle age in life. With what pessimism you would sit if you are not convinced by divine revelation that God is sovereign in the affairs of his created universe.
And you who begin to feel the insidious workings of decay and disease in your bodies and in your minds. With what despair, with what fight indeed, you might be facing the future. If you didn't believe that God is sovereign, even in the physical face of his universe. And you scientists who hold the secrets of nature and seek to plan to improve and help forward the world in its progress.
What frustration would you go about so far, knowing that this world, by definition, is a temporary phenomenon and eventually will boom? What a frustration would you perceive if you were convinced in your heart that God is sovereign, not only in the creation and the development, but in the final disposal of his created human. You may pity the atheist if you have a compassionate heart. For pray, consider what a prison the man is in.
He can't believe there is a God. He is obliged to think that this universe comes of blind matter, produced and worked upon by blind, mindless, purposeless. Finds himself therefore in a prison house. For in the last analysis, he cannot control those forces. And their little virus, too minute to be seen except by the aid of a powerful electronic microscope. One day that little virus will insert itself in his body, and little by little it will tear him to pieces.
And the irony of it is that when the virus has done its ghastly work, it won't know it's done it. And here was your first class scientist with his giant of a brain, full of intelligence and purpose and thought, and torn to pieces by a mindless bit of. It won't even know it's done it when it's finished. And your fair wife, one day, God forbid it, that she may be walking along a cliff and a, and a mindless bit of rock come down, an avalanche maybe, a volcano, a flood, and crush her fair beauty into an ugly pulp, and it won't know it's done it.
Ay, what prison house is this that this poor man finds himself in? A creature with a mind and intelligence and aesthetic sense. And in a prison whose walls gradually and gradually, with the passing of the years, the walls of time contract upon him, and one day will crush him. Mindlessly destroy his mind and foully destroy his spirit. Oh, thank God. Lastly, through our blessed Lord, who is the foretelling of the Creator, we have discovered that there is a God behind this created universe, and he holds it in his hand.
We think with loving remembrance of that occasion when the Creator incarnate rode in a boat with his frightened fishermen apostles, and a storm came. The wind and the waves, those great physical powers, threatened to insult. Mounted the wind, and it was muffled. And rebuked the waves, and there was a calm. We have met in Jesus Christ incarnate, the God who is in sovereign charge, ultimately, of the physical powers of the universe.
It is a comfort to us, I consider the gospel it is. Not merely when we think of our ultimate destiny. The ultimate destiny of our physical world, part of our present situation. There are people born into this world with some major physical handicap. To them, sometimes it is hard, hard indeed to believe that behind this physical universe, behind their bodies.
Easy for the young and healthy, who never suffered a pain or any mental anguish, to talk at length about the love of God, and they rightly so talk. There is another side to nature, to the physical universe. Nature produces feet, manged bodies, imperfect minds. And yet, and yet, and yet again. They would be better. To explain nature's imperfections, that somehow or other God has let the thing get out of control.
That God is not ultimately to be held responsible. Oh, I know I touch a vast subject. More interested than can be properly dealt with in the few moments at my disposal now. Is this these things as being some accident over which God has no control? You remove a problem. Why did it happen? It won't remove the pain. And it will give no hope.
It needs in the end. Better to hear the word of God to Moses yet again. When Moses protested his inability to go and speak before Pharaoh because he was slow of speech, God replied to him, and who has made man's mouth? Who has made man seeing or blind or dumb? I said then, that ultimately God will hold himself responsible, even for those apparent vagaries of our genes, our inherited disabilities, our imperfect bodies.
I dare to answer yes, ultimately yes. I am not forgetting all the intermediate steps of the rebellion of God's created universe against God, and all the necessary sufferings that have been brought as a result thereof. There are vast wheels in wheels when we come to consider the actual day-to-day workings of God's universe. But it is a tremendous comfort to know that he who set it all going in the first place and delegated its powers to sundry of his creatures holds himself ultimately responsible for the dumb and the blind.
And if, my dear brother, you have found yourself in life afflicted with some major disability, learn if you can to find comfort in this. But God will take you one day. God won't try to wriggle out of his ultimate responsibility, that he started the whole thing going, and it led to you. And you will find that the latter end of the law is kindness indeed. Not only will he compensate you in the end for what you have suffered in the midterm, but being the God of your very disability, will use that disability now and turn it into a something potentially beautiful.
We must start at this juncture to consider the implication of God's sovereignty in the created universe for man's vision. Genesis one tells us that when God made this universe and our planet in it, he made it not all at once, but made it in stages. And when we look more closely at those stages, we find that they are a progressive order leading to a climax.
In other words, the work of creation was not simply divided into six parts of equal significance. There is an ascending order of progress. And therefore, when you have a series designed as an ascending order of progress, you naturally look to see what is the summit and the goal of that progress. Genesis one proclaims the glorious gospel that man is the goal and summit of this great creative process. Man made in the image of God, made to be God's viceroy, made to develop, to control, to subdue.
This, of course, is gospel. It stands in vivid contrast with the mythologies of the ancient world, and with the mythologies of the new. You shouldn't confuse the Hebrew account in Genesis one of the creation with the other creation stories, such as the Babylonian epic. For in this, as in other things, they are distinct. That in the mythologies of the heathen, the gods themselves are the products of the material and forces of nature.
Whereas in the book of Genesis, God is the self-existent, Lord independent of the created universe. And even gods were ultimately subject to some vague blind force called faith. Zeus of the Greeks could strike terror into the hearts of subordinate gods, but himself was bound by faith. The Hebrew revelation sticks its hiss into the face of all such idolatry and proclaims a God who is genuinely the creator of all, and proceeds to announce that man is made in the image of that God, viceroy of God, made to be king and to rule.
Praise God, though we see not all things now put under man, we see that program very far advanced. We see him who for a little was made lower than the angels. The suffering of death crowned with glory and honor. One day all shall be put under his feet. But even now, here is our charter to go around the business of living in the fear of God. Here is our charter, not only for the digging of our gardens, as Adam dug his, for the development of the deserts that lie outside Eden's garden, but for the mining of its gold, for our physics, our chemistry, our geology, our mathematics, and all the fun of those many disciplines.
But reverently follow the thinking of God. Oh, I know you advanced spiritual men will tell us that the universe, the physical universe, is only like toys on the nursery floor compared to those glorious spiritual blessings wherewith God has blessed us. I know it. I know it that when we've got beyond our childhoods and beyond the nursery floor, God will dismiss this present universe, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth. But for the moment, I'm content for a while to be a child, now and again at any rate. I think it's fun listening to the rattle that's made when atoms dance around the face and finding out what goes on inside them.
Fun understanding our world and its surround. What a lovely thing it all could have been, had man remained loyal to God. Now alas, if the name of science herself is sometimes smudged by the spirit of her practitioners who go at their work not out of faith, but some of them as a means of rebellion against the very idea of God.
And Russians tell us that they've been out in space and haven't found God there, who thought they would? Biologists tell us that they have, uh, the cell and all else. We haven't found that God there either. Who thought they would? We have to remind ourselves this morning that whereas man was made in the image of God to be God's viceroy, he is viceroy so long as he remains in dependence upon God and God's sovereignty.
That is written into our very created universe. Let me take just one example from Genesis one to remind you of it. On day one God created the light, and he divided the light from the darkness, and then he proceeded to call the light day and the darkness night. And you may wonder why he didn't. Why call the darkness night? Why not leave it as it wasn't, call it darkness? It's a very good term. And why call the light day? Why not leave it as it was and call it day? It is a very good word. You will say that darkness isn't the same as light at night, is it?
And day isn't the same as night. Quite so. That leads us to the point of each story. If you ponder the way the lighting system of our planet is arranged, you may be struck if you haven't got so used to it, there's no wrong with the thing, with the apparent oddness of it. On this planet, we must have light. It is vital to our life and all our activities. And there's what a curious thing. The life upon which we depend as our number one basic necessity is not in our Earth.
It is ninety-odd odd million miles outside of our Earth. And we are so arranged on this planet that for roughly twelve hours per day, we are trizzled round into the light, and that twelve hours of experience of the light is called day. And when those twelve hours are done, we're trizzled out again. The light doesn't cease to exist. It's just that we're trizzled out of it. Whether we are ready or not, whether we agree or not, there's nothing we can do about it. We're trizzled out into the dark, and there we sit for the next twelve hours. Hopefully.
Because the number one basic necessity is not within us, it is not within our power, it is stationed ninety million miles outside of our planet. And it reaches to us once in twenty four uh hours. This humble basic lesson of human existence, that man can be lord of his world so long as he is dependent, not only on the provisions that God has made deliberately and stationed them outside, but on the God who put them outside. As our Lord summed it up, if a man walk in the day, he stumbles not, but if he walk at night, he stumbles because the light is not in him.
Of course it isn't in him, not in his world. It's ninety million miles outside of it. Now says God put the thumbprint of his organization on our universe to teach us from the physical facts, those deeper lessons of our relationships with him at the moral and spiritual level. Man will not have it so. Man only grasps that independence of God, thinking that independence of God will somehow bring man freedom. It never has.
It never will. See the misery it plunged the ancient world into. When man saw the independence of Almighty God, they were then reduced to fear of cosmic forces that they didn't understand. Why, if a woman got a little static electricity in her hair at night when she turned her hair, she thought a demon had got into it and set about the arduous business of propitiating the demon. And if the moon went into an eclipse, they banned all the bin lids to try and chase the demon away that had got hold of the moon, and sacrificed their children to this god, and defied the forces of nature, and defied their own psychological urges, until man became a groveling slave, enslaved to the biggery element of the physical universe.
We moderns are not liable to erect statues to Zeus and Aphrodite in our garden. But moderns without God are in every bit as much of danger. Every bit as much of danger are falling to the slavery of idolatry. Cajoling the forces of nature as best men can, without God. Believing a mindless, materialistic version of evolution. And they are headed for the biggest bit of slavery our planet has yet seen.
There is coming a man of sin. He will come with spectacular control of physical forces that seem, and indeed are, to be superhuman in their genius. He shall make the very fire come down from heaven, as it did in Elijah's day. Whereas in Elijah's day it was an evidence of the true God, when a man of sin performs these things, it will not be evidence of the true God. So God himself shall allow man to go to extreme lengths in unlocking the secrets of the physical universe. Why his left tenant shall be able to give breath to the image so that it proceeds.
And under that final dictator, man will make his soul grasp for complete independence of the very idea of God. He will sit in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God and exalting himself above all that is called God, all that is worth it, and will seek to banish the idea of God. And then what will man do? He oh, says, they, they know. They know. They observe what will happen. There'll be no gods in control of the universe. You'll have to have some control. Man shall set himself up as God.
Man shall worship man. And it will reduce mankind to the most groveling haven that men have ever seen. When a man of sin is at the height of his power, they shall go forth the gospel in the terms that have always been implicit in any gospel. But then shall have to be spelled out explicitly and faithfully. Flying eagle that announces the eternal gospel in the book of Revelation chapter fourteen, calls upon men to worship the creator of the earth and its sea.
For only by faith in him and dependence upon him can man be free, let alone be reconciled to him. But free of fear of the universe, free of slavery to the politicians, free of slavery to be by man or to be by forces of this. men. We haven't surveyed some other, some many other problems that arise in connection with this. But enough has been said, I think, to suggest and to emphasize in our minds and hearts that the doctrine and the fact of God's sovereignty and his created universe is not merely a theological theory.
It is a grand and glorious, but it is a gospel, basis of man's dignity, basis of his freedom, basis of his faith, and guarantee one that the future shall not end in the whimpers and frustrations of man. The future opens out infinitely before us. Ever a future of hope. Because the God who made this universe as a temper- as a temporary stage, to which creatures might come in their process of becoming something infinitely higher, namely children of God.
The Creator, I say, that designed this world to that end and now maintains it to that end, will gather together all its forces and by his divine grace and wisdom and power work them together for good to them that love God, to them who I call. I call him to.
