God's most hated attribute!
(Charles Spurgeon) LISTEN to audio! Download audio
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"Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases!" Psalm 115:3
"The Lord does whatever pleases Him, throughout all heaven and earth, and on the seas and in their depths!" Psalm 135:6
"All the peoples of the earth are regarded as nothing. He does as He pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth." Daniel 4:35
On the other hand, there is no doctrine more hated by worldlings, as the great, stupendous—but yet most certain doctrine of the Sovereignty of the infinite Jehovah!
Men will allow God to be everywhere except on His throne!
They will allow Him to be in His workshop to fashion worlds and make stars.
They will allow Him to be in His almonry to dispense His alms and bestow His bounties.
They will allow Him to sustain the earth and bear up the pillars thereof, or light the lamps of Heaven, or rule the waves of the ever-moving ocean.
But when God ascends His throne—then His creatures then gnash their teeth! And when we proclaim an enthroned God, and His right to do as He wills with His own, to dispose of His creatures as He thinks well, without consulting them in the matter—then it is that we are hissed and execrated, and then it is that men turn a deaf ear to us—for God on His throne, is not the God they love!
No doctrine in the whole Word of God has more excited the hatred of mankind, than the truth of the absolute sovereignty of God!
Opposition to divine sovereignty is essentially atheism—and were it not for sovereign grace, none of us would ever have followed the path to Heaven. I am daily more and more convinced that the difference between one man and another, is not the difference between his use of his will—but the difference of grace that has been bestowed upon him.
"Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns!" Revelation 19:6
Stephen Charnock: "The great controversy between God and man has been, whether He or they shall be God; whether His reason or theirs, His will or theirs, shall be the guiding principle. If anything could frustrate God's will—then it would be superior to Him, God would not be omnipotent, and so would lose the perfection of the Deity, and consequently the Deity itself; for that which did wholly defeat God's will, would be more powerful than He. To be God and yet inferior to another, is a contradiction!"