God’s Sovereignty - Man’s Accountability: A Sparrow Cannot Fall to the Ground Without Your Father
God’s Sovereignty is replete throughout Scripture, for those with eyes to see, and who are not humanists who interpret Scripture to conform to man’s own self-flattering delusional fantasy.
“29Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. 30But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” (Matthew 10)
God is not passive in His creation.
“Surely as I have thought, so shall it come to pass; and as I have purposed, so shall it stand.” (Isaiah 14:24)
God is not merely a bystander, a spectator in His universe. He has penned the entire Divine Drama. No novel, no movie ever wrote itself. No novel, no movie THAT IS TRUE TO THE SCRIPT ever contained a single thing that the author, editor, director did not determine. This is of course generally speaking, for authors and directors cannot control every time an actor blinks, or makes a minor error, or ad libs the tiniest bit (and in some cases the director likes the addition and decides to keep it)... or the director does not notice it when the crew that sets up each scene gets a tiny element wrong; but God is Sovereign and Omnipotent; human directors are not. Furthermore, again, I am referring to a movie or novel that is true to the script; and God allows no “ad-libbing” or changing of His Script or Plot. Furthermore, God does not use one-sided, hollow, movie props, or fake anything. He has (and needs) no assistants to carry out all the tiny details. He does not ordain merely for some “generic human” or “generic cow” to appear when He needs one. They dont “create themselves”. Every single thing that God designed He designed down to the atomic and subatomic level—for every single specimen. God does not put anything on “autopilot”. He designed no computer program to carry out all His Design. He performs and sustains all perfectly by the Power of His Will and Pure Thought.
God’s Foreknowledge is not passive, for God is Immutable. Nothing catches Him by surprise and likewise He does not “re-act”. He plans all. He plans all for His Own Glory and His Own Good Pleasure, even if sinful man does not understand, agree, or appreciate it. God’s knowing is determinism. Thoughts of things and events external to Himself cannot force their way into God’s Mind and change how He thinks or acts. Therefore, nothing external to God is autonomous. Satan does not run around inventing ways to try to thwart God. Satan “thinks” that he does—but that is the delusion that God has sent Him; and God says that He chooses our delusions (Isaiah 66:4; II Thessalonians 2:11). But Satan is God’s tool and Satan (without even knowing it) follows God’s Script without deviation. It was not Satan’s idea to tempt Job—God threw the “challenge” down and God put the thought in Satan’s mind and God Planned and controlled every single thing that happened (and God sustained Job to keep him true). At the end Scripture records,
“Then came there unto him [Job] all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him...” (42:11)
Satan did not bring the evil upon Job—ultimately, and in fact, God did. Satan was the means by which God effected it, but every single part of the Drama was God’s idea and Plan, perfectly executed, without deviation from His Script. God does not engage in a “Scavanger Hunt” to accomplish His Will, and look for “odds and end” that He can “use” to make everything work out for His Ultimate Goal. He Scripts all. The universe is His Theater.
A careful reading of Christ’s discourse in Matthew 10 reveals God’s determinism. Christ does not say that a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without God’s “notice”. Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia recognized God’s Sovereignty in man, but not in regard to sparrows (or he just poorly expressed it):
“And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”
But Christ declared, “one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father”. This refers to determinism. God determines when each falls (as well as when each rises, when each is born, how many feathers it has, what it eats and when, what parasites it has, what injuries it will sustain, when it will sleep, get rained on, build its nest, how many young it will have, etc. throughout its entire lifetime).
Likewise, Christ did not say that God “counts” the numbers on our head, or merely “knows” them.
#2657 kah-tahn-o-eh-o (first o is short; second is long) means, “to observe fully:—behold, consider, discover, perceive” and is the word used in the passage in Luke below. However, God NUMBERS (#706 ar-ith-mos; short o), that is, He determines our hair: He does not passively count our individual hairs (which is a continual process, moment by moment)—He determines them and assigns to each a number. He does not need to count as we do, to learn the quantity of things, for He knows all. He knows all continually. He determines all continually.
“By Him all things consist.” (Colossians 1:17)
“It is in Him that we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)
God didn’t just throw a handful of matter and energy into a bag, shake it up, and then pour it out and wait and see what ‘evolved’, declaring, “I can’t wait to see what it turns into. I’m so excited I have goosebumps!” Neither does God merely have a crystal ball.
How many hairs fall off your head each day, and then later regrow (or how many don't regrow)...? God not only knows, but determines. DNA doesn’t “just happen”. NOTHING “just happens”.
“Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?” (Luke 12:24)
Note here also, God does not merely “watch” the ravens eat. He feeds them. He determines what crops will grow, what bugs will crawl or fly (and where and when), what animals shall die and need scavengers to clean up the carcases (and when and where). God calls the vultures to the feast that He prepares for them in battle.
God does all these things on not only the individual level, but the atomic level and macro level. It is the greatest juggling act in the universe... and He never makes a mistake—every planet, star, comet in every galaxy, every electron in every atom in every molecule of all energy and matter. Any Christian who believes any less has a very small god and has no understanding of God’s Nature, Attributes, Being—Power: His Omnipotence and Omniscience, neither of which is passive.
“O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his [own] steps.” (Jeremiah 10:23)
“That no flesh should glory in His Presence.” (I Corinthians 1:29)
“...that in all things He might have the Preeminence.” (Colossians 1:18)
[For more detail, see my book: Does God Repent...? Can God Change His Mind...?, 506pp., 25.00 + P&H.]