God is sovereign. But whenever someone says that God is sovereign, most people fall into one of three categories:

1. Those who have no idea what “sovereign” means.
2. Those who feel discouraged by God’s sovereignty because the only time they ever hear about it is after something bad happens, as in “I’m sorry for your loss, but it will be okay because God is sovereign.”
3. Those who have a firm grasp on what God’s sovereignty truly means, and are therefore blessed and encouraged by it.

For starters, “sovereign” in the non-biblical sense means having absolute power and supreme authority. However, if we rest in that definition to describe God, it’s only half of the truth. We’ve already established that God is omnipotent, so we already know He has absolute power and supreme authority. His sovereignty, then, describes how He executes His power.

The intellectual explanation

This is why it was so important to understand God’s other attributes first. You can’t truly grasp His sovereignty until you grasp that He is omnipotent, omniscient, holy and loving. Here’s why:

If God were all-powerful, and that was all, then He could easily become like an evil genie, doing any and everything He wanted just because He could. But because God is also love, He will not do anything that is not motivated by love. His power, therefore, first gets filtered by His love for us.

Because He is also holy, everything He does, thinks, and speaks must be right, good and perfect. So His power also gets filtered through His holiness.

Finally, He is omniscient. He knows the intricate details of what is going on in your individual life, the world, eternity, and the spiritual realm. So He is able to take His power and filter it through His knowledge to determine the best way to execute it.

Therefore, absolute power filtered through perfect love, divine holiness, and infinite knowledge results in sovereign execution of power.

The everyday, simple explanation

God is in control, and “in all things [He] works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). This doesn’t mean that all things are good. Not at all. It just means that God can take all things and work them into something good.

Imagine eating a whole cup of flour by itself, chomping on a stick of butter, washing it down with a few raw eggs, and polishing it off with a handful of raw sugar. Separately, those ingredients would be disgusting. But when you add some baking powder, stir it all together, and submit it to extreme heat, you get something delicious after time – cake!

This is why God’s sovereignty is the perfect explanation for, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” It is because God’s power is behind the scenes, taking all of the bad things, filtering them through His knowledge, His holiness, and His love, in order to make something beautiful come of it. This is His sovereignty at work.

Why you should be encouraged

You may not understand why God did not do something even though you know He could have (like stop a hurricane, heal your cancer, or prevent a disaster). On the surface, it may even feel like if He cared, He would have acted.

But rest assured, the exact opposite is true. You may not see how He’s working now. But someday, even if it’s not until you’re in Heaven, you will see and understand. “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely” (1 Cor. 13:12 NLT).

  Let’s Talk! How do you grasp and describe God’s sovereignty?