Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Is God Sovereign Over Sports Games (and Other Things)? | Job 42.1-2

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

We might say that God is sovereign over everything, but do we really believe it? What about the little things like sports games or what clothes to wear? Learn how God's sovereignty impacts our own free will and personal responsibility from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastors Keith Simon) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick Miller) as we continue our series on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/questions-youre-asking/ (Questions You're Asking). Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-to-deal-with-the-storms-of-life/ (How to Deal with the Storms of Life) from our last series on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/how-to-follow-jesus/ (Learning to Follow Jesus). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. So we're here in the morning of September 10th, and Patrick is decked out in Chief's gear. He looks like a guy who just jumped on the bandwagon. We have a brand-new chief's shirt that looks like he purchased it at Schnucks. I love that you're calling this a brand-new chief shirt. I've owned this shirt for about six years now.

And he has his Chief's hat on. I mean, he is just all decked out, excited for opening game of the 2020 season. I bought this hat at Arrowhead Stadium, the last game I went to. I got seats in a suite. I don't even know how that happened. It was not like the really fancy suite. It was like kind of the lowest level suite, but when I was there, I got a hat just to commemorate my suite. My guess is you're over by the buffet most of the game, but maybe not.

Is that a fat joke or is that just the I don't care about football joke? I don't know. Yeah, let the people determine it. You pray about it and we'll figure it out. So I'm wondering, do you think God is sovereign over whether the chiefs will win tonight's game? Ooh. Well, you know, Keith, I do believe in God's sovereignty. I do think that he is sovereign over a win or a loss, whether that makes me happy or sad.

Well, we're asking that question because we're going to talk about God's sovereignty today. How does sovereignty fit in with human freedom or maybe better put human responsibility? we're going to think through this issue because I think what I find at least is that lots and lots of Christians get stuck on this and they almost perseverate on it to the extent that they just can't let it go so that it comes up over and over in conversations. And it's a really important biblical doctrine. It's also one that's really practical to our life. So let me take it out of football and ask it a different way just to kind of make sure you feel the tension. I once watched a newscast about a tornado that went through a small southern town, and the pastor was standing in front of his congregation after the tornado had come through. Now, you have to understand the picture here. The church was devastated. All that was left with the building was a slab of concrete, so they're sitting out there on folding chairs. And the pastor said to his congregation, God didn't have anything to do with this. This were just strong winds.

Now, what do you think about that? Did God have something to do with that tornado? Why did the pastor tell him his congregation that God didn't have anything to do with it? If you're a pastor, you get asked questions about God's sovereignty, it feels like all the time. And sometimes it's philosophical questions. How can a good God allow evil? We look at our world right now. We see a world struck by a pandemic and people say, well, is God sovereign over a pandemic? But you often also get asked these questions in those kinds of circumstances. when someone loses a child, when someone is battling with what appears to be terminal cancer. You get asked, is God sovereign over this? Is he in charge of this? And the philosophical questions, those are far easier to answer. The far harder question is when you're in the middle of someone's life and they're having something awful, something terrible happen, and they're just wrestling with the question. Is God in control of this or is this out of his control? And I think what we're really asking is we're saying how does it fit together? Because I know that God is good, and yet I know

what's happening in the world or is happening in my life is bad. It's not what God would want. And so how do I square that circle? How do I put these two things which seem so incongruous together? It's a question I think all of us have asked at some point. Job, he was someone who faced terrible pain, terrible suffering. He lost his children. He lost his wealth. He lost his health. his marriage fell into shambles. And in Job 421, we read this. He says this to God, I know that you can do anything and no one can stop you. And so here's Job in that exact same kind of life circumstance looking to God and saying at the end of the day, God, I know that no one can call the shots here except for you. So whether it's struggles with the problem of evil

in our world or whether it's just trying to figure out, is God sovereign over me finding a job? is God sovereign over me finding a spouse. Is God sovereign over the details of my life? People like to make this sound ridiculous by saying, does God even pick out the socks I wear today? How exhaustive is God sovereignty? Check out my socks. Oh, Chief Sox, Banwagon, Patrick. These socks are maybe a few years old now. I feel like I have to justify at the age of my clothing. I'm sorry, I just got us way out track, but you said socks. I couldn't help but talk about my Chief's socks. I do believe God chose my socks this morning for the record.

Let me see if I can rebound here. So God's sovereignty is like Patrick read from Job, his power, his power to do anything that he wants. Theologians use the word providence sometimes to talk about God's wise application of that power. In other words, power in and of itself is not necessarily good news, but the wise and loving application of it is. So the Heidelberg Catechism, which was written in the 1500s, asked this question, What do you understand by the Providence of God? And here's the answer. I really wish I had it memorized.

It says, Providence is the almighty and ever-present power of God by which he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so rules them that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty, all things in fact come to us, not by chance, but from his fatherly hand. That's good news for us, isn't it? That everything in our life, every circumstance will face, every difficulty that comes our way, whatever it is. It all comes from God's loving, wise, fatherly hand. But it still leaves us with the question. How does this fit with us having freedom, responsibility? Does this make sense? It might be good news, but does it make

sense? So one thing that I think is really valuable to do is just ask, does the Bible actually teach God's sovereignty? This seems to be a debate in some Christian circles, whether or not this is a clear teaching of God's word. And so we want to take some time to just look at what the Bible says about God's sovereignty, his providence, his wise care for all of creation. And let's start here. I mean, you started with the story of a tornado. Is God actually sovereign over the natural world? Matthew 545 says this. He causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Did you catch it there? Who's making the sun rise and the sunset? Who's sending the rains? Well, it's God. He's the one who does it. Matthew 1029 says,

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside of your father's will. We might think that birds living and dying, that's just too small. You know, God cares about a lot of things. We're not worried about a sparrow. And yet here is Jesus teaching that not even one sparrow falls to the ground apart from God's will. This tells us that clearly God is in control of the natural world. His power upholds it and his power guides it. And then we can move one level down and say, not only is God sovereign in control over the natural world, but also all the nations of the world. In Job 12, it says,

He makes nations great and destroys them. He enlarges nations and disperses them. In Acts 17, From one man he made every nation of men that they should inhabit the whole earth. And he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. So things that look random to us or by chance, they're not.

God is in control of those things. Similarly, God also rules over the human heart, which I think is amazing because in a real sense, I have a battle to rule over my own heart, to guide my own heart, to love and long for the right things, and to disdain and oppose the right things. So check out Proverbs 21-1. The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord. He turns it wherever he will. We might think that kings are up there making their own decision, that rulers, leaders, they're the ones who are calling the shots. But in this verse, in this passage, it says that no, even their decisions are in God's hands. I love that because in the ancient Near East, who is the most powerful person that someone

would know? And it was the king. So the point here isn't that it's just the king's heart that is in God's hands and that God turns it wherever you will. It's that if the most powerful person you know, if that person's heart is in God's hands, how much every other person's? Yeah, Psalm 11936 says this, Turn my heart toward your statutes and not towards selfish game. The psalmist believe that God actually had the power to transform his heart. Now, that requires God to be sovereign. It requires God to actually be able to control and change hearts.

You don't pray to God to have your heart change unless it's something that he can actually do. Now, this is, again, it's counterintuitive. It's the problem that we're trying to put together here. God is sovereign, and yet we are responsible. There's a sense in which we're responsible to change our hearts, and yet the Psalm is simultaneously knows, I can't do that unless God does it first. Yeah, there really is a sense in which we think sovereignty and responsibility, sovereignty and freedom are incompatible. But that's not ever how the Bible sees it. What we see as enemies,

like they're running opposite direction, God sees as friends. They work closely together. So God even rules over details of our life. Like when Paul's making travel plans, He says he's going to come if the Lord is willing, or if it's the Lord's will, we will do this or we will do that. That's how James Ford teaches us to think. And I have to admit that when I became a Christian, I wasn't really familiar with kind of the Christian subculture. I didn't know there was a thing out there called Christian music. I didn't know there were Christian universities that all had their separate education system. It all seemed a little odd.

But one thing that really seemed odd to me back then was how Christians would talk. And they would say things like, well, if it's the Lord's will, and I was like, well, isn't that weird? Can't you just make decisions and do your thing? But whether we say those words or not, James tells us that because God is in control over all things in our life, because we are utterly dependent upon him, it's wise to at least think and probably sometimes verbalize that we are dependent on God's will for every detail, even travel plans, every detail in our life. God is also in control of human desires. This kind of goes back to the heart idea. And again, I find this interesting piece today, there was probably a time 50 years ago when most people thought that your desire was up to you, that you desired whatever you wanted to desire was a choice. These days, we flip that all the way around. And we say that if someone desires something, that's just the way they are. We shouldn't inhibit their desires. We should do nothing about their desires. Well, I hate to break it to you. God apparently is invested in actually inhibiting people's desires. is invested in changing what people long for. So it's a good thing to ask God to change your heart.

Check out Genesis 20. This is a fascinating little story. I should say fascinating. It's really a sad story where Abraham, for the second time, gives his wife away to a foreign ruler under the guise of being his sister. And this foreign ruler doesn't sleep with the woman. And he's praying to God and saying, please God, forgive me. I didn't know that what I was doing was wrong. I didn't know that she was his wife, and check out what God says to him in response in a dream. He says, yes, I know that you did this with a clear conscience, and so I kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her. So he's saying, I protected you in your desires from having sex with Abraham's wife. In a similar fashion, in the book of Exodus, God makes a promise to the

Israelites. He says, look, Israelites, if you will obey me and walk in my ways, then I'm going to do this. I will make sure that the nations outside of Israel never covet your land. They're never going to come along and think, huh, we'd really like to conquer this place and take it over and kill all the people inside of it. God says, I'm going to protect you from that. Now, the only way for him to guarantee that these people outside of Israel will never covet Israel's land is that he's in control of their desires. He's in control of their hearts. So maybe you're kind of getting it, at least what I think the Bible teaches, and that is that God is sovereign over all things. We started with God as sovereign over the natural world.

We saw that God rules over the nations. He rules over the lives of individual people. There's really no detail, no small event that can escape his will. God's rule even extends over to human desires. But there's one last thing God's rule extends over, and that is evil. Now, that's a hard topic to discuss because some of you have really experienced traumatic things. And the point here isn't to go on a deep dive into evil. I just want to acknowledge that it is an emotionally difficult topic to think through.

But I would encourage you to think through it, if not in this episode, maybe a future episode, or by picking up a good book and reading it, because I think it will bring you some hope in healing in it. But we are going to talk about evil for just another moment. And we're going to say the Bible doesn't shy away from saying that all things, literally all things are under God's authority, under God's rule. And one of the places that we can see that most clearly is in the death of Jesus. Because really, no evil that happens to us can compare to the evil that happened to him. Here is the perfect spotless son of God who lived a sinless life, who is being crucified

by the empire. He's being crucified by the Roman soldiers. He's being crucified because his own people have turned their back on him. and that is evil. And you might be thinking in your head, well, yeah, God allowed this to happen to Jesus, but he wasn't really in control of it. That was outside of his hands. Well, go read Isaiah 53.

It could not be more crystal clear. In that passage, the prophet says that it was God's will to crush him. It wasn't Herod's will to crush him. It wasn't the Jewish leader's will to crush him, although those were all true as well. At the end of the day, this was part of God's sovereign plan. It was part of God's sovereign plan to crush Jesus in our place. He was sovereign over what happened. And then the book of Acts was it tells the story clearly confirms that what Isaiah said was true.

Because in Acts 2, in talking about the death of Jesus, it's saying this man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge. And you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. So you see there, God's sovereignty over the death of Christ, it was God's will to put him to death, and yet the people are rightly held accountable for their choice to crucify Jesus. You see the same thing in Peter's Prayer in Acts chapter 4. It says, again, about the death of Jesus, they did what your power, what God's power and will had decided beforehand should happen. So God clearly is seen as the one who is in charge, who had ordained, who was sovereign over the greatest evil that ever happened, and that was the death.

of his own son. Now, again, we'll come back to evil on another episode, but let me be clear, God never directly does evil, but he is the ultimate authority over evil. And that's good news, because that means that Satan doesn't have somehow sort of access to our life or fate, doesn't have some sort of access to our life apart from the hand of God, that our loving God, our wise Heavenly Father, the one who gave his life for us, the one who loves us more than our mind or heart can comprehend, is sovereign even over the sad, difficult, challenging trials that come into our life. It's helpful to understand that dualism, the idea that there is a good force and an evil force and that they are in constant combat with each other, that's not a biblical worldview. It has

nothing to do with the Bible. The Bible is clear. God is the one in charge. Now, he's given us freedom. He's given us the ability to make choices. He's given us responsibility, and we have sometimes not fulfilled those responsibilities. And the consequences of that, even under his sovereign rule, is evil. And like he said, we can talk about this in a future episode. But the broader point here is to say this, at the end of the day, it's not good versus evil, who's going to win. There's never a question in the Bible. God is always the one who is in charge. Jesus is the one who always wins. That is the end of the story. So hopefully we've established that the Bible teaches that God is sovereign over all things. But then the next question that we can ask is, how does this affect my life?

For example, how should this affect my prayer life? Why pray if God is sovereign and everything's going to turn out according to his will anyway? In order to answer that, let's just take a step back. And let me ask you this. Do you believe that God knows when you'll die? And I think just about every Christian out there would go, well, yeah, sure, of course he does. For example, in Psalm 139-16, it says, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. So clearly, God knows when we will die. All right, so then why do you wear your seatbelt? Or take medicine. Go to the doctor, look both ways before crossing the street. Why do you do any of those kinds of things? Well, because you, in two,

instinctively know that those are the means that God uses to keep you alive. But on the last day, the day that he has written in his book, according to Psalm 139, the day that your life will come to an end, you know that no seatbelt, no doctor, no medicine will possibly save you at that point. So what's the point? Well, you believe that God uses means to keep you alive and that Those means, those things that are part of your responsibility of wise decisions to make, don't negate his sovereignty over you. So the exact same thing applies to prayer, doesn't it? Why pray when God is sovereign?

Well, prayer is part of God's means of bringing about the things over which he is sovereign. I think another good example is sharing your faith. What some people will tell me is they'll say, well, if you believe in a sovereign God, why in the world would you go out and announce the gospel to people? And I want to say there's some fairness to that critique. There's actually a history of Christians refusing to send out missionaries to reach people for this exact reason. They say, well, God's sovereign, so he'll get around to it in his own time.

And they don't understand the very thing that Keith is saying that God's means of bringing about his sovereign plan of rescuing people and saving people is sending missionaries out into the world to announce the good news. But here's the counter argument. If you want to say, look, if God is sovereign, I'm not going to pray for him. him to save people. Well, I might say to you, well, why do you pray for God to save anyone? Because if God isn't sovereign over the human heart, you're asking the wrong guy. Apparently, you need to go to that person and convince them, because God isn't really the one who's in charge.

So let's step back for just a second and go through this piece by piece and just think through this one particular question. If God is sovereign over who becomes a Christian, then why do anything? Why suffer? Why share your faith? Why pray? Why do anything? Because God's going to take care of it all in the end. And what I can tell you is that if that's your approach, it runs counter to the Bible. It runs counter to how the Apostle Paul thought. So we could say, all right, if God is sovereign, then why go through great trials, great difficulty to take the gospel to whether it's my neighbor or someone around the world? Well, the Apostle Paul thought that God's sovereignty over people's salvation is part of what motivated him to go through hardship and difficulty

and suffering. In 2 Timothy 2.10, he says, therefore, I endure everything for the sake of the elect, for the sake of those that God has chosen, that God has died for, I endure everything for their sake, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. So why does Paul suffer the way he did? And, you know, if you've read anything about Paul's life, you know he was shipwrecked and stoned and beaten and went without food and his friends turned away. from him. When he's talking about suffering, he knows what he's talking about. Why did he do that? Well, because he believed that God was sovereign over salvation and that God would use his suffering to bring people to faith in Christ. God's sovereignty also caused Paul to stay the course. I mean, how do you keep

going year after year after year? Paul had good years, Paul had bad years, Paul had years, Paul had years where people that he spent lots of time with teaching them to follow Jesus, they turned away. He, like Keith said, had terrible suffering. What kept him going? Well, check out Acts 8 verses 9 to 11. One night, the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision. Do not be afraid. Keep on speaking. Do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you because I have many people in this city. So Paul stayed for a year and a half teaching them the word of God. So God comes to Paul and he says, hey, keep on going, man. And here's why I've got all kinds of people that I've already elected. I've already chosen who are in this city. So you've got to keep going. Now, if Paul was one of the people that we seem to be imagining here, he'd say, oh, God already chose a bunch of people in this city. I guess it's time for me to move on to a different city if he's already chosen all these people. But the exact opposite happens. Paul says, God's chosen people in this city? That's what's going to motivate me to get up every single morning and keep proclaiming. blaming the gospel to them because I know that God's going to come through because I know that God is going

to produce fruit and results. And that takes us back to prayer. One way to think about this is to say, well, since God is sovereign over people's salvation, then I don't really need to pray for them. But again, that's not how Paul thought. In second Thessalonian chapter two, he talks about how God chose them to be saved. Because again, God's sovereign over whether anyone becomes a Christian. But just a few verses later at the very first verse of 2 Thessalonians chapter 3, he says, finally brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored. So here he says to them, hey, God chooses all that come to faith and you should be praying that God would bring people to faith. So we tend to say, well, if God is sovereign, then our choices don't matter.

that's not at all how the Bible talks. That's not how the Bible thinks. So if you've understood God's sovereignty to mean that you don't have real choices to make that have real consequences, you've misunderstood. If, on the other hand, you think that our choices are all that matters and that God is kind of watching along and learning as he goes or that he can't quite get his will to happen, then you've misunderstood also. God is sovereign and we are responsible. So the classic debate between God's sovereignty and human free will, I think, as it turns out, is somewhat misleading. We want to put those two things in opposition to each other, and the Bible clearly sees them somehow being compatible with one another. Now, it's obvious that the Bible elevates God's sovereignty as the primary thing, which, I mean, come on, that makes sense.

He's God. We're not. But it never, ever, ever says that because he is sovereign, we have no responsibility. We have no roles to play. we are God's means of bringing about his sovereign will here on earth. So I find that to be incredibly encouraging. It goes back to the very first thing that Keith said in the podcast. God is wise. He is our father. He intends good for us ultimately. Yes, they're going to be hard things. They're going to be bad things that come along. And yet we know that even those things come not outside of God's power,

but even from our father's hand. And when you know that, it doesn't make you become demotivated and depressed and sad. It actually gives you the energy to keep pushing through because you know in the end, God will see this through. In the end, God is guiding this process. In the end, my life is not out of his hands. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.