He is the Sovereign One

“The Lord has established His throne in the heavens, and His sovereignty rules over all” (Psalm 103:19).

Periodically, a word gets stuck in my mind and, try as I may, I am unable to shake it. This usually means that I am supposed to pay attention. So, like a kid with an all day sucker, I stick with it to the end. Two words are presently stuck in my head, Sovereign and Sovereignty.

When I want a proper translation of a given English word, I pull out my 1828 edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language by none other than Noah Webster. The following are his definitions of Sovereign and Sovereignty.

SOVEREIGN: Supreme in power; possessing supreme dominion; superior to all others. As in, God is the Sovereign Ruler of the universe.

SOVEREIGNTY: The possession of highest power; supreme power. Absolute sovereignty belongs to God alone.

In the passage quoted above, God is identified as the one who “rules over all.” This theme is echoed by the Lord Jesus Christ when He spoke His final commission to His followers, after His resurrection, before He ascended to His heavenly throne. Matthew 28:18 says, “And Jesus came up and spoke to them saying, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth’”.

Now, if all authority over the affairs of both heaven and earth belongs to Jesus, obviously there can be no greater authority in existence. This fact is also attested to by the Apostle Paul in his first letter to Timothy, where in reference to Jesus, he said, “He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords” (I Timothy 6:15). Did you hear that? Paul said that Jesus Christ is the only Sovereign, the King above all kings, the Lord above all lords. Christ’s Sovereignty means that He has absolute control over everything and every event in the cosmos, which, by the way, He also created (John 1:3, Colossians 1:16).

It was the late R.C. Sproul who once said, “God has not left a single maverick molecule in the universe.” Meaning that all is under His sovereign rule. There is no loose monkey wrench flying around to get caught in the gears of the machinery of the cosmos. All is ordered, all is in His control and under His command. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing has been left to chance.

How does this sovereignty apply to us? The Psalmist said that God numbered the days that we would spend on earth, before our infant self ever saw the light of day (Psalm 139:16). He determined your race and the place that you would be born, or as the writer of the Acts of Apostles put it, “…and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation” (Acts 17:26).

Nothing within God’s created order has been left to chance. Which is a very different scenario presented by those who hold a naturalistic worldview, where the whole of the cosmos and life on earth is believed to be totally random.

Now I ask you, “Which system would you rather live under?” The one claiming that you  were created in the image of a Sovereign Lord and God who loves you beyond measure and longs to guide you through this life and give you a purpose for living, or the one that says that you are a cosmic accident and there is no plan, no plan for now, no plan for the hereafter?

Yes, God is over all! And His sovereign plan includes you, both now and in His coming kingdom. “Then the sovereignty, the dominion and the greatness of all the kingdoms under heaven will be given to the saints of the Highest One; His kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all the dominions will serve and obey Him” (Daniel 8:27).