Daily Archive

Here’s the truth – God is God, He is sovereign, we are not, and His will is going to be accomplished (Psalm 115:3). When we see God as the potter in Jeremiah 18 and also in Romans 9, to answer the question as to election and God’s sovereignty, we read, “I will have mercy to whom I have mercy” (Rom. 9:15). Charles Spurgeon’s point on Romans 9 was that he was not amazed that God hated Esau, he was amazed that God loved Jacob. He shows mercy to whom He shows mercy because He is God and we are not.

“So what shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God?” This is what that sounds like. Do we preach about a sovereign God who in His providence does whatever He wants regardless of what you want? Yes, and hallelujah! Because if He left me to what I wanted, that’s judgment. He changes what we want. He gives us a new heart. God gives us a “new willer”, one pastor said, so that we can will what we should want to will and then He empowers us to do what we desire (Phil. 2:13). So can we ask the question legitimately, “Is God not fair?” Thankfully by the way, God is not fair. Thankfully we get mercy instead of what we deserve.

The answer to the question, is there any unrighteousness with God? “May it never be.” Absolutely not. God forbid. “For he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then it does not depend on the one who wills or the one who runs, but on God who has mercy. For the scripture says to Pharaoh, for this very purpose I raised you up in order to demonstrate My power in you and in order that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth. So then He has mercy on whom He desires and He hardens whom He desires. You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who resists his will?’ On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? Will the thing molded say to the molder, why did you make me like this? Or does not the potter have authority over the clay to make from the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? And what if God wanting to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath, having been prepared for destruction, and in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles?”

He is the potter. There are those who would say that it wasn’t fair that He hardened Pharaoh’s heart. You know God did harden Pharaoh’s heart, but Pharaoh hardened his heart first. God was just turning Pharaoh over to what He wanted. This was judgment upon Egypt for the salvation of God’s people. He left him in that hardened state and added to that hardened state until Pharaoh was finally broken and let the people of God go.

We can’t find fault. The question is, “Who resists His will?” There’s not a one of us. We can’t resist His will. We may quench the Spirit, we may grieve the Spirit, but we can’t resist His will. What does that mean? Look at Jonah. Jonah knew he was going to preach and he knew, if perchance the people believed, that God would grant to them and could grant to them, without Jonah having a say, repentance, and could save the whole city of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria. Jonah hated those people so badly, he tried to kill himself instead of go. He went the other way when he got found out on the boat and the sea started to rock the boat. Finally, he said, throw me overboard.

And you understand his plan was not to get swallowed by a fish and spit out to go preach to Nineveh. It was to drown. He would rather stand before God as an unfaithful prophet than go preach because God might save those people. That’s going on today, folks. It’s going on today in reformed churches where there are people who have taken the position that sinful people in the world are our enemies and that we are to literally go to battle with them and defeat them. No, we’re not. We’re supposed to reach them with the gospel. And the gospel that we preach will either harden them or it will break them. Either way, God’s will will be done. And we have to see that we need to have compassion on people in the world and not treat them as our enemies. “We don’t wrestle against flesh and blood.” It’s a spiritual battle that’s won by the preaching of the Word.

In his stubbornness, Jonah got himself swallowed by a fish. He spent three days in the belly of that fish. He got vomited out onto the shore, bleached from the stomach acid of the fish. So here this, and undoubtedly people saw this happen, here, this great fish pukes out this whole bleached man right out of the ocean and he goes to the place where in the main city, in the main temple, they worship Dagon, who is the statue of a man with a fish head. And he goes and he preaches. And even though he preaches reluctantly God pours out His Spirit. The people hear it, and the people repent in sackcloth and ashes. Great revival comes to the city.

And Jonah sits out on the other side of the city and mopes about God saving those people. You see, Jonah could try and do everything within his power to prevent God from doing what He was going to do. We can’t resist his will. Wouldn’t not Jonah have had a better time joyfully going and doing what God called him to do and rejoicing in the salvation of a whole city of people? Instead, he fought tooth and nail. Yet, God’s will is going to be done.

Ephesians 1 reminds us, starting in verse 3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love, by predestining us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself,” and here’s the phrase, the key, “According to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He graciously bestowed on us in the beloved.”

God does what He does according to the good pleasure of His will. His will is going to be done and it’s going to be good.