Faithful in Famine (1)
"The LORD sends poverty and wealth; he humbles and he exalts." (1 Samuel 2:7)
The sovereignty of God is one of the first things that we should consider when we face lack, poverty, and famine. There are those who place little emphasis on God's sovereignty, and they think that our fascination with it is a matter of private preference. Indeed, some Christians are obsessed with this doctrine for illegitimate reasons. They have a view on the subject, and they do not like to be contradicted. They cannot state a cogent theological reason for making this their chief concern. They are obsessed with it, but they do not know what they are saying or what they are doing. In the same way, some people are obsessed with disputes about the sacraments, some about eschatology, some about covenants, and so on.
Those who accuse us of placing an inordinate amount of emphasis on God's sovereignty must not understand this doctrine very well. If they understood it, they would either forsake their faith in God, showing themselves to be reprobates, or they would rejoice in it with us, and proclaim and defend it with equal vehemence. On the other hand, their accusation of theological imbalance indeed applies to those who are always going on about God's sovereignty as if this is the only teaching in all of Scripture, and who cannot provide a sound reason as to why they give it such emphasis. They exalt the doctrine not because they understand its significance, but it is because they have identified themselves with it. It is a private obsession, and badge of their identity and tradition. They defend this God-centered doctrine from the perspective of man-centered interests. Thus the danger of false piety is real, and we need to examine ourselves, to see if we truly understand this doctrine.
When we say that God is sovereign, the meaning is that God is king over all his creation. He created the world, he sustains it, and he continues to exercise control over it. It is not enough to say that he can control all of creation. This leaves room for the false doctrine, affirmed by most of the people who claim to believe in his absolute sovereignty, and even by those who call themselves Calvinists, and who supposedly give the doctrine its strongest and purest expression, that there are some things that he does not directly cause, but that he merely permits to occur. This is blasphemy at the deepest level.
We must rather say that God can and God does control all of creation. If God can control all of creation but does not, then it leaves room for billions upon billions of events to be decided and caused by influences other than himself, even if these are somehow controlled by being "permitted" – a strange and self-contradictory doctrine. No matter how hard this perspective is defended, we are left with a God who is in direct control only over the "big picture" of what happens in his creation. This God is different from the God of open theism only in degree. This is not the God of the Bible, but one that man has imagined to satisfy his own standard of what God should be and what he should not be.
The agenda is to distance God from being the direct cause of evil, and this is necessitated by the assumption that to cause evil in the metaphysical sense is to commit evil in the moral sense, a standard that is nowhere found in the Bible, and never successfully defended in the entire history of human thinking. So why has this standard been imposed on Almighty God? Is it not obvious? The underlying principle that forbids God to be the ruler over all things and the cause of all events is not reverence but self-worship. That is, if God must adhere to your standard in order to remain righteous, when he himself has declared no such standard, then in your thinking, he is not God, but you are. You are the one who sets the standard for him.
If we understand the doctrine, then when we say that God is sovereign, it is just another way of saying that God is God. And if he is not God over all, if he does not exercise direct causation over all things, all minds, and all events, then he is not God at all. Thus the idea of permission is only a hidden denial of actual and complete sovereignty, a denial of the true God. And this is why the doctrine of God's sovereignty ought to receive such emphasis.
God's sovereignty applies to things that are pleasant and things that are unpleasant to us. Our verse comes from Hannah's prayer. God had shut her womb, so that at first she bore no children. But she petitioned the Lord for a son, and vowed to offer him to serve the Lord all the days of his life. The Lord granted her request and opened her womb, whom she named Samuel. She brought the boy to Eli as she promised, and uttered this prayer from which our verse is taken. She realized that the Lord could shut up a woman's womb, so that she could not bear children, and afterward he could open it, so that she could bear children. Both are of the Lord.
She says in verse 6, "The LORD brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and raises up." This is clear enough, but lest it eludes some people, let me paraphrase it. It means that God can kill you whenever he wants, and just as easily, he can make you alive again, and raise you from the dead. He can put you into the grave, and he can also bring you back out. He is the author and cause of both death and life. The same applies to poverty and wealth. God can make a person rich, and then take away all his wealth. And God can make a person poor, and afterward make him rich. He is the author and cause of both poverty and prosperity on all levels – the personal, the national, and the global.
This recognition should not lead to despair and grumbling, but to reverence, submission, and gratitude. This is because the exercise of God's sovereignty, whether pleasant or unpleasant to us at the time, is always for the good of his people. Consider the case of Hannah. She was barren, and berated and provoked by another woman because of it. In her plight she petitioned the Lord, who granted her a son. Born out of suffering and prayer, Samuel turned out to be one of the most faithful and powerful prophets in all of biblical history. He brought great honor to her mother, and great blessing to his nation, and also to us, who read about his words and deeds, and who benefit from his ministry to David, out of whom Christ was descended.