On The Road - Episode 6 - God Maximizes His Glory By Demonstrating All Of His Attributes

God Centered Theology

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Welcome back down the road. This is Andy Cain. It is 9 -11. That's right.

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It's September 11th, 2024. We all know what that day means just by hearing the date.

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It should ring out in your ears. It should bring out some reminders.

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It should really take you back. It's amazing to think that it's been 23 years.

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Great day in the morning. It's been a while. And if you're like me, you remember exactly where you were that day.

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I was in college. In fact, I just started college. It was my first semester at Campbell University.

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And I woke up that morning. I don't remember why we were waking up later.

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I assume we just didn't have a class that early. But my roommate woke me up and said, you know, hey, something crazy is going on.

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You know, we turn on TV and there it is. So it's amazing to think that such evil could exist.

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But we must remember that it is even that evil that God is completely sovereign over.

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God is completely sovereign over all his creation. He's over everything that occurs. There is nothing that happens that surprises

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God. There is nothing happens that is outside of his control.

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It's always interesting to listen to those that would try to make an excuse for things and, you know, quote unquote, like got off the hook by saying, well, you know,

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God could possibly have known about that or God could possibly God is control that God wouldn't call it.

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God is sovereign over everything. Every single thing that happens is because God wanted it to happen.

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It's because it's part of God's decree. It's part of God's his plan for his creation.

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And it has purpose and it will bring him glory. This means that there is no purposeless suffering.

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There's nothing that occurs that is wasted or meaningless.

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In fact, it's in Isaiah where God says, you know, who are you? Who are you liking me to?

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Who are you compare me to? Tell me why things happened in the past. Tell me what's going to happen in the future.

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Tell me what it means. Tell me why it happens. You can't because you're not God. God has a reason and a purpose for everything that occurs.

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God is in complete control. And it's because of that, that we can have faith that we can have peace in the midst of everything.

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One of the things that people either forget or don't want to think about or talk about when they talk about things like evil and suffering is they always do it from a man centered perspective.

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And the man centered perspective is going to think about evil from the perspective of what we see as evil.

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Yes, we'll say, okay, we recognize that certain things are evil and murder is evil and all these things.

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And we'll categorize things and say, well, you know, that's evil. But my little sin over here, well, that's not nothing in comparison to that.

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Well, all sin is evil. All sin is cosmic treason against your creator.

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So we always love to think, well, okay, well, that's evil. God's somehow wrong for causing or allowing that.

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But he's not wrong for allowing me to sin. No, your sin is evil.

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We sin, we commit evil. We need to be far more worried about our own sin than anything else.

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But all sin, all evil, including our own is under the sovereignty of God. And thankfully to Jesus Christ, our sins have been forgiven.

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So even in the midst of something like a 9 -11 event, there is glory that comes to God through that.

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And see, we want to say, you know, that makes God a villain or makes

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God whatever. If there were no justice or holiness, if there was just grace and mercy and love, then

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God's only displaying some of his attributes. If God only displays justice and holiness, well, all of us will be wiped out for our sin and there'd be no grace, mercy, and love.

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It's only in the allowing for sin and the displaying of all of his attributes that God maximizes his glory.

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You see, we have no problem with movies and stories and things we would come up with that would involve both heroes, villains, good, bad, good, evil, drama, trials, suffering, people overcoming it.

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Through our man -centered lens, we're perfectly okay with understanding that there's all of this good that comes from bad.

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But when it comes to God, we want to say, well, you know, he shouldn't have allowed

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Hitler. He shouldn't have allowed this. Well, he's God and you're not. Isaiah is clear about this.

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He says, who you gonna liken me to? Who you compare me to? You keep going after your strange gods.

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They're nothing. They can't tell you about what's happened in the past or why it happened. They can't tell you what's going to come in the future.

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It's only God that's sovereign. And see, through our man -centered lens, we construct what we think is okay based on our finite capacity and our finite reasoning, instead of starting with God and reasoning down to man.

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So if we do the God -centered perspective of sovereignty, it is true that God is sovereign over everything, meaning anything that happens in creation only happened because God wanted it to happen and it's for his glory.

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But it's also true that he's revealed to us in scripture that man is responsible for his own sin.

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Now you see those from the man -centered perspective trying all kinds of ways to get around this and explain it and mix the two together or separate them completely or show some way that this can't be.

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Whereas the God -centered perspective is simply going to let scripture speak and understand that even if we can't reconcile what may seemingly be two contradictory things, we may not reconcile those things together in our finite minds.

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We're going to trust what scripture tells us. We're going to trust how God has revealed himself, and he has revealed himself to be completely sovereign.

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He has a decree, and we're not told what his decree is. We're not told about certain things he is accomplishing in time.

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We are revealed much of what he intends to accomplish. Intends makes it sound like he may not accomplish it, but what he is accomplishing.

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So the open theists have no way of saying anything about why 9 -11 happened.

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As far as they're concerned, it was a complete surprise to God. There's no way he could have planned for it. There's no way he could have known what these men were going to do that day, and he has no way of doing anything about it.

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Or he could have stopped it because he would have known it was coming, and he can't get any glory from it because there was no plan or purpose or intention behind it.

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So if you don't understand the sovereignty of God, what you have is a world full of meaningless suffering, purposeless suffering, suffering that will not bring glory to anyone, much less

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God. But when you understand the sovereignty of God, when you understand that he created this world with the intention of maximizing his glory through righteousness and evil, and that one day he will show himself to be the final and righteous and holy and just judge of all sin, and no one will speak back to him, then you truly start to come to understand his sovereignty and how it operates in this world.

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So 9 -11 is tragic. It's evil. But I also understand that it did not surprise my

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God. He has reason and purpose for it. He will get glory from it. See, we like to say, well, if I was

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God, I wouldn't have allowed all them people to die. That's just wrong.

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Well, you sinned against your creator. Would you be okay with him wiping you off the face of the planet the second you sinned?

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Because none of us would make it past our second breath. So we have a way of mitigating, or what's the better word?

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We have a good way of minimizing, is the word I was looking for, our sin and excusing it and thinking, well,

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I'm not as bad as God because I wouldn't have allowed that, really. Well, what would you allow?

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If you only allow that which is good and righteous, how do you know sin? How do you know grace and mercy?

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How do you know these things unless there's something that God would have to be graceful and merciful to you for?

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So in the way God has decided to operate his creation, we learn, experience, and have far more of a better understanding of who

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God is by seeing his grace, mercy, justice, righteousness.

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We see all of it. We see all of his attributes displayed in his creation, in us, and how he is sovereign.

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And I'm thankful for that. I want to know who God is. And yes, it's tough going through suffering and trials, but everybody always say, man,

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I learned so much from that hard time. I learned so much from that suffering. But then they want to turn around the same breath and say, well, if I wasn't

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God, I wouldn't allow that. I shouldn't be no such. That's because you're not God. We need to let

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God be God and let us be us. We can't change reality. Reality is what it is.

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Reality says that things like 9 -11 happen. So either God's in control of it and there was purpose for it, or it's a frightening, terrifying thing that there either is no

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God, like the atheists say, and this is just a random bunch of bags of gas and molecules and all these things.

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And they just decided they wanted to do something evil, or there is a God that can't control it. And we're just kind of left up to ourselves and we're really in trouble.

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And it's funny, those that don't want to, they want to be against the sovereignty of God, still have no problem praying to him and asking him to help with things.

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So they believe in his sovereignty enough if they need something. So it's, it's always a mixed bag there.

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So anyway, this is the podcast takes you from carpool to work and we have made that journey.

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So now it's time to cut this off. I trust you have a wonderful day. And I want you to know that it is important to remember that everything that we have and everything we are is by the grace of God.