The Sovereignty of God Over All Things (Part 1)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the

Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of our

King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is

Mike Abendroth, and it is good to be alive, is it not? It is good to be alive in Christ.

Both of those things, by the way, were done to us, right? I did not bear myself.

The first time, physically, I did not bear myself. Second time, spiritually, no, no, it was done to me.

The ESV, I think, and the NAS translate 1 Peter 1 verse 3 that he caused us to be born again.

Good theology. Well, if you like good theology, I think you're in the right place. I still am a little stuffy, some post -pneumonia, bacterial pneumonia hangover,

I guess is what we should call it. I had a CAT scan yesterday, and they didn't have any contrast. Can you imagine?

There's all kinds of things that are out of stock, thanks to our current administration, and they did not have contrast, so I don't know if they saw anything or not.

The good news is you can still see certain things on a CAT scan without contrast, and the same goes true with MRI.

My name is Mike Abendroth. You can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com. Lots of encouraging emails these days.

The emails that I used to receive were, where can we find a church?

What do we do about maybe changing churches? How could we find maybe a more reformed church?

That used to be kind of the number one email that I get, and maybe I talked about that a lot. Who knows? But now, these days, most of the emails that I get, some aren't this, but many of them are.

We've been learning about law gospel. What can you tell me more about law gospel? And our church, the church we attend, they don't do law gospel.

In other words, it's just glossable. It's just all gospel law. It's law -light.

You can do it. They're putting people back underneath the covenant of works. You can't do that, but that's what they're trying to do.

Pleasing God, the standing before God, the ground of your standing before God, not

Christ's perfect works, but ours somehow. That's final justification falls into that, federal vision, everything else,

Piper, et cetera, Baxter. Anyway, that's kind of the number one thing we get. The Israel trip is on February 21st through March 2nd,

Omaha Bible Church, Bethlehem Bible Church, Pactam, and No Compromise Radio. I get 22 slots.

Pat gets 22 slots. I think 24, but my wife is going with me, and Pat's, I think, bringing one of his children, one of his childs, and so that means 22 left for each of us.

And so if you want to fly out of Boston, you can go with us. It's a $500 deposit that is refundable up through November 8th.

If you change your mind after that, you lose some of it, then you lose all of it. It is $3499, and that is from Logan, and it's going to be

Logan, Newark, Newark, Tel Aviv, and on the way back, Tel Aviv, Logan, nonstop.

So that's really good. We will stay at, not five -star hotels, we want to keep the price down, but we'll stay at nice enough hotels, and so far, every trip, we've had just a great time.

You can go with us, first 22 who send in $500 are on the list. After that, it'll be a waiting list.

If the waiting list is long enough, then we'll get another bus, but it wouldn't be as fun to have two separate buses.

The Pat bus and the Mike bus, that wouldn't be as fun. What else is going on?

I hope in a couple weeks to record some American Gospel shows on sanctification. We're hoping to get that done.

There is a Lordship article I wrote that's on the Heidelblog .net,

I think it's .net. You can pull that up. That's from a book that I'm writing. I don't know what to call it, but it's from certain things to other things, from Biblicism to Confessionalism, from monergistic, from synergistic sanctification to monergistic.

So that's going on, and then the book on assurance, hopefully will be out in the next couple months.

I need to finish the introduction. Everything else is done in terms of information in the book, a little preface, introduction, and then how to format it, and then the cover.

Other than that, we're in good shape. Today I'd like to talk about the sovereignty of God. I've been talking about that a lot lately because of the book of Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verses 1 to 8.

It uses the word time over and over and over, 14 pairs of time, showing completeness, and instead of the sovereignty of God talking about it in a doctrinal way,

God ordains whatsoever comes to pass, maybe like the Westminster divines. This is set up in a poetic way, so I've been thinking a lot about that.

I've been in Ecclesiastes for a couple weeks. I was only going to do a couple, then go to California for the summer.

Most of my shows this summer are not going to be reruns, by the way. I've got like 20 in the can, they call it.

And so they're done, so there should be new stuff this summer. Friday only is the rerun.

And so I've been in Ecclesiastes, I'm up through Ecclesiastes 3 .13

last time. And there's a season for everything, there's a time for every matter under heaven, and then you get that kind of ebb and flow back and forth, time to be born, a time to die.

And what he's doing here is he's employing a grammatical device called a merism,

M -E -R -I -S -M. And merism is a wonderful way to talk about completeness.

If you searched everywhere, that's not a merism. But if you said, I searched high and low, that's a merism.

If God created the heavens and the earth, that means he created the heavens and the earth and everything in between. He created everything.

And we have merisms here in Ecclesiastes 3, and a lot of them have to do with issues that the fall,

Adam's sin, has caused. It's difficult when there's mourning, there's weeping, breaking down, killing, even healing.

There wouldn't need to be healing without the fall, tearing, war, hate, lots of stuff like that.

And the writer is trying to let everyone know that if you look at the world and you say, it's just spinning out of control, you need to look with eyes of faith in addition to eyes of, with the eyes of sight.

In other words, you say to yourself, self, I see things, but there's another reality.

There's another dimension of sight and sound. There's an invisible war going on.

There are invisible realities. That's amazing to think about. I mean, you just stop and let that sink in, right?

C 'est la moment. There's an invisible world out there with real beings and real things happening.

Wow. I mean, I'm just looking outside right now here in West Boylston, Mass, a town of 7 ,000 people.

I'm looking over to the Catholic cemetery. I can't remember what that's called, St. Leo's or something like that. Was Leo ever a saint?

I lived next door to a guy named Leo. He didn't seem too saintly to me. God is sovereign.

And if you don't see everything through the lens of a sovereign God, life is going to be more frustrating than it already is.

Life is already hard. Life is difficult. Life is frustrating, full of toil, vexation, doesn't seem to last.

It's like a sandcastle. And the one thing that all sandcastles have in common, if you build a sandcastle at the beach, in comes high tide and it's gone.

All that work, and you look at it the next day, it's imperceptible. You don't see anything.

You say what Solomon, probably the author of this book, says, what gain has the worker from his toil?

Chapter three, verse nine. So you need to see things underneath the umbrella of God's sovereignty.

So what I want to do on today's show is I want to give you five realms of God's sovereignty.

I don't know if I'll finish every one today, but five realms. I think some of this comes from my book,

The Sovereignty and Supremacy of King Jesus. I didn't like that title, but that's what you have to do when you have publishers.

I think I just wanted to call it King Jesus or something, who knows. I have a cover that has some of the names of Jesus, or his prophet and priest, and just lighter colors, and then maybe

King, really bold, who knows. But anyway, I think this comes from that. The first realm of God's sovereignty that I want you to grasp so that you have an easier life and you think about God properly is that God is king and sovereign over all his creation.

God has decided, God himself has decided by his own good pleasure to make the earth and the heavens the way they are.

If you just start thinking about waterfalls and arid deserts and polar caps, dense jungles, you can see that planet earth,

I think they even have secular films about how meticulously wonderful planet earth is.

An all -wise sovereign God is in control of this. He could have just as easily had two -thirds land instead of two -thirds water.

He could have had no Everest, no Mount Everest, or he could have had a thousand Mount Everest. Everything in creation follows the decree of the king.

Here's a Psalm 135, a portion of it. Whatever the Lord Yahweh does, or whatever he pleases, he does in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all the deeps.

He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth, who makes lightnings for the rain, who brings forth the wind from his treasuries.

God is sovereign over all creation. For most of us as Christians, we understand that and we grasp that.

Psalm 119, it says in verses 90 and 91, your faithfulness continues throughout all generations.

You establish the earth and it stands. They stand this day according to your ordinances, for all things are your servants.

Can you imagine the moon and the sun and the stars, they're called

God's servants? Stay here, do that, come here, stay there, do as you're told.

And with fascinating obedience, the galaxies instantly respond to the precise commands of God.

And the exact same thing is true for the weather. Weather doesn't just happen, it occurs by God's explicit purpose and control.

Climate is the exact result of God's intervention in the universe. Many people say things like, well, it's raining outside.

Maybe implying, at least with their language, that rain randomly occurs, you know, somehow, some way, for some odd state of affairs, rain pellets begin to serendipitously form and drop from habit.

And just, hey, it's raining. We say in our apps on our phone, chance of rain.

What's the chance of rain? And if you look at a dictionary, chance is the abstract nature or quality shared by unexpected random or predictable events.

Chance suggests absence of design, chances, you know, and predictability don't go together.

I wonder if you think rain is more than moisture condensing in the sky and then precipitating from the sky.

If you know your Bible, and I know you do because, of course, you're a no -compromise radio listener, the

Bible speaks regularly of rain in a way that we don't say things. We say it rained.

That's kind of passive. It's raining. Genesis 2 .5, no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the

Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth. Interesting. The Lord will open for you his good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand.

That's Deuteronomy 28. Leviticus 26, then I shall give you rains in their seasons.

In the hydrological cycle, theological speaking, rain is passive and God is active.

I mean, if you want to go this far, you can because it's true. Every drop falls exactly where God planned it to land.

Calvin said, it is certain that not one drop of rain falls without God's sure command.

And it falls where he wants it to fall. It falls by his command and it falls where he wants to have it fall by his command.

Of course, then I think, God's sovereign over the weather. I'm complaining about the weather.

It's too hot. It's too cold. It's too rainy. It's too icy. It's too this. It's too that. I mean,

God is the king of the weather, right? He spoke and raised up a stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea,

Psalm 107. The sun stood still. The moon stopped,

Joshua 10. Who does that? Who can accomplish those kinds of incredible acts? Only a sovereign and omnipotent

God has such, might I say, raw power to rule what is humanly unrulable, right?

We don't rule tornadoes. We don't rule earthquakes. We don't rule the sea. We might figure out how to put a boat on the sea, but we don't rule it.

Remember Rabbi Kushner years ago, the unbelieving, not a Christian rabbi.

He wrote that book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Remember that?

And he declared that insurance companies should not regard fires, earthquakes, and tornadoes as acts of God, because it would be a case of using

God's name in vain. That's Harold Kushner. Well, I don't want to follow his faulty theology, but I want to acknowledge that these indeed are under the sovereign umbrella of God.

And we can praise him who presides over the sun, moon, rain, sleet, hail, snow, clouds, wind, storm, thunder, lightning, earthquakes, fire, ice floods, famines, tsunamis, forests, and all the oceans, the seas.

Lorraine Bettner said, Lorraine Bettner is a man, by the way, in case you're new to the show. My name is

Sue, how do you do? My name is Lorraine. He looked tough. I never met him. Never saw any photos except the one photo where he looks, he's a man's man.

His theology is manly too, godly. Every thinking person readily sees that some sovereignty rules his life.

He was not asked whether or not he would have existence, nor when, where, or what he would be born, whether in the 20th century or before the flood, whether white or black, whether in America or China.

It has been recognized by Christians in all ages that God is the creator and ruler of the universe.

And our response to God's sovereignty over all his creation should be Revelation chapter four with the 24 elders who are falling down before him.

Worthy are you, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things and because of your will they existed and were created.

Not evolution, God's created hand. Isn't that good to know?

You just sit back and you think, makes life easier. Now if it's a pipe dream, well fooling yourself doesn't make life easier.

But since it's true, then we can just rest in God's sovereignty. That's the book

Jerry Bridges wrote, Trusting God, subtitled Even When Life Hurts. This is what we need for comfort when we're in difficult situations and we have sorrow and we have even joy.

We think, oh, sovereign hand of God. The second realm of God's sovereignty is not just he's sovereign over all creation, but he's sovereign over all history.

Sovereign over all history. This is just a good little lesson for us today to make sure we understand the extent of God's sovereignty.

You want a God who's sovereign over everything, because if he's not sovereign over everything, there are some things he's not sovereign over, and maybe those are the things that are really bad.

Maybe that's you that he's not sovereign over, or your cancer, or your pneumonia, or your

COVID pneumonia. How can I get COVID pneumonia and regular pneumonia in one year? How could that happen?

There are many times that I think I should have done this, that, and the other, and maybe it would have been better for me, and I just have to say

I made the decisions that I did at the time, and God's sovereign, and the day I'm supposed to die, the day

I was born, has already been determined, and I'll try to do my best on earth, but it is what it is.

At 62 years old, with some health problems, I'm like, hmm, all right.

Thankfully, there's a resurrection. Thankfully, there's a Lord who loves me and cares for me, and thankfully,

God's sovereign, not just over creation, but over all history. God the King rules everything in time and place, all history, from the speck of dust to the election of world rulers.

God sits on his throne. Even the timing of inventions and the centuries when man made important discoveries are irrevocably fixed in the annals of history by an outside being, capital

B, God the Triune King. I mean, if you listen to what Daniel said, let the name of God be blessed forever and ever, for wisdom and power belong to him.

It is he who changes the times and epochs. He removes kings and establishes kings.

He gives wisdom to wise men and knowledge to men of understanding. Daniel 2, verses 20 to 21.

Did you know, quoting Paul, he made, God made, from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and boundaries of their habitation,

Acts 17, even governments established by God.

And knowledge of this fact of God's sovereignty over history is not only the grounds for our future prophecies, but it's the basis for our complete confidence and dependence upon God for today, for right now, the trial that you're in right now and future trials that you either know are coming specifically, or, you know, just generally will be there in a fallen world short of the

Lord's return. I mentioned bridges before. I give you a quote from that book, Trusting God, page 37.

Confidence in the sovereignty of God in all that affects us is crucial to our trusting Him. If there is a single event in all of the universe that can occur outside of God's sovereign control, then we cannot trust

Him. His love may be infinite, but if His power is limited and His purpose can be thwarted, we cannot trust

Him. You may entrust to me your most valuable possessions. I may love you and my aim to honor your trust may be sincere, but if I do not have the ability to guard your valuables, you cannot truly entrust them to me.

So God is sovereign over everything, and therefore we can trust Him. We can have confidence in His sovereign, loving care.

Political parties, governmental legislation, easy for me to do legislation, legislation, shleest acts, and everything in between are guided by and determined by God, not the other way around.

In God's universe, what ifs and if onlys are actually not reallys and never a doubt. That's pretty clever.

Who told me to read that? Who am I quoting? Trusting the

King in unsettling times is much better than trusting in horses, chariots, and governments. That's true.

God is sovereign over creation, and He's sovereign over all history and those in history. Third, third realm.

See how we're using realm? That's my kind of plural proposition. A plural noun is realm, and so we'll make it plural, realms, and then five, five realms of God's sovereignty so that you can rest in Him.

What's a proposition? If you realize that God's sovereign, you can rest in Him. I don't always preach that way, but that's sometimes good to have plural noun propositions.

It's better than three points. Everything's a point. Now, a point is a noun.

Points are plural nouns. Three points is a plural noun, and then I could give a proposition. But if everything's a point, every time the pastor preaches, he's got a point.

Can't you just find a different word than point? Truth? Three non -negotiables?

Nothing wrong with any of those. I just don't think you should say point every time. What's the point? So what's the point?

Or as we say in New England, what's the point? Is that how we talk around here? I don't know.

I was talking about tonka trucks the other day, and it was an illustration of, I don't know, at the beach, tonka trucks, before the tide comes in and you have the question asked, what gain has a worker from all his toil in the sand?

Kids now don't know what a tonka truck is. If you even, I was talking to a friend today about this, my friend Bill, and if you go to a store like a

Walmart or Kmart, go to the outside toy section. Remember in the old days,

Frisbee, lawn darts, what they call them, yarts or something. All these kind of outside fun things and bikes.

Now you go to the digital area, the video area, the technology area.

It's huge. The outside game deal, well, not so much. Where are the tonka trucks when you need them?

We need more tonker trucks, as we say in New England. That's why I've thought of tonka trucks. Somebody this week heard me talking about tonka trucks from a sermon, and they sent me a picture of their son playing with their old tonka trucks.

So 35 -year -old dad's got a tonka truck that he saved because they're so impervious to decay.

Don't push too hard on that dump truck because it'll flip back and you'll crash your head onto it. Anyway, we're not going to get to number three.

I got number three. I got my third plural non -proposition, but we're not going to get there until next time, which will probably be in your time, dear

NoCo listeners, tomorrow. Mike at NoCompromiseRadio .com. If you want more details on Israel, you email me,

Mike at NoCompromiseRadio .com. Make sure you go to the Heidelberg website, the

Heidelcast, rather with Scott Clark. There's an article written there by me. Two more parts coming. We'll see you next time on NoCo Radio.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.