God Loves… Himself

The late deservedly celebrated Dr. Young, though he affected great opposition to some of the doctrines called Calvinistic, was yet compelled, by the force of truth, to acknowledge that “there is not a fly but has had infinite wisdom concerned not only in its structure, but in its destination.” Nor did the late learned and excellent Bishop Hopkins go a jot too far in asserting as follows: “A sparrow, whose price is but mean, two of them valued at a farthing (which some make to be the tenth part of a Roman penny, and was certainly one of their least coins), and whose life, therefore, is but contemptible, and whose flight seems giddy and at random; yet it falls not to the ground, neither lights anywhere, without your Father. His all-wise Providence hath before appointed what bough it shall pitch on, what grains it shall pick up, where it shall lodge, and where it shall build; on what it shall live, and where it shall die.” Our Savior adds, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. God keeps an account even of that stringy excrescence. Do you see a thousand little motes and atoms wondering up and down in a sun-beam? It is God that so peoples it, and He guides their innumerable and irregular strayings. Not a dust flies in a beaten road but God raiseth it, conducts its uncertain motion, and, by His particular care, conveys it to the certain place He had before appointed for it; nor shall the most fierce and tempestuous wind hurry it any further. Nothing comes to pass but God hath His ends in it, and will certainly make His own ends out of it. Though the world seems to run at random, and affairs to be huddled together in blind confusion, and rude disorder, yet, God sees and knows the concatenation of all causes and effects, and so governs them that He makes a perfect harmony out of all those seeming jarrings and discords. It is most necessary that we should have our hearts well established in the firm and unwavering belief of this truth, that whatsoever comes to pass, be it good or evil, we may look up to the hand and disposal of all, to God. In respect of God, there is nothing causal nor contingent in the world.        Augustus Toplady

This quote, and those Toplady quoted, are simply magnificent. These set out a God that is really God. We can behold with what seems to be a breath taken away how glorious God is in perfect sovereignty. Not a speck of dust can blow in a person’s eye apart from His specific will for that dust, for the wind, and for the person’s eye. There can be nothing that happens apart from His will and apart from God’s purposes and plans. The world is not running on its own and it does not run according to natural laws as such, but instead it is in the wise and almighty hands of the living God. Each person does not walk, drive, or live in any way in a real chaos, but only what may seem to be chaos to a worldly way of thinking. Every event is in the hands of God and nothing happens apart from His will.

It is like a ray of light into a dark world to hear the biblical truth that nothing comes to pass but that God has His purposes for it. Oh how beautiful to know that there is not a single thing that can happen to us (His people) that is random or does not come through His hand of love. Everything that befalls a person has a purpose and it is God’s purpose. We may never know why God brings small or large events to pass, but we can know that His purposes are wise and good. We may know that the events may bring pain and sorrow, but they are always for the best and that is defined what is for His glory and His glory is what is best for His people.

It is so true in our modern world that there seems to be so many events that are random and are simply the result of blind luck or fate. How the world seems to be spinning out of control while the leaders are confused and seemingly have no way of dealing with things. Yet things are not out of the control of God, though they are out of the control of man. Indeed we may feel hopeless and helpless as we see wars and acts of terror in other lands and even in our own nation, yet while we are helpless in truth we are not hopeless. God is in control and His will must be done. We can have great comfort in knowing that God reigns, and not with a weak hand, but with an omnipotent arm. Stonewall Jackson (Confederate General) said that if God willed for him to be safe in battle he was as safe as if in his own bed. It was said that he was unflinching as bullets sailed around him. This is how the believer is to live as life unfolds in breathtaking fashion. Nothing can happen to us unless God intends it. After all, we are His whether we live or whether we die.

The late deservedly celebrated Dr. Young, though he affected great opposition to some of the doctrines called Calvinistic, was yet compelled, by the force of truth, to acknowledge that “there is not a fly but has had infinite wisdom concerned not only in its structure, but in its destination.” Nor did the late learned and excellent Bishop Hopkins go a jot too far in asserting as follows: “A sparrow, whose price is but mean, two of them valued at a farthing (which some make to be the tenth part of a Roman penny, and was certainly one of their least coins), and whose life, therefore, is but contemptible, and whose flight seems giddy and at random; yet it falls not to the ground, neither lights anywhere, without your Father. His all-wise Providence hath before appointed what bough it shall pitch on, what grains it shall pick up, where it shall lodge, and where it shall build; on what it shall live, and where it shall die.” Our Savior adds, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. God keeps an account even of that stringy excrescence. Do you see a thousand little motes and atoms wondering up and down in a sun-beam? It is God that so peoples it, and He guides their innumerable and irregular strayings. Not a dust flies in a beaten road but God raiseth it, conducts its uncertain motion, and, by His particular care, conveys it to the certain place He had before appointed for it; nor shall the most fierce and tempestuous wind hurry it any further. Nothing comes to pass but God hath His ends in it, and will certainly make His own ends out of it. Though the world seems to run at random, and affairs to be huddled together in blind confusion, and rude disorder, yet, God sees and knows the concatenation of all causes and effects, and so governs them that He makes a perfect harmony out of all those seeming jarrings and discords. It is most necessary that we should have our hearts well established in the firm and unwavering belief of this truth, that whatsoever comes to pass, be it good or evil, we may look up to the hand and disposal of all, to God. In respect of God, there is nothing causal nor contingent in the world. Augustus Toplady

The typical person in the modern world is simply blind to the greatness and glory of God. A fly is nothing but a nuisance to the person that is absorbed with self and self-interest and who cares about the lowly sparrow. The typical person in the modern world has a naturalistic mindset and sees all things in a physical sense as if the deepest reason for all things is a result of natural laws and blind chance. A person gets sick simply because of either a genetic issue or because of a virus or bacteria. A person gets well simply because of proper medication. A person lives as if all things are on his or her shoulders and abilities.

For the person with the biblical understanding of God absolutely everything happens as a result of Divine providence. This person lives with the understanding that each and every hair that s/he has is numbered by God. God does not number each hair of a person simply as an act of bare knowledge, but that text of Scripture points to the reality that God knows absolutely everything about us and that His people are in His intimate care. It is not that all things will happen according to the way our fallen hearts will desire for them to happen, but all will happen according to the infinite wisdom and plan of God. We must seek Him for hearts that will bow in sweet surrender and absolute submission.

Toplady points us to the great truth that we would have much benefit to meditate on and that truth is that as a truck drives down a dusty road, each bit of dust is in the hand of God. Every bit of dust is raised by God and the motion of it according to His divine plan. Each bit of dust in under His particular care and He moves it precisely to the place He has appointed it. Regardless of the wind and regardless of all the other things going on around that bit of dust and all those bits of dust, they cannot move that dust in any location other than what God has ordained for that dust to go. The path and location of dust points us to the fact that nothing can come to pass unless God ordains it so and it will happen for His purposes.

As we think and meditate upon great truths like this, it should give us a great firmness in our faith in God. All that happens to us can only happen if He has planned it from all eternity and that for the good of His people. All that goes on around us, in us, and happens to us is not apart from His specific and careful plan that was planned with infinite wisdom. As each particle of dust cannot move apart from the great goal of His glory, so God works all events in the lives of His children for His glory as well. The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, but only God can work that in and for His people. Only God can give us hearts to enjoy His glory.

The late deservedly celebrated Dr. Young, though he affected great opposition to some of the doctrines called Calvinistic, was yet compelled, by the force of truth, to acknowledge that “there is not a fly but has had infinite wisdom concerned not only in its structure, but in its destination.” Nor did the late learned and excellent Bishop Hopkins go a jot too far in asserting as follows: “A sparrow, whose price is but mean, two of them valued at a farthing (which some make to be the tenth part of a Roman penny, and was certainly one of their least coins), and whose life, therefore, is but contemptible, and whose flight seems giddy and at random; yet it falls not to the ground, neither lights anywhere, without your Father. His all-wise Providence hath before appointed what bough it shall pitch on, what grains it shall pick up, where it shall lodge, and where it shall build; on what it shall live, and where it shall die.” Our Savior adds, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. God keeps an account even of that stringy excrescence. Do you see a thousand little motes and atoms wondering up and down in a sun-beam? It is God that so peoples it, and He guides their innumerable and irregular strayings. Not a dust flies in a beaten road but God raiseth it, conducts its uncertain motion, and, by His particular care, conveys it to the certain place He had before appointed for it; nor shall the most fierce and tempestuous wind hurry it any further. Nothing comes to pass but God hath His ends in it, and will certainly make His own ends out of it. Though the world seems to run at random, and affairs to be huddled together in blind confusion, and rude disorder, yet, God sees and knows the concatenation of all causes and effects, and so governs them that He makes a perfect harmony out of all those seeming jarrings and discords. It is most necessary that we should have our hearts well established in the firm and unwavering belief of this truth, that whatsoever comes to pass, be it good or evil, we may look up to the hand and disposal of all, to God. In respect of God, there is nothing causal nor contingent in the world.       Augustus Toplady

It may be that the word “sovereignty” does not communicate what it used to. The fact that God is sovereign does not mean that He rules at a distance and controls the big things or controls things when He is pleased to do so, but that from all eternity He has ruled over the smallest of details and will do so for all eternity future. Not the smallest thing can escape Him as He is in full control of it and it can not move or do anything that He is not in full control of. Nothing can happen apart from His plan and apart from His permissive will. Even more, nothing can happen apart from His concurrence with it and apart from His giving energy to the movement of His creatures. The presence of God is simply everywhere and as such nothing can happen apart from His wisdom and His power. While many want to protect God from such control since there is so much evil, God does not need our help. He is and always will be sovereign.

When we think of the thinking of Bishop Hopkins on the sparrow, it brings our thinking closer to where it should be. There is nothing that the sparrow can do but go according to the will of God for it. While the sparrow is nothing or less than nothing in our way of thinking, yet it is under the supreme Ruler and His sovereign care and guidance for it as it carries out His sovereign plan for it. In the sovereign care and plan of God, that little sparrow and all little sparrows have branches planned from them to rest on and food planned for them to eat. God has planned lodging for them and has it planned where they will build a nest. He has planned where it will live and how long it will live. He has also planned the precise moment it will die and how it will die. The Lord God omnipotent reigns and He reigns over all things at all moments and in all places.

When we turn to think of the children of God, it is no small thing to recognize that the very hairs of all men are numbered regardless of how much hair they have and regardless of how curly or knotted it is. In terms of His particular sovereignty over each of His children, we must bow in utter humility and reverence before Him. He is perfectly in control of each aspect of our being, even to each blood cell and each subatomic particle our bodies are made of. Our every breath is in His hand and apart from Him we could not lift and drop our arms. Our chief and really only real business is to deal with the living God. We are in His hands to do with as He pleases as the clay is in the hands of the potter to do with as the potter pleases. Apart from Christ we can do absolutely and utterly nothing spiritual or good, which means we must receive it from Him first. The glory is His and His alone and when man tries to stick his so-called ability and freeness in then man is intruding upon the very nature of God. God will be God, so we must seek Him to give us hearts to bow to the supreme glory of His sovereign rule.

The late deservedly celebrated Dr. Young, though he affected great opposition to some of the doctrines called Calvinistic, was yet compelled, by the force of truth, to acknowledge that “there is not a fly but has had infinite wisdom concerned not only in its structure, but in its destination.” Nor did the late learned and excellent Bishop Hopkins go a jot too far in asserting as follows: “A sparrow, whose price is but mean, two of them valued at a farthing (which some make to be the tenth part of a Roman penny, and was certainly one of their least coins), and whose life, therefore, is but contemptible, and whose flight seems giddy and at random; yet it fails not to the ground, neither lights anywhere, without your Father. His all-wise Providence hath before appointed what bough it shall pitch on, what grains it shall pick up, where it shall lodge, and where it shall build; on what it shall live, and where it shall die. Our Savior adds, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. God keeps an account even of that stringy excrescence. Do you see a thousand little motes and atoms wondering up and down in a sun-beam? It is God that so peoples it, and He guides their innumerable and irregular strayings. Not a dust flies in a beaten road but God raiseth it, conducts its uncertain motion, and, by His particular care, conveys it to the certain place He had before appointed for it; nor shall the most fierce and tempestuous wind hurry it any further. Nothing comes to pass but God hath His ends in it, and will certainly make His own ends out of it. Though the world seems to run at random, and affairs to be huddled together in blind confusion, and rude disorder, yet, God sees and knows the concatenation of all causes and effects, and so governs them that He makes a perfect harmony out of all those seeming jarrings and discords. It is most necessary that we should have our hearts well established in the firm and unwavering belief of this truth, that whatsoever comes to pass, be it good or evil, we may look up to the hand and disposal of all, to God. In respect of God, there is nothing causal nor contingent in the world.       Augustus Toplady

The above quotation of Toplady is simply tremendous. It reaches beyond what is the normal thinking on sovereignty and points the mind and the heart to the glory of God and the depths of His sovereignty. It is true that it is now possible to reflect on things like atoms and quarks, but most minds (perhaps all to be honest) cannot reach the depths in thinking of the beams that move in the sun. How are we to deal with a God that is sovereign over the structure of the fly and even more on each path of each fly? How are we to comprehend a God who is sovereign over every gnat and every mosquito? Can it be that all the chiggers and ticks are where they are because God ordained that they be right there? Can it be that every spider spins its web in precisely the place where God plans for it to be and that every insect that is caught in that web has been planned to be caught in that web? Behold the glory of God!

The glory of God is on display in every place in the universe, but not all are given eyes to behold His beauty and glory. As has been written hundreds of years ago, God hides Himself in the second causes. This is to say that those with natural eyes (so to speak) will see nothing but the second causes and be blind to the First Cause of it all. Men curse people, events, circumstances, and the weather and in doing so they curse the God who planned and ordained all of them. Men look to luck, fortune, and happenstance as explanations for what happens to them good or bad. However, they ought to know that God is in control of all events instead of forces that just happen. Men ought to know that the wrath of God is upon them each moment that they are out of Christ and all that happens to them (good or bad in their perceptions) comes from the wrathful hand of God who in perfect wisdom knows how to bring judgment upon each person as He pleases.

Apart from the glorious teaching of the sovereign God in all things we have a universe that displays design and order, but that is nothing more then the god of the Deists. The Deists will have a god who will design and created the world, but they deny that He has much to do with it now. But the teaching of Scripture regarding the sovereign God who created all things for His pleasure and who upholds all things by the word of His power sets forth a God who is in control in the most intimate of details. The God with whom we have to do is a God who knows everything about us and is in control of all things in the universe as well as in us. The God with whom we have to do is a God who is worthy of worship and is the only one who can give us hearts to join Him in love and worship of Himself. This God is utterly beautiful and glorious in all He is and in all He does. He is the true God and there is no other.

When I consider the absolute independency of God, and the necessary, total dependence of all created things on Him their first cause, I cannot help standing astonished at the pride of impotent, degenerate man, who is so prone to consider himself as a being possessed of sovereign freedom, and invested with a power of self-salvation; able, he imagines, to counteract the designs even of infinite Wisdom, and to defeat the agency of Omnipotence itself. “Ye shall be as gods,” said the tempter to Eve in paradise; and ye are as gods, says the same tempter now to her apostate sons…The Scripture doctrine of pre-determination lays the axe to the very root of this potent delusion. It assures us that all things are of God, that all our times and all events are in His hand. Consequently, that man’s business below is to fill up the departments and to discharge the several offices assigned him, in God’s purpose, from everlasting; and that, having lived his appointed time and finished his allotted course of action and suffering, he, that moment, quits the state of terrestrial life and removes to the invisible state.             Augustus Toplady

There are only two systems of religion in the world. The first is that men have to work either a little or a lot in order to have a happy life in eternity. The second is that God is sovereign and bestows grace upon the ungodly and gives them a happy life in eternity by His mere grace to the praise of the glory of His grace. Christianity is the second of these and every other religion in the world is the first. Men, women, and children are utterly dependent upon God for all things and at all times. Yes, it is quite true that men are blind to this because of their sinful hearts that are blind to spiritual things. But when men have their eyes opened, they can see how utterly prideful their wicked hearts have been to think that they can take a breath apart from God’s concurrence.

Instead of starting with men as the standard, we must go to where Scripture goes and state that God is the ultimate truth and standard of all things. God is absolutely independent and as such all men must be absolutely dependent. God is the first cause and though He works through secondary causes, all that happens is from His hand. Nothing can happen unless it fits into His plan and it is that plan that is from all eternity. The living God who is all-powerful and of infinite wisdom cannot be coerced or bribed and cannot be brought into an agreement with men based on their principles. Man is simply and utterly dependent upon God and cannot do one thing to bring God into some form of obligation to himself.

Toplady speaks of being astonished at the pride of impotent and degenerate men. If he thought impotent man was so full of pride in his day (1700’s), then what would he think of our day in which the true God seems to be almost universally denied? What would he think of our day in which the pulpits of the land are full of those who seem to think nothing of the power of God and encourage men to serve God by their own decisions? It is not just that men are deceived and/or wrong about some small things regarding theology, but they are horribly and terribly wrong about the truth of God. Men focus on themselves and their own power and strength, but what they need to be brought to is to focus on God’s power and strength and to know their utter weakness and inability. Men need to be told of their own inability and of God’s ability. Men must be pointed away from themselves and then pointed toward God or pointed toward God and then away from themselves.

The delusion of men is to think that they have something like a sovereign freedom while they assign God to a lesser position than their own wills. This is simply an outrage and an attack upon the sovereign freedom of God. Can impotent man who is empty of wisdom and spiritual life and strength and such a speck of dust in the universe really have the power of self-salvation and effectively oppose the designs of the omnipotence of God in His infinite wisdom? What is man that God should even think of such a vile creature with anything but loathing and wrath? What is man but a tiny speck of dust on the earth which is but a speck of dust in the universe? Who does man think he is to actually think that he can plan for himself and provide for himself?

When put bluntly, the old adage is very true. God is God and man is not. God has created all things and that includes all men. It is God who is sovereign over all things and man is sovereign over nothing. It is God that orders all things according to His plans and man cannot counter those plans with his own. It is God that is infinite in wisdom and power and man has no wisdom or power but what God gives him. Who is puny little man to lift up his fist against God and say that he (man) will do as he pleases? Who is this speck of dust who will demand to be saved according to his own pleasure? Man is but a vapor who is held into being by the mere pleasure of God each and every moment that He is pleased to do so. When God decides that He will not hold a vapor into being on this planet, then as a little bubble pops with a sharp object and disappears, so man dies and enters eternity. Man is completely in the hands of his Maker and should be humbled and broken over this. Man should bow in utter submission to this God instead of subverting the rights of God over himself to himself.