![]() ![]() It’s a form of the word “sovereign.” Sovereign was a designation of the person who reigned, the – the single ruler, the king, the monolithic power, the unilateral authority and that is essentially what to say God is sovereign means, that He is the sole ruler, He is the sole authority. We – we would have a little difficulty in America understanding the word “sovereignty” since we’ve never lived under a sovereign. PHIL: Well, let’s start at the very beginning and I’ll just ask you what does the word “sovereignty” mean? JOHN: And all of life takes on a frightening character. But the bottom line, maybe a good place to start would be to say, “I would much rather know that God is in charge of everything than to think that He’s not. JOHN: Yeah, then you’ve got to explain why things are the way they are. Because if you say, “No, He’s not in control of everything,” then you’ve got a God who lacks power over something and if you say, “Yes, He is in control of everything,” you run right up against the problem of evil. PHIL: Yeah, one of the reasons it’s so difficult is that no matter how you answer the question is God in control of everything? you find yourself in trouble. So I think this will help a lot of people if we can get a biblical handle on how to understand the sovereignty of God. People throw around the idea, “Well, God is sovereign,” or “Is God Sovereign?” And they grapple for an answer to that. JOHN: Phil, I think this is really an important thing because that question is raised all the time and rarely answered. God’s sovereignty is not an easy issue, is it? It’s a subject that raises lots of questions and we want to ask you some of those questions today and get your help in finding biblical answers. And we’ve actually never addressed that issue by itself head on, and today that’s what we want to do. ![]() We chose those conversations based on questions we hear from listeners and questions that, frankly, we grapple with sometimes ourselves.Īnd you may have noticed that there is a common thread that runs through virtually every one of those conversations, the issue that always seems to come up is the sovereignty of God. And we chose those subjects because they’re the ones people ask questions about. We’ve talked about the doctrine of election, and most recently the problem of apostasy. In the year since then, we’ve done close to a dozen other Q&A sessions and we’ve dealt with issues like The Gospel, the seeker-friendly church movement, the issue of how far the church should go in adapting methodology in our message to the culture we’re trying to reach. “Where was God when this happened? Why did He allow it to happen? And how are we supposed to think of God’s sovereignty in the midst of terrible disaster like that?” And that was the first of these discussions we had. And you answered questions starting with the main questions we knew people were going to ask. We got in the studio that afternoon right after those attacks and spent some time. John, we’ve done a number of these studio interviews over the years, going back, I think – I think the first one we ever did was on September 11, 2001. PHIL: Hi, I’m Phil Johnson and I’m here in the studio today with John MacArthur and we’re going to talk about the sovereignty of God.
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