This podcast is part 1 of a discussion on the Sovereignty of God with Jeffrey Johnson. Embracing the doctrine of the sovereignty of God is the most life-giving thing you can do. It helps you understand everything happening in your life and the world around you. Jeffrey Johnson joins us to discuss this critical matter. He has written a book on the Sovereignty of God. We highly recommend that you read it. Find information here.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and we're here today to talk about the majesty of God and His sovereignty, and particularly to focus in on a book that will be published by the end of the year here by Jeff Johnson on the sovereignty of God. So Jeff, thank you for joining us on this. Oh, it's great to be with you guys. Thank you for having me.

So Jeff is a pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Conway, Arkansas, in Free Grace Press, and He operates a seminary. You can read it on a Shirt Grace Bible Theological Seminary there. Jeff's book is a treasure. It was to me when I read it. It's so full of Scripture.

I don't know if I have read a book that had the lines of Scripture so thoroughly injected into the pages of this book. In fact, I was so taken with it, I haven't told you this, I was so taken with it that I copied down, I think, every scripture reference in the book, and I went and I looked at every one of those references, copied them out of an online Bible, and just pondered them. They've been so encouraging to me. It was a feast of the Word of God. And I thought, how did he write this book?

Here's how he wrote this book. He got all these scriptures and then he just wove them together, you know? Is that what happened? Yeah, well, yeah. You notice there's not one single quote from any human author.

And I almost my books is just filled chock full of people that I love and appreciate. But this book, I I did want any quotes from my heroes, other than in the chapter headings, you know, to have a pink quote or a Spurgeon quote, but not in the text. And I did that on purpose. I wanted the Scriptures just to be saturated with the Scriptures. Let's look at the Word of God.

And you're kind of right. I just research a bunch of what the Bible says and put it together. There you go. Jason, would this be called an application of the sufficiency of scripture? I like it.

Let's do it. Okay, there you go. So there's no more comforting, no more helpful doctrine of the Bible to me than the sovereignty of God. I often have young people ask me, how do I prepare for marriage? The very first thing I say is you must understand just how sovereign God is.

And I tell them to read A.W. Pink's book, The Sovereignty of God. Now I'm going to tell them, read Jeff Johnson's book on the sovereignty of God, because it really does contain really, I'm just going to say it, everything for life and godliness, because you'll know how to interpret everything that's happening in your life. Every calamity, every situation, and frankly, problems in marriage, most people's problems in marriage really have to do if they don't really believe that God is sovereign, that God sent them this problem. And so they're all flustered about it, and they get angry, and they develop contempt for the people that God sent them.

You know, I was reading the other day, the single greatest cause for divorce is contempt. Some marriage researchers for 40 years, and that was their conclusion, contempt. But if you have contempt for man, it's probably likely that you don't really understand God. You don't understand the sovereignty of God. God sends you everything.

So I really love this book. I love the whole idea of talking about it today. So Jeff, you wrote this book, and I just want us to just have a free-flowing conversation about it. Tell me what motivated you to write this book. I wrote this book for myself.

I was going through a load time, started writing it about a year ago, and I was just needing to reestablish the fact that I was in God's hands. So this wasn't for publication as it started out. It was for self therapy. And I just I knew God has sovereign. I believe that for 30 plus years now.

But it's amazing how we need refreshers. We need to be reminded of God's sovereignty. So it's something I could have told you prior to writing the book, yeah, God's sovereign. I never questioned that in the process of writing it, but I wrote it to go back to scriptures and to just look at my problems that I was going through, like you said, and put them back in place, put them in their proper place. And I could say the book helped me.

It's not my book helped myself, the scriptures helped me. Just going back over what God says about His control over my life. Now, that was just generally a beneficial project for myself. And that was the motivation. And I agree with you.

It's one of the most important doctrines to understand. You say in this book, quote, a God who rules over all the galaxies is one thing, but a God who rules over the thoughts in our heads is quite another." Do you think that's an overstatement? Well, if God's not completely 100% sovereign, then He's not sovereign. It demands, God's sovereignty demands absolute sovereignty. All it takes is one little feather blowing around outside of God's control, and the ripple effect of that one little feather could have devastating effects on the whole history of redemption.

And so I know it's not an overstatement, and it's not just me, philosophical, trying to reason this out. It's the fact the Scriptures makes it clear that everything from the galaxies to the will of man is under his control. You know, you tell a story, it runs through the entire book. I really resonated with it because my dad was in World War II as well, but you tell an incredibly gripping story and you refer to it, I think, in every chapter. Yes.

So could you tell us the story? Yeah, I start every chapter with my wife's grandfather who worked his way all the way through World War II. He was, went through the African campaign, he went through Sicily, and he landed on Normandy on D-Day and ended up basically living throughout the whole war. And I did a lot of research going back to reading a lot of history books on World War II, asking all the family every story that they knew about him. And it's quite remarkable that this man, my wife's grandfather, the grandfather, the great grandfather of my children was truly a hero, a hero of World War II.

And it's just amazing that he lived. There's probably 10 times that he should be, should have died. And when people were dying all around him, he survived. And that story means so much to myself because I think that if God wasn't sovereign, my kids, my children would not be here. And that God preserved his life in order to, for many, many children of, you know, his children and his great-grandchildren and for generations to come, is only because God kept those bullets and the shrapnel and the bombs from killing him, and It's just phenomenal.

Jeff, in terms of structure, you now have a three-part book, part one, The Foundation of God's Sovereignty, part two, The Nature of God's Sovereignty, part three, The Extent of God's Sovereignty. I can't wait to get to part three. I know we're going to talk some about it in a future podcast, but could you just walk us through the three sections and just give us a sense of them? Yeah. I wrote the book with the assumption that someone did not understand that the sovereignty of God may not even have agreed with it.

So the first section was, let's root the sovereignty of God in scriptures. And rather than just start with the verses to talk about sovereignty, I wanted to start with rooting it in the power of God. So chapter one is on the power of God. And I sought to do my best from scriptures to prove that God is omnipotent. And I think most people, even if they don't agree with the sovereignty of God, they would have a difficult time denying the omnipotence of God, that God is not just powerful, but I sought to show that He is all powerful.

And that word all is significant, that it's not a dualism between God and Satan. It's not like God has most of the power and Satan has some of it and you and I have a little bit left over and all the power is divided up. God has, He has his section and he's more powerful than I am. I mean, I'm more powerful than my kids at the moment. And so I can wrestle them down and get them to say mercy when we play.

But is that the way God is? Is he's just stronger than us? And What I sought to prove is, you know, all of my strength and all the power of the Son and the power that's invested in this universe is actually directly under the power of God that he has exclusively, he has all power and every other secondary power is delegated power that God remains in control of. And by showing that God is all powerful, we make a strong case biblically that God is sovereign. If God is all-powerful, then he must be sovereign over all other powers.

It's hard to overstate omnipotence. Yeah, yeah. You can't fathom it, really. It's beyond our imagination what all power means. When the Bible says about God that he doesn't faint or grow weary, that doesn't make sense to us.

My cell phone runs down, its battery runs down, batteries have to be recharged, I have to be recharged. The sun is slowly depleting itself of its energy. How does God do something but not lose one ounce of power? How does he do such amazing things but stays completely charged? That's unfathomable, but that's who God is.

You say this, the notion of God making a decision based on his foresight is built on the notion that there are some things that take place independently of God's providential control. The problem is that we tend to view God as we view ourselves. This would be how we would make our decisions if we knew the future. So you have this idea that God has foresight. He knows what's getting ready to happen, so he's navigating around it.

So Talk about that whole issue of foresight or omnipotent and omniscient sovereignty. Right, right. Well, that's in chapter two where, as I said, seeks to prove the sovereignty of God by God's omnipotence. Chapter 2 looks at the fact that God is all-knowing. He knows all things.

The Bible makes that clear. He knows the end before the beginning. And the reason He knows all things is because he's ordained all things according to scriptures, that all things are part of his predestination and his decrees. And so the objection that we would have in our mind was, well, God knows all things because he looks ahead and he's good at predicting or he's seen the movie before. But how can God know something if he's not in charge of what's going to happen?

How is it actually theoretically even possible to know something that has yet to be decreed? So to understand if there's going to be foresight and foreknowledge, which we know the Bible makes it clear that God has foreknowledge, it demands that God is the one who's sovereign over that which he chooses. There's no possibility or contingency or something God could have done or something that may would have happened that God could have not been in control over. So the foreknowledge demands the sovereignty of God, as well as the power of God demands the sovereignty of God. You know, one of the pressing questions that everybody has is what is God's plan for my life?

How is it working out? What's interrupting my best life? Things like that. But you have in part two the answers to those questions. I really appreciated this section along with the others and the nature of God's sovereignty.

Sovereign over His plan, sovereign over providence. Could you just tell us what you meant by that? Yeah, yeah, Part two is like, okay, now that we've built a case for sovereignty of God in part one, part two is like, now, what is the sovereignty of God? What does that mean? Well, if you have any definition of sovereignty of God, it has to go back to the decrees of God.

So I lay out what the Bible says about predestination and his decrees, and these are eternal decrees that he ordained before the foundation of the world. And how these decrees is basically a central part of the sovereignty of God, but that's only part of it, then the execution of these decrees is what we know as providence. And so there's a chapter that I've tried to explain the nature of providence. Now, providence is somewhat separate from the sovereignty of God, but you can't have one doctrine without the other doctrine. And that chapter on the providence of God, I turned to the story of Jonah and look at how God ordained all the secondary causes or all the details that brought about what God intended to bring about.

And I show that Jonah going away from Nineveh, even in that act of rebellion, was part of God's plan to get him to Nineveh, that there was no accidents and God used every circumstances from the storm, the casting of lots, to throwing Jonah overboard, to the big fish swallowing up Jonah, all these things which we would call secondary causes, all these things were brought together and used by God to carry out God's providential plan. And That is so encouraging because what was true with Jonah is true with all of God's people. And because of that, verses like Romans 8-28 can apply to me that all things, even my rebellion, even when I don't want to go do what God wants me to do, and I run from God, and God chastens me and uses circumstances to bring me to repentance and brag to Him that all these things we can look back on is that God was over that, and He brought about a greater plan, even though my plan was not for his glory initially. God overrode that and used it to bring about his glory and my good. It's just amazing.

I find so much comfort in that, that, you know, God, he's holding me. In my ignorance, he's holding me. In my indolence, he's holding me. Even in my sins, in my selfishness, he's holding me. He's holding me for all eternity.

And I'm just so thankful that God is who he is. Yeah, I think that's why the Lord Jesus is able to sleep. When he was on a boat, mist of a storm, He's out there sleeping and they woke him up. Hey, Lord, do you care that we perish not? I mean, we don't want to perish.

What are you doing sleeping? And he rebukes them for their little faith. And I think the Lord's able to rest. Lord Jesus was able to rest because he had a high view of God and God's sovereignty. Of course, he himself was sovereign over the storm, but he knew that his time would not come, his time would not come through a death in a boat, he would die on a cross.

So He knew that he was safe. It didn't matter what it looked like. And I think that's encouragement to us that nothing can take us until God's appointed time, that we're going to live as long as God has a purpose for us and nothing, nothing can take us before that time. That God has us and we can trust God with our life and with our possessions, our emotions, with everything. I loved your chapter on God's Sovereign Over Nature.

I really lit up on that one. Well, one reason I lit up is because you talked about God's sovereignty over the fish. You did that when you talked about Jonah. But when we go to the ocean, I always tell my children, particularly on Shark Week, hey, look, God is sovereign over the fish. I mean, you know, He'll put a coin in a fish's mouth and, you know, He'll have a fish swallow you and spit you up.

But He's also sovereign over the sharks, so you don't need to worry about the sharks. In fact, you can tease the sharks, they're not going to touch you unless, you know, He wants them to. Yeah, I mean, He's sovereign over nature, every aspect of it. It's surprising how much the Bible talks about how God's sovereign over the weather, the snow, the lightning bolt, the mountains, the trees, the bugs, everything. God has arranged all things, the things that we don't even aware of, the microorganisms underneath the surface of the, you know, underneath the dirt.

Every little thing God is caring with such tenderness to bring about a greater, more grand purpose. And I remember in one section I was talking about how we may think an earthworm exists to eat dead leaves, but that's not the reason they exist. They have a greater purpose. And if you read about how dirt is turned into soil and you need soil to grow plants, that earthworms are a bottle part of the ecosystem and irrigating, if you would, the dirt to get the dirt to be germinated, if you would, or irrigated and all the minerals and vitamins to get into the dirt. And it's like, wait, earthworms have a huge purpose in God's plan.

And so he's arranging that and caring for that because he wants trees to be planted and trees to grow, but he wants trees to grow because he wants one tree to be cut down. And that tree would be particularly the one Christ would hung up on. And that would be the thing that brings our salvation. And a little worm had a role in this grand scheme. And there's nothing, there's nothing that's outside of God's plan.

God would not have brought it about. Everything has a purpose and has meaning, and that means I have meaning. I have a purpose. I'm here for a reason, and that reason is not myself, it's for God. Let me read a text of Scripture because it's picking up a phrase, Jeff, that you've already used, which is declaring the end from the beginning.

It's Isaiah chapter 46 verses 9 and 10, where God says, Remember the former things of old, for I am God and there is no other. I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, my counsel shall stand and I will do all my pleasure." I think our struggling with the second part there, which is that there is this God that declares from ancient times things that aren't done yet. He declares at the end from the beginning is actually tied to our struggle with the first part where God says, there's no one like me. We tend to envision God as a perfect version of us. Us, but only a whole lot better, but that's not what the Bible teaches.

The Bible teaches that there's no one really to compare God. He's a category unto Himself. Yeah, yeah, it's... When you think about God, your mind begins to shut down because he's too big for the mind to wrap itself around. And you could think about the sovereignty of God, you can think about the omnipotence of God, the wisdom of God, the knowledge of God.

Think about the love of God. You could meditate for eternity on one of these attributes and never get to how glorious that attribute actually is. So we're like feeble people trying to grope around and figure out this divine, glorious being called God. But he's truly, like you said, a category of his own. He knows the end before the beginning.

That's just quite astonishing. Nothing more comforting than this doctrine. Spurgeon called it a balm for every trouble. And it certainly is. And so Jeff, thank you for writing the book.

I think people can probably be getting this book in the late fall, maybe might even be able to pre-order it right now and perhaps have it delivered before the end of the year. I just so highly recommend it. It was a blessing. I would go home in the evening after reading it and tell my wife, oh, Deborah, I'm just so encouraged. That's what I did.

That's very kind of you. Thank you. Yeah. Join us on the Next Church and Family Life podcast where we're going to discuss one of the most difficult and even controversial matters in the sovereignty of God and that is God's sovereignty over sin. Jeff has a chapter dedicated to that subject and we're going to discuss that issue.

Hope to see you next time. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.