21: The F.I.S.H. Model (Series Compilation, Part 2 of 2)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail Podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God.

Here we are in episode 21. We’re continuing today with a look at the second of the three pillars of a kingdom worldview, Sovereign Lordship.

Hello, Father.

[00:32] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Good to be with you again.

[00:36] Stephanie: Oh, it’s so good to hear your voice. I’m sad I can’t see you in person this week, but it’s a delight to be with you.

[00:44] Marcus: It is. It’s fun. We’re getting ready to leave. I’m headed to the airport here shortly.

[00:52] Stephanie: Huzzah! I’m so glad we could squeeze this in. Thank you!

[00:56] Marcus: Yeah, this is fun.

[00:57] Stephanie: Okay, so last episode we began with the potentially controversial Pride and Prejudice discussion: 2005 or 1995? This episode, I am not going to be so gentle. Indeed, that was just practice because this controversial question is more of a theologically touchy subject. Are you ready?

[01:21] Marcus: Sure. I’ll take a deep breath. Okay, let’s go.

[01:26] Stephanie: I’ve encountered many people who believe God’s sovereignty means that he determines everything that happens. Like the universe is some cosmic software system creating the illusion of free will, but God is actually predetermining everything that happens. So what do you think? Do we live in the matrix? Does sovereignty mean determinism?

[01:47] Marcus: That is becoming a more popular idea these days. Even among non-Christians, there’s this idea that there’s some sort of a matrix-like system going on. But the Bible is pretty clear that that’s not the case.

The Bible doesn’t talk about determinism, it doesn’t talk about fatalism. We have a couple of obvious situations: think of David when he’s at, I don’t know exactly how you pronounce this, Keilah, however they pronounce that city. But, he asked God, “Is Saul going to come with his troops and come find me?” And God says, “Yes.” And then he says, “Will the people hand me over to Saul?” And God says, “Yes.” Well, neither of those things happen. If neither of those things happen, and God said,  “Yes, they were going to happen,” then what that means is that this isn’t all just predetermined.

God actually knows hypotheticals. He knows what has sometimes been called middle knowledge. That is, he knows all possible realities. Honestly, that’s just us trying to figure out a mind that is so far beyond ours. We can’t understand it.

So where we go with this determinism is essentially a way to try to understand in human terms how sovereignty works. But what sovereignty really means is that God is king, and because God is king, everybody’s accountable to him. Like a king, he initiates laws, initiates activities. Just as he is the head over everything, so God is an initiator and God is also the judge to whom we will have to give account someday.

So I think when the Bible is talking about sovereignty, it has more to do with God’s plans, his power to make sure that those plans happen, and then the fact that he’s the judge over all things.

[03:45] Stephanie: But he does know the future.

[03:47] Marcus: Yes, he knows.

[03:49] Stephanie: He just doesn’t take our free will from us.

[03:54] Marcus: Right. Just like he said to David, the implication was that if you don’t do something, this will happen. So he knew that, right? He knew what the future was in that case. And he knows how that all happens. People, again, have tried to come up with metaphors to help us understand. The one I’ve heard the most is that God is up above a parade, watching the whole thing. The past is just as present as the future is to him.

Or that God is like the speed of light, where everything is an eternal “now”, everything is right now. I don’t know if those are true or not. They’re helpful guesses, if you will. They make a certain amount of sense, and they help us wrap our heads around the idea of somebody who knows the past and the future and knows all things, because at some level he’s standing outside of it.

I’m content to just know that the Bible tells me to trust him, that he has my future, that he knows the future, and he has to know his plans for the future, which is the most important part.

[04:54] Stephanie: That’s so good. I’m in a class at seminary right now with Dr. John Oswalt and a lot of times he says things, and then he adds on, “You know what? If I get to heaven and God tells me, ‘Actually…’, I’m gonna say, ‘Yes Sir!.’ We can only know so much here, and if God tells me differently later, I’m not going to fight him on it, but this is how we’re making sense of things.”

[05:26] Marcus: It is. And, you know the reality is that sovereignty is a theological term that is based off of the kingship of God. It is based on the idea that God is powerful and that he knows the future. Because of that, the future that God has determined he wants to happen, he’s going to make that happen.

So the other part of this is, when Jesus has us pray, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” there’s a clear indication here that it’s not. Why do you pray for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven? It’s because his will is not being done on earth as it is in heaven.

[06:05] Stephanie: There are a lot of places in the Bible that say, “This should not happen.” It’s not saying it can’t happen, it’s saying it shouldn’t happen, but it is happening.

[06:16] Marcus: Exactly. And so anytime that you say this shouldn’t be this way, if God is saying it shouldn’t be this way, then you can’t believe in determinism.

[06:27] Stephanie: So our goal here isn’t to solve the mysteries of life and free will, but I think it’s so vital to think appropriately about the why and how of our existence. So let’s explore this more.

You’ve talked and written before about the idea of God as the cosmic chess player. Do you want to expand that thought?

[06:46] Marcus: Sure. I got to thinking about this one day, that my own life is sort of like this 64 square chess game. Some people are really good at playing the game, and some people are not. I am not all that good at chess. I once got beat by a teenager in five moves.

The point here is that even if you’re super good at chess, the biblical way of looking at this is that God’s chessboard doesn’t look like ours. We see 64 squares in front of us, but God’s chessboard is miles wide and multiple layers deep.

We’re dealing with our 64 squares. We may even hypothesize, like I just did, that the other things exist, but we don’t have access to them, so every now and then, things show up on our 64 squares:  “Where did that come from?” We didn’t see that coming.

Ultimately, this is God’s game, if you will. It’s not just mine, because if it’s mine, I just want to make sure things work out in a way that I want them to work out. Well, God is up to something bigger than that. Part of trusting him, and trusting him in his sovereignty, is that he is working something out, and when he’s done, it will be for my good as well as for his. In the short term, I often have to sacrifice my good for what he’s up to without understanding what it is.

[08:10] Stephanie: On that note, let’s tackle another heavy-hitter: the problem of evil. But this is a huge topic, so…

[08:22] Marcus: I feel like we should have a cackling laugh after that, but, yes!

[08:29] Stephanie: It’s a very real problem. Every religion must answer this fundamental question: How do we explain the presence of suffering and evil? So let’s get to the heart of our faith. What does the crucifixion of Christ teach us about the problem of suffering and evil?

[08:46] Marcus: One of my favorite quotes came from, I believe it was John R. W. Stott in one of his books, where he’s talking about Jesus in pain on the cross. And he was contrasting that with Buddhism, where you have this placid looking person who nothing seems to ruffle him and there’s no passion there.

He says, “I would much rather have Jesus. I’d rather have this passionate person, somebody who enters into my pain and suffering and understands my pain and suffering, rather than somebody who’s teaching me how to detach myself from all that is suffering.”

I think that one of the things that the cross teaches us is that Jesus, and his ultimate answer to the problem of suffering is,  “I went through it too.  I don’t stand aloof to it and say, ‘Well, it’s too bad for you’, and think about it theoretically. I am entering into it with you. I became human and I went through the suffering.”

And not just any suffering. He went through the suffering on the cross. Because of that, nobody can say to God, “You don’t understand.” Nobody can say to him, “You just don’t get it.” Even to a certain extent, “This isn’t fair,” goes out the window because he was willing to subject himself to it when he didn’t have to and he only did it for us. So the cross is a significant answer to the problem of evil.

[10:17] Stephanie: Can you tie that into sovereignty, sovereign lordship?

[10:22] Marcus: I heard a sermon several years ago. I can’t remember who did it, but the sermon was basically explaining sovereignty this way: God allows evil, God uses evil, and God overcomes evil.

First, that he allows evil is unquestionable because evil exists, except for those people who try to argue that evil is an illusion. But for a person in suffering, that is not a very helpful answer. The idea that God allows evil clearly is true. We see there is a lot of evil in the world. Secondly, God uses evil, and then thirdly, he overcomes it.

So we see this in the cross very clearly. God allowed the evil of the cross. You could even say he decreed the evil that happened on the cross. And here we have got to cut some lines. That is, God decreed that Jesus would suffer and that he would die and that it would happen by crucifixion. That does not mean that he prescribed every lash that hit him, everything that took place.

I go back to the story of Assyria, in the book of Isaiah, where the Lord says through the prophet, “Isaiah is my rod to punish Israel.” But then he goes on to say, “But Assyria did things I did not intend.” The point being that Assyria is going to be punished for the things that they did that weren’t part of the plan, that wasn’t what had to happen.

In the same way, I think that at the cross there were people totally guilty of all kinds of things. You can’t just say that it was God’s intended plan, therefore nobody’s guilty. God planned that he would use their ignorance against them. He definitely allowed that, and at some level he decreed it. It doesn’t mean he decreed every evil thing that took place in all of that.

Secondly, he (God) used it (evil). We all know that. That’s why we are Christians. We say he used the cross to be a sacrifice to make atonement for our sin so that we could be justified, and we could be purified, and we could be redeemed, and ultimately reconciled to God because of that. He used it for a greater good, and he overcame it. He overcame it in the resurrection. The crucifixion and suffering aren’t the end of the story.

We see this pattern a lot in scripture and in our own lives. God allows evil in our lives, he uses that evil, and he promises that he can work all things together for good. The hope of the Christian is that he is going to overcome evil, and that we will have eternal life. That’s the blessed hope of the believer.

[13:21] Stephanie: I love that you camped a little bit on the idea of decree. Do you think you can match that against determinism? What is the difference between a decree and something being determined?

[13:34] Marcus: When we talk about determinism, we’re simply talking about percentage, like is it 100% determined, and the answer is no. Are there some things that are determined? Yes. Jesus is going to come again that’s been determined.

There are other things that have been determined that are simply mysteries to us. We do not know the mind of God. Who has known the mind of God, that we may instruct him. I don’t know everything that God has decreed, but he has revealed some of them to us.

He wants us to order our lives out of faith, that if he has decreed something, we can trust it and we should therefore live that way. There are decrees that determine things. When we talk about determinism, though, that’s the idea that 100% of everything that happens happens because God forced it to happen. That’s not biblical.

[14:33] Stephanie: That makes sense. I love what you say in your book, Toward a Deeper Walk:

The point of understanding God’s sovereignty is not to be able to explain why we suffer or to know what the good is that
God wants to accomplish or how God will overcome the evil in our lives. The point is hope. God wants us to know that we
have hope because he is good and he is sovereign. As we learn to depend on that hope and trust God’s plan for us and his
heart toward us, we find peace.

That’s just a lovely summary of all these things that are so important, but what is the point? There’s always more we can say on these topics. Much of the content of this worldview series can be found in your book, Toward a Deeper Walk. I love that book.

So next episode, we’re going to be looking at the third pillar of a kingdom worldview, which is Spiritual Warfare. But for now, any final thoughts to wrap up this big, huge topic?

[15:40] Marcus: Just last night, I was struggling with a little bit of anxiety. One of the things I would just repeat to myself as I’m trying to find peace is, God is good, God is sovereign. Because God is sovereign, he’s going to work everything together for my good. Because God is sovereign, I can trust him. And it also means because God is sovereign, I can give thanks. And so I can set my mind on what is there to be thankful to the sovereign God for.

Gratitude at some level is rooted in this idea that every good and every perfect gift comes from above. That’s why we give God thanks, because it is all flowing from the abundance of his sovereign love.

I encourage people, when it comes down to the practicality of what we mean by sovereignty, it means I can trust God even when I don’t understand. I find myself, personally, that’s the hardest when I don’t know what he wants me to do and I have options in front of me and I’m just not sure which one he wants me to do. I find I can lose my peace the most quickly when that happens.

Part of this is learning to trust God, that even if I make a wrong decision, even if I don’t do exactly what it was he wanted me to do, he can still work it out. He’s still for me, not against me. He can still work with whatever is on the chessboard, if you will, and bring about the result he gets.

I can’t make a move so stupid and so bad that he goes, “Well, that’s it. I can’t overcome this.” because that’s part of the idea of his wisdom and his love and just his capacity, which is so much beyond our ability to imagine.

[17:32] Stephanie: Thank you for talking about all of this and for bringing it to that very practical level. This has been a good conversation.

So thank you all for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk Podcast and share with your friends. You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.