All Things Are Of God
A Short Study on Absolute Divine Sovereignty
By Rev Earl Jackson
“For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things: to Whom be glory for ever. Amen.” (Romans 11:36).
“But to us there is but one God, the Father, of Whom are all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom are all things, and we by Him” (I Corinthians 8:6).
“For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God” (I Corinthians 11:12).
“And all things are of God, Who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation” (II Corinthians 5:18).
“In Whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will” (Ephesians 1:11).
“For it became Him, for Whom are all things, and by Whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10).
The removal of God from anything renders Him a false God. The failure to recognize Him in all things excludes Him from some things, and turns Him into a god of our own creation. All distortion in the universe stems from the distortion of God in the minds of intelligent beings.
The Bible begins with “In the beginning God”, and it does so, because it means: “In the Beginning God. In the middle God. In The end God. In all things God!”
The moment God is removed from all things, or anything, He becomes nothing and we become all things to ourselves. This was Satan's ploy from the very beginning when He tempted our first parents with the subtle question: “Yea Hath God said?” (Gen. 3:1). The question was not about God's words, although a thoughtless and careless understanding might lead you to think that it was about God's commandment to not eat of a certain tree. The words and the fruit of the tree were part of the narrative, but they were virtually inconsequential elements in the story, designed to show the really important steps toward all sinfulness and evil. What the narrative is actually meant to show is that the Satanic question: “Yea hath God said?” is a direct frontal assault on the God-hood of God. Satan, in removing God from His words, was removing Him from His universe. If you remove God from anything, you remove Him from all things. Removing God from his words, God from the tree, God from the fruit, God from the thought processes, God from the man, God from the garden, God from the soul, God from the worship of the soul; you leave the entire cosmos in utter ruin and total darkness. Darkness is always the negation of the light, the removal of the light, the separation of the light from the darkness.
The verses we have quoted above show that God is in fact the source, the direction, the cause and the effect of all things. He is the Universal Centrality of Reality. So in a very real sense it is impossible to remove Him from anything, because He is everywhere and in all things. But sin is sinful, precisely because it attempts to do this impossible feat. Sin springs from sinful thoughts about God. It springs from thoughts turned away from the creator of all things, to ourselves the creators of nothing. Technically it is impossible to remove God from anything, because “By Him all things are held together”, or “consist” (Colossians 1:17). “Without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). But in point of practical human psychology and behavior, it is the constant tendency of the “natural man” to attempt to divorce God from the human reality, and to do this we imagine our own independence, or the independence of something else, in isolation from God.
The false dualistic view of evil, presupposes that God did not create the things we do not agree with, but only the things we approve of and are happy to understand in our own puny frame of reference. We allow a god in our own creation into our Sims-city universe, and we exclude the God of All Creation from the reality of what He really is, in spite of what we imagine Him to be. This false dualism, creates a God in isolated from something, and something isolated from God, on which we can pin all the faults with which we wish to accuse the Almighty. If there is sin, it certainly is the devil's fault? If we have sinned it is certainly because we have been duped by the deceiver, and it is none of our faulty thinking which is the cause? The historic Confessions of the faith, have always been tripped up by this defective humanistic logic. It says God created everything but he did not create sin or evil in the universe, and thus it is self-contradictory nonsense. They call it a dialectic and it is nothing but intellectual schizophrenia, which turns God into something which He is not. The failure to recognize the God-hood of God in all things always removes God from something and creates a false dichotomy, and sets up a false dualism, or an all pervasive false humanistic pantheism.
When everything is not comprehended by the One God, then everything will become many gods, and you will find yourself worshiping two gods, three gods, ten gods, or ten thousand gods! The cosmic Oneness of the Triune God informs the entire universe and that is the meaning of “In the Beginning God”. Nothing is excluded from Him. Nothing happens without Him. He is before all things, above all things, and behind all things. And if he is not in everything, then He is in nothing.
I recently spoke to a long time member of the church where I attend, and this supposedly Christian man, began to tell me how “He could never believe in a God, who would cause a plan to crash with 300 people on board, or the Holocaust, or the Hindenburg disaster, or the millions of aborted babies in recent history”. His justification for this statement was that “his god is a righteous and loving god”. By extension that means that “his god” is removed from plane crashes, infanticide, disasters, and other areas of “evil”, which in his human opinion are evil areas which the true god must be excluded from on the basis of his presumed holiness, love, righteousness, etc. which he has established for god by his own human reasoning and definitions. I looked at the man and told, him, that there is no difference between his thinking and the thinking of the most godless atheist. His words are the identical argument which the atheist uses to prove in his own mind that there is no God. “If there were a God”, according to the atheist, “there would be no plane crashes, no infanticide, no murder, no pain, no suffering, no hurting in the universe. The fact that there is such things proves that God does not exist”. My friend, a member of my church for over 20 years showed in two seconds that his innate core beliefs were identical with atheism! He denied the Lord whom he claims to serve by denying the God-hood of God in all things. This is certainly not Christian language, or Christian thinking.
While I cannot presume to know my friends soul, I know that out of his heart His mouth spoke the very essence of evil and unbelief! Hearts that have not the grace of God's Light, and who harbor the spirit of this world, rather than the Spirit of Truth, are probably not Christian hearts at all? After 40 years of pastoral work, I can say that I have seen this sort of thing, even at the highest theological and ecclesiastical levels. Ignorance could account for ignorant speech, but when men are well educated, and have been in a church for over 20 years, can we use the ignorance argument to justify speech which is nothing short of pure blasphemy? I don't think so? The tares grow together with the wheat, side by side, and some of them are pastors, people next to you in church, and professors in our theological institutions. The bottom line is not what you know, it is who you know! Paul did not preach a bunch of doctrines, human statements of facts, human wisdom spiced up with enticing words and humanistic analogies. Paul preached “Christ and Him crucified” (1Cor. 2:1-2). The issue of all truth is the person of all truth. If He is not the source of our light, then our light is darkness. “Yea hath God said?” removes God from His own truth and light, and thus it removes Him from our soul and our thinking. “God hath said, because God is” is the correct response. It is the affirmation of faith, and the step into the light, not the running away from it. It matters not how long you have gone to church, or how much theological education you have or do not have? If Christ is not the center of your universe, as He is the center of God's universe, you have only a lonely intellect, full of cobwebs and misappropriated rationalistic thoughts. Your world is dark, if the light of the world does not fill every corner of it, and permeate every minute particle of your existence! If Jesus Christ is not your “all and in all”, then He is nothing at all! And you are yet in your sins, and are a practical atheist! You may carry all sorts of Christian looking baggage, and may even attach the name of “Christian” to your life. But if you exclude God in anything, you are an atheist of the highest order.
Atheism, is not the absence of God in the universe, for that in fact is an impossibility. Atheism is the revolt against Him and the exclusion of Him by hearts that are darkened by their own convoluted self-appreciation. When you think too highly of yourself, you are certain to think too poorly of the Lord. Wrong views of God, exclude Him from something that is rightfully His, and thus He becomes the source of our own atheism through the exclusion of His light and grace from our lives, which are not our own, but which were bought with a price. This is the plague of plagues, the evil of all evils, and the darkness which locks God out of every unbelieving heart. This is Adam's fall. It is the fantasy of the unknowing of God, the delusion of “knowing nothing” instead of light, which knows everything. It is death and destruction instead of Spirit and truth. It is the origin of evil, and the perpetuation of it in our very own bosoms. It is the reason we need to put to death our flesh and our selves. We are crucified with Christ, so that we die to the principles of destruction within us, and live to the resurrection of His Divine Life in all things. We have the mind of Christ, because we have the Christ of the mind, and we exclude Him in nothing. There is no truth, thought, congruity, validity, or reality apart from Him. He is all and in all.
You will express Him, only when you quit expressing yourself. You will magnify Him, only when you start humbling yourself under Him. When you quit trying to adjust His shoelaces, and learn to take off your own on His holy ground, only then will you realize that you are absolutely unworthy and that He is everything worthy. He is God, and we need to cast off every sin which so easily besets us, and fall before Him, in wonder and praise. Faith never walks by sight, but always walks relaxing in the full sunshine of God's love. That is everywhere and in everything. God is love. “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1John 4:16).
A Short Study on Absolute Divine Sovereignty
By Rev Earl Jackson
“For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things: to Whom be glory for ever. Amen.” (Romans 11:36).
“But to us there is but one God, the Father, of Whom are all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom are all things, and we by Him” (I Corinthians 8:6).
“For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God” (I Corinthians 11:12).
“And all things are of God, Who hath reconciled us to Himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation” (II Corinthians 5:18).
“In Whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will” (Ephesians 1:11).
“For it became Him, for Whom are all things, and by Whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10).
The removal of God from anything renders Him a false God. The failure to recognize Him in all things excludes Him from some things, and turns Him into a god of our own creation. All distortion in the universe stems from the distortion of God in the minds of intelligent beings.
The Bible begins with “In the beginning God”, and it does so, because it means: “In the Beginning God. In the middle God. In The end God. In all things God!”
The moment God is removed from all things, or anything, He becomes nothing and we become all things to ourselves. This was Satan's ploy from the very beginning when He tempted our first parents with the subtle question: “Yea Hath God said?” (Gen. 3:1). The question was not about God's words, although a thoughtless and careless understanding might lead you to think that it was about God's commandment to not eat of a certain tree. The words and the fruit of the tree were part of the narrative, but they were virtually inconsequential elements in the story, designed to show the really important steps toward all sinfulness and evil. What the narrative is actually meant to show is that the Satanic question: “Yea hath God said?” is a direct frontal assault on the God-hood of God. Satan, in removing God from His words, was removing Him from His universe. If you remove God from anything, you remove Him from all things. Removing God from his words, God from the tree, God from the fruit, God from the thought processes, God from the man, God from the garden, God from the soul, God from the worship of the soul; you leave the entire cosmos in utter ruin and total darkness. Darkness is always the negation of the light, the removal of the light, the separation of the light from the darkness.
The verses we have quoted above show that God is in fact the source, the direction, the cause and the effect of all things. He is the Universal Centrality of Reality. So in a very real sense it is impossible to remove Him from anything, because He is everywhere and in all things. But sin is sinful, precisely because it attempts to do this impossible feat. Sin springs from sinful thoughts about God. It springs from thoughts turned away from the creator of all things, to ourselves the creators of nothing. Technically it is impossible to remove God from anything, because “By Him all things are held together”, or “consist” (Colossians 1:17). “Without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). But in point of practical human psychology and behavior, it is the constant tendency of the “natural man” to attempt to divorce God from the human reality, and to do this we imagine our own independence, or the independence of something else, in isolation from God.
The false dualistic view of evil, presupposes that God did not create the things we do not agree with, but only the things we approve of and are happy to understand in our own puny frame of reference. We allow a god in our own creation into our Sims-city universe, and we exclude the God of All Creation from the reality of what He really is, in spite of what we imagine Him to be. This false dualism, creates a God in isolated from something, and something isolated from God, on which we can pin all the faults with which we wish to accuse the Almighty. If there is sin, it certainly is the devil's fault? If we have sinned it is certainly because we have been duped by the deceiver, and it is none of our faulty thinking which is the cause? The historic Confessions of the faith, have always been tripped up by this defective humanistic logic. It says God created everything but he did not create sin or evil in the universe, and thus it is self-contradictory nonsense. They call it a dialectic and it is nothing but intellectual schizophrenia, which turns God into something which He is not. The failure to recognize the God-hood of God in all things always removes God from something and creates a false dichotomy, and sets up a false dualism, or an all pervasive false humanistic pantheism.
When everything is not comprehended by the One God, then everything will become many gods, and you will find yourself worshiping two gods, three gods, ten gods, or ten thousand gods! The cosmic Oneness of the Triune God informs the entire universe and that is the meaning of “In the Beginning God”. Nothing is excluded from Him. Nothing happens without Him. He is before all things, above all things, and behind all things. And if he is not in everything, then He is in nothing.
I recently spoke to a long time member of the church where I attend, and this supposedly Christian man, began to tell me how “He could never believe in a God, who would cause a plan to crash with 300 people on board, or the Holocaust, or the Hindenburg disaster, or the millions of aborted babies in recent history”. His justification for this statement was that “his god is a righteous and loving god”. By extension that means that “his god” is removed from plane crashes, infanticide, disasters, and other areas of “evil”, which in his human opinion are evil areas which the true god must be excluded from on the basis of his presumed holiness, love, righteousness, etc. which he has established for god by his own human reasoning and definitions. I looked at the man and told, him, that there is no difference between his thinking and the thinking of the most godless atheist. His words are the identical argument which the atheist uses to prove in his own mind that there is no God. “If there were a God”, according to the atheist, “there would be no plane crashes, no infanticide, no murder, no pain, no suffering, no hurting in the universe. The fact that there is such things proves that God does not exist”. My friend, a member of my church for over 20 years showed in two seconds that his innate core beliefs were identical with atheism! He denied the Lord whom he claims to serve by denying the God-hood of God in all things. This is certainly not Christian language, or Christian thinking.
While I cannot presume to know my friends soul, I know that out of his heart His mouth spoke the very essence of evil and unbelief! Hearts that have not the grace of God's Light, and who harbor the spirit of this world, rather than the Spirit of Truth, are probably not Christian hearts at all? After 40 years of pastoral work, I can say that I have seen this sort of thing, even at the highest theological and ecclesiastical levels. Ignorance could account for ignorant speech, but when men are well educated, and have been in a church for over 20 years, can we use the ignorance argument to justify speech which is nothing short of pure blasphemy? I don't think so? The tares grow together with the wheat, side by side, and some of them are pastors, people next to you in church, and professors in our theological institutions. The bottom line is not what you know, it is who you know! Paul did not preach a bunch of doctrines, human statements of facts, human wisdom spiced up with enticing words and humanistic analogies. Paul preached “Christ and Him crucified” (1Cor. 2:1-2). The issue of all truth is the person of all truth. If He is not the source of our light, then our light is darkness. “Yea hath God said?” removes God from His own truth and light, and thus it removes Him from our soul and our thinking. “God hath said, because God is” is the correct response. It is the affirmation of faith, and the step into the light, not the running away from it. It matters not how long you have gone to church, or how much theological education you have or do not have? If Christ is not the center of your universe, as He is the center of God's universe, you have only a lonely intellect, full of cobwebs and misappropriated rationalistic thoughts. Your world is dark, if the light of the world does not fill every corner of it, and permeate every minute particle of your existence! If Jesus Christ is not your “all and in all”, then He is nothing at all! And you are yet in your sins, and are a practical atheist! You may carry all sorts of Christian looking baggage, and may even attach the name of “Christian” to your life. But if you exclude God in anything, you are an atheist of the highest order.
Atheism, is not the absence of God in the universe, for that in fact is an impossibility. Atheism is the revolt against Him and the exclusion of Him by hearts that are darkened by their own convoluted self-appreciation. When you think too highly of yourself, you are certain to think too poorly of the Lord. Wrong views of God, exclude Him from something that is rightfully His, and thus He becomes the source of our own atheism through the exclusion of His light and grace from our lives, which are not our own, but which were bought with a price. This is the plague of plagues, the evil of all evils, and the darkness which locks God out of every unbelieving heart. This is Adam's fall. It is the fantasy of the unknowing of God, the delusion of “knowing nothing” instead of light, which knows everything. It is death and destruction instead of Spirit and truth. It is the origin of evil, and the perpetuation of it in our very own bosoms. It is the reason we need to put to death our flesh and our selves. We are crucified with Christ, so that we die to the principles of destruction within us, and live to the resurrection of His Divine Life in all things. We have the mind of Christ, because we have the Christ of the mind, and we exclude Him in nothing. There is no truth, thought, congruity, validity, or reality apart from Him. He is all and in all.
You will express Him, only when you quit expressing yourself. You will magnify Him, only when you start humbling yourself under Him. When you quit trying to adjust His shoelaces, and learn to take off your own on His holy ground, only then will you realize that you are absolutely unworthy and that He is everything worthy. He is God, and we need to cast off every sin which so easily besets us, and fall before Him, in wonder and praise. Faith never walks by sight, but always walks relaxing in the full sunshine of God's love. That is everywhere and in everything. God is love. “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1John 4:16).
©2013 EHJ All Rights Reserved
Permission is granted to reproduce this article in any form on any website, as long as it is not altered and as long as this copyright is attached, and a link back to http://RevEarlJackson.com This article may not be sold, or included in any other material intended for sale or profit. It is sent forth freely because God's grace is free to us.
Permission is granted to reproduce this article in any form on any website, as long as it is not altered and as long as this copyright is attached, and a link back to http://RevEarlJackson.com This article may not be sold, or included in any other material intended for sale or profit. It is sent forth freely because God's grace is free to us.
