Muslims vs. Christians on the Sovereignty of God

00:00:00.000 | Last time in episode 233, you gave us a brief summary of events during your three-week trip

00:00:08.960 | to Ethiopia and the UAE.

00:00:11.680 | And knowing you, Pastor John, I presume you returned with some fresh theological thoughts

00:00:15.160 | simmering in your mind as well.

00:00:16.640 | So is there anything theologically you want to share with us from your trip?

00:00:20.720 | One of the things that keeps simmering, Tony, since I got back, and it probably is the most

00:00:26.640 | significant theological, missiological insight that I got in the trip, which was like an

00:00:33.080 | education for me, came out of a lecture I was giving on the sovereignty of God.

00:00:38.800 | And when I was done, I mean, I really stressed God's absolute sovereignty over all things.

00:00:43.400 | He controls all things for the good of His people and the glory of His name.

00:00:47.560 | And a question raised his hand, and he said, "Now, that sounds a lot like the Muslim view

00:00:54.720 | of God's sovereignty."

00:00:56.840 | And you hear here in the UAE, "If God wills, if God wills, if God wills," all the time.

00:01:04.040 | And in the Muslim view, God can do anything He wants, and they actually use the name "Capricious"

00:01:12.560 | for God.

00:01:13.560 | I was standing in the second biggest mosque in the world in front of the biggest wall

00:01:23.040 | of the 100 names of God under the biggest chandelier of its kind, standing on the biggest

00:01:28.240 | hand-woven carpet.

00:01:29.560 | This is all the way they describe it when you're there.

00:01:33.760 | And one of those names at the top, my friend Mike was there explaining them to me.

00:01:38.080 | He's just pointing out name after name written in Arabic, and he said, "That one up there

00:01:41.320 | is usually translated 'Capricious,' which means God is free.

00:01:45.120 | He can do anything He wants."

00:01:47.600 | Now here's what I realized as I tried to think through, what's the difference between my

00:01:52.680 | view of the biblical sovereignty of God and the Muslim view of God as Capricious?

00:01:59.880 | Other names of God that they have on that wall are wise and just and kind and compassionate.

00:02:08.000 | And I thought to myself, "You know, the name 'Capricious' virtually cancels out those,

00:02:15.520 | because if God can do anything He wants," meaning if you're standing before Him and

00:02:22.440 | He can just flick you off to hell or flick you off to heaven capriciously, without reference

00:02:28.240 | to His kindness, without reference to His justice, without reference to His compassion,

00:02:32.560 | then what good are those names?

00:02:35.800 | They're meaningless if there's this overarching sense of capriciousness.

00:02:39.680 | And I think that really on the street governs a lot of what Muslims feel.

00:02:47.680 | They know that God is like that, and therefore, "Okay, sara, sara, in the end of the day I'll

00:02:54.720 | do the best I can with my five acts of devotion, but He can do with me whatever He wants at

00:03:00.520 | the end of the day, and I may go to heaven, I may go to hell."

00:03:03.800 | So here's the new insight.

00:03:08.480 | At the center of our religion, at the center of Christianity, is Romans 3, 25, which goes

00:03:16.460 | like this, "God put Christ forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith."

00:03:25.040 | This was to show God's righteousness or justice, because in His divine forbearance He had passed

00:03:31.640 | over former sins.

00:03:33.120 | Now right there is the center of our faith.

00:03:36.600 | God sent Christ, and He sent Him to die in order to be a propitiation, that is, to remove

00:03:44.520 | His own wrath.

00:03:45.740 | God loved us by removing His own wrath from us by having Jesus in His blood absorb the

00:03:52.880 | wrath which was owing to our sin.

00:03:55.460 | There's the heart of the Christian gospel.

00:03:59.300 | And He says the reason He did it was to show His justice or His righteousness.

00:04:06.180 | Why did He need to show His justice and righteousness?

00:04:09.080 | It says, end of verse 25, "Because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former

00:04:16.200 | sins."

00:04:17.200 | Now think that through and what it means for God's sovereignty.

00:04:20.480 | God had been passing over sins, so He had been forgiving Abraham and forgiving David,

00:04:26.520 | his adultery and his murder of Uriah.

00:04:29.320 | He'd just been passing over these sins.

00:04:31.400 | Now what did that look like?

00:04:32.960 | Well Paul said it looked like He was unjust, because it looked like He was accepting the

00:04:39.680 | belittling of His glory, which is what sin is.

00:04:43.280 | All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

00:04:46.400 | So here is God acting as if the belittling and the dishonoring of His glory didn't matter.

00:04:54.520 | And that's unjust of God.

00:04:56.360 | That's unrighteous of Him to treat the infinitely valuable glory of God as though it were not

00:05:01.920 | valuable.

00:05:02.920 | And therefore God, in order to vindicate His righteousness and demonstrate His just

00:05:09.800 | allegiance to the value of His glory, sends His Son to fix that.

00:05:16.120 | Now that is something that in Islam would never be necessary, because God doesn't have

00:05:24.060 | to do anything to fix anything.

00:05:27.040 | God is free to take a person like David, say, "I'll just let your murder of Uriah and your

00:05:37.720 | rape of Bathsheba, we'll just let it go.

00:05:40.360 | I'm free to do that."

00:05:41.480 | Well, what I realize now is that the sovereignty of God as the Bible presents it is that it

00:05:47.800 | is in the constellation of other attributes of God.

00:05:52.320 | His justice and His mercy and His grace and His wisdom, so that when God passes over a

00:06:02.880 | rape and a murder, something's got to give, something's got to be done in the universe,

00:06:11.200 | not just to say, "Well, God is capricious, He can do what He wants," but rather, "God

00:06:15.360 | is just and He is holy and He doesn't let sin be swept under the rug of the universe,

00:06:20.720 | and therefore what will He do?

00:06:22.120 | He will send His own Son into the world in order to demonstrate the righteousness of

00:06:27.600 | God."

00:06:28.600 | So, the upshot is that Christian views of God's sovereignty and Muslim views of God's

00:06:35.320 | sovereignty are profoundly different, because in the Christian view, His sovereignty is

00:06:41.720 | being guided and shaped by the other attributes from within God.

00:06:50.680 | Muslims tend to feel like if God has to yield to some sense of justice or some sense of

00:06:57.240 | righteousness or mercy or compassion, then He's limited.

00:07:02.400 | But the answer is He's not limited, because those attributes are not outside of Him, govern

00:07:07.960 | Him like controllers from another source.

00:07:10.640 | They are inside of Him.

00:07:11.800 | They're who He is.

00:07:12.800 | And so it was a great illumination to me that right at the center of our faith is an act

00:07:20.520 | of God that shows how His sovereignty coheres with His righteousness, and I think this is

00:07:30.280 | one of the reasons why Muslims find the gospel, the substitutionary death of Christ, so difficult

00:07:39.240 | to understand.

00:07:40.240 | It's not just that in their tradition Christ didn't die and didn't rise from the dead.

00:07:44.240 | I think all of that is quite secondary to the fact that given their view of God, such

00:07:49.720 | a thing is preposterous, that God, being as free as He is, would never need to send His

00:07:57.480 | Son into the world to die in order to vindicate His righteousness.

00:08:02.240 | Very interesting, and much in here to think about.

00:08:04.240 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast.

00:08:07.560 | And with Christmas fast approaching, we have received a pile of email questions about Santa

00:08:12.120 | Claus.

00:08:13.200 | Is he harmless fun, or is he a Christmastime disruption?

00:08:17.520 | We'll ask Pastor John that tomorrow.

00:08:18.840 | Until then, please email your questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org.

00:08:23.360 | And please visit us online at DesiringGod.org to find thousands of books, articles, sermons,

00:08:26.880 | and other resources from John Piper, all free of charge.

00:08:29.760 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:08:30.760 | Thanks for listening.

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Muslims vs. Christians on the Sovereignty of God

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