Divine Sovereignty

Divine Sovereignty: There is no doctrine more comforting to a self-condemned sinner than this: that Salvation is of the LORD. And yet, this same truth unsettles a man, until he has nothing left to stand on. As long as he imagines there is something in himself to distinguish him, something that makes him more worthy than another, sovereignty will feel harsh, even offensive. But when he is brought low, stripped of every imagined distinction, and sees his own wretchedness without excuse, what once troubled him becomes his only hope. For if salvation rests in God’s sovereign will, then it does not rest in anything found in him. For that reason, this doctrine is either deeply offensive or deeply comforting, depending on whether a man still trusts himself, or has come to see that he has nothing at all.

Sovereignty is not an abstract truth to be weighed and considered at a distance, but the very ground of a salvation that brings a man to the end of himself and shuts him up - not to despair, but to Christ. It is there, when every other hope is gone, that this doctrine becomes precious. And so, the question is not whether a man agrees with it in principle, but whether he has been brought to need it in reality. For until then, it will either offend him or be reshaped to suit him; but when he is brought low, he finds in it the only hope he has. And this is where the sovereignty of God finds its end, not in abstraction, but in Christ. For the same sovereignty that leaves a man with nothing in himself, directs him wholly to Another, in whom all salvation stands. See Jonah 2:9c [KJV]

-copied