God Is The Potter

…my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored Him who lives forever,

for His dominion is an everlasting dominion,

and His kingdom endures from generation to generation;

all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,

and He does according to His will among the host of heaven

and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay His hand

or say to Him, “What have you done?”

Daniel 4.34-35

That any human being might possess the ability to frustrate the will of God is one of many exceedingly arrogant doctrines taught in the Church today. Imagine the absurdity of worshipping a God who wills to do something but is unable to because His own creation stands in the way. Not only is this popular position on the relationship of God to created people unbiblical, but it would result in our inability to know anything if it were true.

A child has no trouble understanding that there is nothing to fear with respect to the mudpie she just made. A creation has no power over its creator. A potter does what he wants to do with the clay. So it is with God. (Romans 9.20-21) God is the Creator. We are created. (Genesis 2.7) Scripture everywhere attests to this distinction. To go against the great truth of God’s sovereignty over all of His creation is to turn one’s understanding of things on its head. Nevertheless, a great number of allegedly orthodox believers are plagued with this sinful would-be role reversal. Eve was told that she would be like God. (Genesis 3.5) Eve thought that she might know some fact independently of God. Eve was deceived. (1 Timothy 2.14) Those who reject passages of Scripture which clearly teach that God is sovereign as God are likewise deceived.

Our epistemology is revelational. We are able to have knowledge as we think God’s thoughts after Him. God made every fact what it is. God’s view of things is the only one which matters. For God, ‘all the facts are in’. Thus, we know a fact aright when our thoughts about that fact are in agreement with God’s thoughts.

The false, unbiblical theology which states that all of God’s will is not accomplished places humanity at the center of things and involves facts which are not created facts. Since, in this view, the creature is taken to possess enough power to overcome the will of God; there are some facts which God has not created. These are facts God has no control over. These are facts which exist apart from God. For example, if evil does not come about in accordance with the will of God, then it exists only because humanity or some other creature has willed that it exist apart from God’s will. Evil is falsely believed to be out of the control of God. The will of the creature trumps that of its Creator. The pot has overpowered the Potter. Some attempt to weasel their way out of this absurdity by submitting that only the possibility of evil is according to the will of God. However, this still places evil in God’s plan, a conclusion which runs counter to the claims of those who wrongfully think we possess the ability to resist the sovereign will of God.

Evil, like everything else, comes about according to the will of God. (Ephesians 1.11) That humanity should do evil has always been a part of God’s plan. (e.g. Acts 4.27-28) God is not Himself evil, nor does He Himself actually perform evil, but rather has planned that evil occur. In fact, everything which occurs does so according to God’s plan! (Isaiah 46.10) This includes conversion. (Ephesians 1.4) Every person who is converted to Christ is converted according to the will of God. (2 Thessalonians 2.13)

Both the fact of evil and the fact of conversion are facts created and hence controlled by God. If it were any other way, then we could not know anything, for there would be facts which exist independent of God. If there were even one fact which might be known apart from God, then there is no reason to suppose that it could not be the same for other facts. Therefore the current infatuation with the idea of a weak and pathetic god who is subject to the will of his own creatures is fatal to our epistemological endeavors. Everything is rendered unintelligible through this false conception of God due to its inherent inconsistency with the idea of facts deriving their meaning from God. No fact can exist or be known apart from God. Thus a theology which rejects the complete sovereignty of God is wholly inadequate to deal with the challenges of worldly philosophy and is incompatible with presuppositional apologetics.