From the farthest reaches of time man has sought to both deny God’s totalistic sovereignty and then take up God’s prerogative of sovereignty.
In Plato’s view of the Republic everything and everyone serves the State. Everything is to be directed to the whole, to the state, not to any personal (private) interest. Citizens are not ends in themselves but merely means for the state. In particular, the higher class of the Guardians, in which the perfect state is represented, imposing this utter self-renunciation and unconditional surrender on the whole – belonging to the state they were not allowed to travel on their own business, are not to make use of silver or gold, since the State would provide all. Even the bond of family was abolished in Plato’s ideal Republic. ‘Marriages are holy’ says Plato, but the most holy are those most beneficial to the state. Because of this, in Plato’s ideal Republic, in the drive to exalt the oneness of the state, a community of women and children is the ideal. No man is to have one woman and no man is to know his children. In such a manner all belong to each other and so all belong to the state. The state, being sovereign, the state is all.
Aristotle likewise promoted the totalistic sovereign state. Like Plato, Aristotle believed that the state is prior to the people so that the state is the purpose of nature in man. Aristotle considered man in all his existence to be a mere subordinate member and agent of the state without a higher relation independent of the State because the state is the absolute end/goal.
Man, whether ancient or modern, once he casts off God’s sovereignty has and will relocate sovereignty somewhere else … most commonly the state. We find this is Scripture with the Egyptians with their religious Mahat pyramid system with Pharaoh as a God sitting at the pin point top of the pyramid. We see it in Scripture with the habits of Nebuchadnezzar with Daniel and the three Hebrew Children commanding them along w/ all other men to bow before his statue. We see it Scripture in the book of Acts where in chapter 12 Herod Agrippa receives the shouts of divine ascription. We see it in the Emperor cult of Rome. Rome sanctioned ruler worship. In the East, inscriptions such as the Priene Calendar Decree (9 B.C.) acclaim Augustus as ‘savior’ and ‘god.’ Provincial subjects were conditioned to deify political benefactors.
Sovereignty doesn’t go away if you insist that the triune God is not sovereign. It is relocated and re-implemented on a humanists basis and men who will not bow to the sovereign God of the Bible will bow to the sovereign God that is the state or they will die. Why do you think that when the Communists came to power in Russia they immediately persecuted the Church? Because they understood the church was the place where a sovereign was proclaimed who claimed a sovereignty over the state’s sovereignty. The Communists understood that they must eliminate any and all competing sovereignty and so they turned churches into latrines or animal stables in the attempt to crush competing sovereignty.
So, the continued leakage in the modern church on the subject of God’s sovereignty invites alien malignant sovereigns to mock the triune God’s sovereignty. In the French Revolution’s Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen the Revolutionaries wrote,
“The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation; no group, no individual may exercise authority not emanating from it.”
Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen
Again we see it with the rise of Italian Fascism during WW II
“For the Fascist all is comprised in the State and nothing spiritual or human exists — much less has any value — outside the State … the Fascist State — the unification and synthesis of every value — interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of the people.”
Mussolini — Il Duce
And we are seeing it again now. The modern church, in running away from God’s sovereignty or in understanding it only in a R2K spiritual sense is making room for the sovereignty of the state. Most of you do understand that is where we are currently arcing. The whole idea of state control is what is driving AI. The social credit system in China which is all about Statist total sovereignty has already been peeping through the keyhole in the West with the de-banking phenomenon and with the Canadian Governments tyrannical end of the trucker strike. The Church has said that God’s sovereignty is not explicit as revealed by His Law-Word and the result is the State has taken up God’s sovereignty. Sovereignty does not go away. Deny it to God and wicked fallen man will seek to arise to present claims to being a immanent god and will at the same time persecute any man or church who does not bow the knee to Caesar.
This explains why the Church especially should be so zealous to extol God’s sovereignty. The truth of the Triune God’s sovereignty protects both the reality of the Gospel as well as the liberty of the Biblical Christian against the claims of a totalistic State. We have already mentioned the latter but let us pause to ask how it is the case that God’s sovereignty protects the Gospel.
If you don’t have God’s sovereignty you do not have a efficacious atonement — either in accomplishment or in application. Christ dies for everyone, so the story of the non-sovereign God goes but god not being sovereign (despite strong claims to the contrary) can’t overcome man’s sovereignty in refusing God’s intent of Christ dying for them. God may have sovereignly designed the atonement for particular and definite ends but … darn it … man is just too sovereign to let God’s sovereignty get in the way. Seems that even if He tries real hard God can’t always get what He needs with most Protestants.
