Download David Doran’s “God’s Sovereignty & The Spread of the Gospel”

December 11, 2008 – 5:02 pm

David Doran’s article “God’s Sovereignty and the Spread of the Gospel” is available for download. The article  was originally published in the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal (DBSJ, Volume 9: Fall 2004), then later was printed in booklet form.

The link to download the article is located on the Missions Mandate Resource-Articles page - or - you can download the PDF directly from this page: God’s Sovereignty and the Spread of the Gospel.

Here is the opening argument of section one:

Although most believers agree that God is sovereign, there is considerably less agreement about what that means. Additionally, not all views of God’s sovereignty are charged with the criticism of being detrimental to evangelism and missions. Some take God’s sovereignty to mean simply that He rules over all things, but not that He has planned or controls all things. Bruce Reichenbach embraces such a view of sovereignty:

God is a sovereign, not a novelist. He does not purpose or dispose everything that happens; his purposes are both general and specific, but they do not include every detail of human existence. Not only does he work through his created natural law, but just as importantly he has (in part) entrusted his program to the hands and feet of people. This means, of course, that at times his plans and purposes are thwarted.⁶

There are two assertions here that need to be addressed: (1) that God’s purpose or plan does not include everything that happens; and (2) that God’s purposes may at times be thwarted. Both of these represent a novel approach to God’s sovereignty that departs from the one presented in the Scriptures. Logically, it seems that the question of whether God’s purposes can be thwarted takes precedence over whether He has a purpose for all things, so the assertions will be considered in that order.

Claiming that God’s purposes may be thwarted allows maximum latitude for man’s freedom, but it contradicts the conclusion Job reached when confronted with God’s sovereignty. His assessment was, “I know that You can do all things, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2). In fact, the ability to carry out all that He has planned is what distinguishes the true and living God from all pre-tender gods. Consider God’s own claim, “Remember the former things long past, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, ‘My purpose will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure’” (Isa 46:9-10). Contrary to the claims of those who trim the concept of God’s sovereignty in order to argue for a larger view of man’s freedom, the Bible leaves no room for the purposes of God to go unfulfilled or be left unaccomplished.

If none of God’s purposes can be thwarted, then efforts to argue for a general kind of sovereignty tend to follow the line of Reichenbach’s first assertion, namely, that God does not have a purpose for all things. Boyd recognizes this: “To confess that God can control whatever he wants to control leaves open the question of how much God actually does want to control.”⁷ The crucial question, then, is whether God has a plan which encompasses all things.

⁶“God Limits His Power,” in Predestination and Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty and Human Freedom, ed. David Basinger and Randall Basinger (Wheaton, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), p. 117.
⁷Greg Boyd, The God of the Possible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), p. 51.

Download entire PDF.