God's Knowledge, Who Can Know it? - part 2

Defining God’s sovereignty in absolute terms

Regardless of God's revelation to us, our perception of God is bound up in time; the fact that our senses and perceptions are limited by our temporal existence is perhaps a reminder that men's descriptions of God are always abstractions of the reality of God’s being—we can’t help it. In the same way, a photograph—however realistic—is still an abstraction of the reality which it attempts to represent.

Regarding the sovereignty of God, I think a definition is in order. I, and those concerned with the definition within biblical categories, would refer to sovereignty as a word of totality such as the words: unique, pregnant, dead, and alive. Those words describe absolute states of being in which there are no varying degrees. When one is dead, there is no variation between that one and the other dead body beside them. One cannot be any more or less dead. One either is or is not dead. Furthermore, in that condition or state of being one does not become deader. Even if there was a spectrum where at one end existed the state of being that represents life and at the opposite end existed the state of being that represents dead, there is no space between them—where one ends the other begins. Similarly the divide between the air above a body of water and the water itself are close. Once one is no longer alive, then he is dead. One exists either in one state or the other, not in both. There are no varying degrees between life and deadness. One moves so immediately from one state to the other that it may approach irrationality to speak of such a transition in reference to time and space at all.[1] As another example of a word of totality or an absolute word: one either is or is not pregnant; no degrees of pregnancy exist. A woman does progress further along in her pregnancy as the baby grows and is eventually delivered but she is no more pregnant as state of being on the day preceding her delivery than on the day conception took place. She is pregnant to the same degree on both days. Therefore we must conclude that the same thing applies to the word sovereignty but because we have a finite perception of the infinite God we see that, at the same time, God has ordered our paths and yet He appears only to be responding to our choices. Thus the concept of “Compatibilism” is introduced.

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[1] Though it is not the point of this present topic, one can hopefully see the importance of this discussion concerning the manner in which Paul refers to the unregenerate man in his letter to the Romans.