The Sovereignty & Prayer

Understanding The Sovereignty of God & Prayer

I enjoy the work of Dr. John Lennox because he presents things logically in a way everybody can understand. He is careful to clarify terms that often lead to confusion. He did an excellent job in His book, “Determined to Believe.” In that book, he shows how unproductive it is to use people’s names to define a teaching. Here we are talking about Calvinism. Calvinism may have influenced the doctrine of predestination, but he also taught many other things. So Dr. Lennox likes the term “Theistic Determinism.”

My background for this article.

I wrote my own small book years ago called “A Fair Election.” It is a very simple way of looking at theistic determinism. As we all do, our understanding of a subject grows, and that is true for me on this topic. Here is some background to my comments here. I once heard a predetermist say that God creates every little snowflake and determines where it lands. I also read a post by John Piper that said everything is ordained by God; every movement of everything, whether good or evil, is ordained by God.

God has sovereign laws.

So here are my thoughts on this. It appears to me that what Christians sometimes do is treat the Bible as a fictional book or at least a book that can be read and taught without consideration of natural laws. Yes, God is not limited by natural laws; however, He created them, and so they must be part of His sovereignty. In this case, I am thinking of the law of entropy. Entropy is a scientific term that describes how things naturally move from order to disorder over time. For example, left alone, a tidy room will eventually get messy, or a hot cup of coffee will cool down. In practice, we see this all the time: when we leave something to itself, it falls apart instead of getting better.  Therefore, we should not ignore this when we are considering how God governs His universe.

I am suggesting two views of God’s sovereignty.

I recognize there is some deep thought going on here, but in my mind, the law of entropy is at odds with the idea that God dictates every action. We all live about the same age because of entropy. The food in a righteous person’s house lasts as long as a wicked man’s. Both the righteous and the wicked are subject to the same diseases. These all seem to point to the laws of entropy in action. Logically, then, it appears that God lets His ordained laws work to accomplish His will.

Understanding the sovereignty of God as being under His watchful care does not violate the law of entropy. God lets His laws do their work, but He can override them at any time. That understanding also underscores the importance of prayer. If we are subject to entropy at all times, bad things are waiting in the shadows, but prayer calls our Lord to override what entropy will do. Prayer can invite what scientists call ‘negentropy’—moments when things become more ordered instead of falling into disorder.

My prayerful approach to God’s sovereignty.

So here is how I make this understanding practical for my life. We live in a world that is governed by God’s law of entropy. Therefore, we can expect disorder to occur. I lost two children to this law, and I have a daughter with kidney dysfunction. My health has not improved over the years. These real-world examples show how entropy affects our lives and make the concept tangible. In Christian terms, we say we live in a fallen, sinful world; in physics, this reality manifests as entropy—a tendency towards disorder, which I see as one consequence of that brokenness. This teaches us that we truly need a God who sustains everything in perfect order, because without His sustaining rule, disorder and suffering are inevitable. Therefore, prayer is absolutely essential if we do not want to live on the roulette wheel of chance.

The caveat! Just because we pray that God will override entropy does not mean that we will never be subject to it. The law is there to teach us, and it must therefore be stable and universal; most of all, our Lord needs His will to be accomplished. So we pray earnestly and know that God will do what is best, but without prayer, we have no hope.