After nearly 20 years of believing in God’s meticulous control over everything, something unexpected happened. In 2022 or 2023, my wife got more serious about her Bible study and started asking a lot of questions. I decided that rather than just answering based on the theological system I followed, I should go back to my study of the Bible like I used to do.
I started with James. As I read, I noticed that James writes to people as if they actually have choices, contradicting what I had learned from my Calvinistic teachers. For the first time in years, I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I’d been given. Scripture was pressing me to think differently.
Because of my understanding of God’s Sovereignty, it had to be the first doctrine I changed my mind about. If God’s Sovereignty meant that He was in meticulous control over everything then we don’t really have a choice. But that wasn’t how James wrote. It really seemed like James was writing to people who could make choices and when they weren’t confident in what they should do they could ask God for wisdom and He would give them the wisdom they needed.
I noticed that I was using respond and response to trials and that this word is closely related to responsible and responsibility. This got me thinking everyone is responsible for their response to given situations and God was going to punish them for their sinful responses.
Remember I had become convinced that God was telling a story to bring Himself maximum glory. Everything we believed, did, and said was under God’s meticulous control. Therefore, to believe in God, God had to give me faith. But it was more. People sinned because God determined that they would sin. They were responsible and deserving of punishment, but God was the ultimate cause, the first cause, of everything including sin. But as I read James, it was their choice how they would respond to the trials they were going through.
Calvinism had taught me that people are only able to respond in the way that God determined them to respond. People are incapable of believing until God regenerates them and gives them the ability to believe. Once God regenerates them, they will believe because God’s grace cannot be resisted. In that case, how are they responsible for that response? If God is truly good and just, and God judges us for our sins, then there must be some amount of choice we have to be able to make.
My understanding of sovereignty changed. As I wrestled with the word “sovereignty,” I started picturing a real king. A true sovereign rules with authority, making and enforcing laws, but he doesn’t personally control every single event in his kingdom. He delegates power, responsibility, and freedom all the way down to the lowest subject.
That picture made me wonder if God’s sovereignty in Scripture was closer to this: ruling with authority, but still allowing real human responsibility. That isn’t what I was taught about God’s Sovereignty (it was always capitalized in my mind). It occurred to me that the Biblical authors might be using “sovereignty” the way a normal person would. This was my next change of mind from God predetermining absolutely everything that happens in every detail before the beginning of time to us having some real ability to respond that we are responsible for.