Commentary: Sovereign God, Not Man

Put Your Confidence in God, Not Your Own Thoughts
#1761c
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 04-May-24; 24 minutes 2024-05-04

description: (hide)

I would like you to turn to Judges, if you would, chapter 21, verse 25. Samuel, probably, who is the writer of this book (maybe it was somebody else, but he is the best guess), writes again, he had already written this a time or two in earlier chapters, but he said in verse 25,

Judges 21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

We are living in such a time right now. We have weak national leadership. We have a man who wants to be president who did a good job when he was in office, but he is not a righteous man by any means. And when you think about it, we can take this idea of "every man did what was right in his own eyes" and the weakness of kings and rulers back quite a ways in this country. And it has affected many generations.

The CGG Weekly that we published yesterday ["Identity as Sovereign"] was written actually 20 years ago on identity and the Identity Movement. Now back then, everybody was all astir over homosexuality and gay marriage and that sort of thing. But we took that essay yesterday and tweaked it just a little bit, and it was very clear that it worked just as well today as it did 20 years ago. David and I, at least I can gauge my reaction; he made some comment on our texting back and forth that he thought so too. It was, kind of like, Wow, that really fits today too. And then we also need to consider the words of Dr. Herman Hoeh, when he said back in the 80s, I believe it was, that "If it's in the world, it's in the church."

Now, I am not saying that we have homosexuality and gender problems in the church. I am talking about "every man did what was right in his own eyes." Because in the course of the essay that David wrote, he said that what has been produced by the Identity Movement and all the related CRT [Critical Race Theory] and the other things that are coming out of the colleges and universities, is that everybody has become a little sovereign, a little king—king in his own mind.

One thing about sovereignty is that when you are a sovereign, no one can tell you what to do. You are the ultimate authority. And so you do whatever you want to do, your decisions are in fact God, in that way, if you have the wrong attitude. It is not necessarily that you are making these decisions, because you are doing them because that is what you learned from God. You become the arbiter of truth and you decide (I am not accusing you, but I am just using that as a generality), but you decide that you are the authority and that you make the rules. You make rules for yourself and for your empirical self.

This has affected the church terribly because now everyone thinks that he or she can make the rules about religion, about God's truth, and it is something that we need to take very seriously—because that is not our job. God is the arbiter of truth. He is the great Judge. He is the great Sovereign. And I think that many people in the church have become a little too proud, a little too self-exalted, and they are the ones that are going to decide what to do. They are not going to leave it to the wisdom of the ministry.

Everybody hates the ministry, because the ministry was so bad and terrible and they did all these bad things. They certainly did them in Worldwide and it is the same people who are in the churches that succeeded. So nobody listens to one another. Nobody listens to leadership. Everybody gauges everything that is being "sent down" from headquarters with a lot of skepticism because they do not believe that God is moving with these people, that this is coming out of their own little sovereign minds. And I think it is something that we need to think about very carefully.

Let us turn to I Peter 5, because I want you to understand that we are not sovereign. We are under authority. I am under authority. I am especially under authority because I have a great responsibility over the church that God has made me pastor. So I have to be very careful about how I evaluate, how I judge the things that come across my desk, the doctrinal matters that people have questions about. I cannot just say, Yeah, that sounds good. No, I have to take a long time and think about them very carefully because they are things that are going to affect hundreds, if not thousands of people. People listen to us in this church. David could probably rattle off some general statistics about how many people get in touch with us through the Internet every day, if just only through the Berean. What is it, 170,000 is not it? Or 165,000? It is a lot of people.

So when we do something, when we say something, when we would make a change, a lot of people hear about it. And of course, in this day and age, because everybody is a sovereign unto himself, they judge it and judge whether they are going to do it or not. But, I am not saying you should not judge it. You should evaluate it. But there should be a level of trust there and what it says here in verse 5.

I Peter 5:5-9 Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders. Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for "God resists the proud, and gives grace to the humble." Therefore humble yourselves [not to the preacher but] under the mighty hand of God [and notice that it does not say to your own mind or your own wisdom, your own intelligence], that He may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you. [Now, verse 8 is extremely important and this is why Peter put it next.] Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith. . .

That is, a body of truth that does not change, steadfast in the faith. Now, our understanding of it may vary because of our inability to understand all things fully, but we need to make sure that we are standing steadfast in the faith.

I Peter 5:9 . . . knowing that the same sufferings are experienced by your brotherhood in the world.

Everybody in the church of God is going through stuff like this and that is why we are so confused. Satan is doing this to the church of God, getting an inroad here, another inroad there; making one congregation slightly different from another, whatever the doctrinal matter tends to be, and it is doing this between brethren. How many churches do we have out there? 300, 500, 1,000? And each one is a little bit different and they will not fellowship with the others.

But notice what he says next.

I Peter 5:10 But may the God of all grace [all His gifts and all His longsuffering, and all His other things, especially the Spirit of God that He is giving to us], who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you.

God knows that there are times like this, when we are in great turmoil and people are going to all the corners of the world in the way they think. But we need to be faithful, not faithful to the Church of the Great God, not faithful to an individual man, but to God Himself and the truth that He has established. And that means that we need to calm down. I do not know how else to put it. We are all living like this. [a bit frantic] What is going on?! The Internet keeps us moving and we are frying our brains with all the information that is coming, and we are not allowing ourselves to be established in the truth. There is just too much going on.

And I am very saddened that there are so many people who decided that, because we are Americans we are free to think for ourselves about everything. Well, you are physically, but spiritually, you are not free. I do not know if that comes as a surprise. I mean, you can do it and sin if your thoughts are wrong. But if you will remember, Paul says in Romans, I believe it is the third chapter, that we were once slaves of sin, but now you are slaves of righteousness. You have to live to a higher standard. You have to make sure everything you do is right with God, not right with you.

Many of the things that God has told us are hard—hard to do—but we need to make sure that we bow to His sovereignty and not rush off and do something on our own that He has not approved, that is not His.

I really do not know why I have told you all this but it, as they say out there, it "smote my heart," and I thought that I should make you aware of my own concerns about the disintegration of the church. And we have told you many times that the way it looks, it is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller until there are just one here and two there. And one of the big reasons is that we have all taken sovereignty for ourselves.

Just something to think about. I do not mean to depress you. I am depressed, but I will get over it in time. But I really think that we should think more seriously about unity with God and unity with each other because if we do not have that unity, we are not going to survive the times that are coming. Did you really want to face the Beast or the False Prophet on your own? We are not playing church! This is serious. God wants us to be fully united with Him and as fully united with each other as we possibly can be so that the church of God, the Body of Christ, can present a united front against Satan the Devil and all the world if we need to.

After I sat down, after introducing Martin, I thought I had better clarify something, maybe give you a positive example. This actually goes back to before I was even born. But I was told by a friend of the particular person that I am going to speak about here, but this is an example of a man who did something, to my mind, correctly. He was actually given a great deal of grief for what he did by a lot of people. They called him a hypocrite and other things, probably worse. But I was speaking about Dr. Herman Hoeh.

Back in the early 60s, I do not know which exact year, I think it was like 60, 61, or 62, somewhere in there, a paper was given to the elders there in Pasadena and it had to do with observing Pentecost on Monday. And the paper said that this is wrong and it should be always kept on a Sunday, which is what we believe today and that is what we practice.

Well, it came before the leadership there and it was rejected, way back in the early 1960s. And this particular minister, an evangelist, Dr. Hoeh, thought it was right. And so you have got to think about an evangelist in the Worldwide Church of God in 1960 and the power that an evangelist had. If he had decided to get in the huff, and say, "No, I have knowledge. This is the right way to do it. I'm going to go and start my own church. I'm going to publish this throughout the church. I'm going to put this out to all members in a member and coworker letter and I'm going to convince everybody that it's better to keep, it's more correct. It's holy, it's righteous to keep Pentecost on Sunday."

But that is not what Herman Hoeh did. Herman Hoeh was a humble man. Herman Hoeh had a good understanding, at least I think a better understanding than most, about historical time. That not everything has to be done now. There is time for something to be changed and it does not have to be last Tuesday. That there are things that have to happen, there are procedures to go through, there is giving people time to understand the truth themselves rather than having it thrust on them and told, this is what you must do because I am so and so.

So Herman Hoeh, remember, I said this paper came through in the early 1960s. Do you know when the Worldwide Church of God switched from Monday to Sunday? 1974. It was at least 10 years, if not 12 years or so. Do you know what he did? When Pentecost came around, Herman Hoeh kept it on Sunday and then he kept it on Monday with the church so that he would not bring any division to the church. He did not want himself to be the cause of people leaving, getting upset, going off in a huff or whatever. And he understood his place. Yes, he was an evangelist, but he was not Mr. Armstrong and he certainly was not God.

Herman Hoeh was a great believer in government and people being in a certain hierarchical place and not trying to take anybody's job above them. And so this, later, was one of the things that I actually thought that he did wrong. That he was such a government man that he never really left Worldwide after all of that stuff was proven to be the case there in Pasadena, that they had completely gone away from God and went out into, basically, evangelical Protestantism. So he was not perfect.

But in the case of the Pentecost doctrine at the time (this goes back to my sermon last week), being circumspect, seeing what was going on around him, considering the times, considering his place, considering the mood of the church and on and on, he decided that he would forbear, be patient, wait for God to make a move, which He did, but it was 12 years later. And so that is something that we are not used to in this day and age when we think we have to have an answer today or that if something is wrong, we have to make the move today. I just think it is something that we need to think about, all those factors.

Remember, please remember what Paul said in I Corinthians 8:1. It says, "knowledge puffs up, but love edifies." So you have the difference between being puffed up with the knowledge that we have or edifying by, like what Martin said, about covering, also about waiting. It is a loving thing to wait for God rather than trying to jump the gun. There is a lot of things that we need to do today to keep the unity of faith that we have lost because of the age of the instant, instant rice or whatever. We think we have to have things done immediately. It is best to take it slow, think it through, wait for God, rather than just jump and cause disunity.

That is really what I am worried about. I would love it if the church came back together. However, I think, going with what Solomon said in Ecclesiastes 3, this is a time to break down rather than a time to build up. And so doing this, as I have suggested, is a countercultural type of thing because as David's essay said, we are all, everybody is their own sovereign rather than there being a group under a true Sovereign who could tell us the right way to go.

So I just ask you to think about it because it is important at this end time that we be unified. We do not necessarily have to be unified on every little thing because we are individuals and God is going to work all that out. But we need to especially be unified in love, supporting one another, helping one another, actually talking to one another, and not judging one another. Lots of things like that have gotten into the church and we need to make sure that we keep the bad things out and accentuate the good things. (I am going to break into song here if I do stop!)

RTR/aws/drm