[God’s] authority is divinely majestic just because it has nothing in common with tyranny, because its true likeness is not the power of a natural catastrophe which annihilates all human response, but rather the power of an appeal, command and blessing which not only recognises human response but creates it. To obey it does not mean to be overrun by it, to be overwhelmed and eliminated in one’s standing as a human being.
Obedience to God is genuine precisely in that it is both spontaneous and receptive, that it not only is unconditional obedience but even as such is obedience from the heart. God’s authority is truly recognised only within the sphere of freedom: only where conscience exists, where there exists a sympathetic understanding of its lofty righteousness and a wholehearted assent to its demands – only where a man allows himself to be humbled and raised up, comforted and warmed by its voice. (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.661–62)
There are those who hate the notion of God's sovereign rule over the universe. They find it dehumanizing, a denial of their human liberty, an assignment of slave status to the whole universe. Note that though some of these people are militant atheists, others are Arminian Evangelicals who treasure their modern notions of personal autonomy above the majesty of God.
It is true that the New Testament uses the word despotes, from which we get the English word despot, ten times to refer to God as sovereign ruler of heaven and earth and to the Lord Jesus Christ as master and owner of his church.
But to equate God's government of the universe and of his human creations in particular with the government of either a tyrant or puppeteer would be willfully and carelessly ignorant. For those interested in how the absolute sovereignty of God's divine government actually elevates and completes human liberty, Barth (heretic though he was in his Neo-Orthodoxy) here is a good place to begin.
It is also a worthwhile study to compare the holy sovereignty of God as he has revealed himself in the Bible with Allah of the Muslim Koran. The Muslim Allah is the divine tyrant. He is never described as being "love," and never displays any. "Islam" means "submission," but it is an entire moral universe away from the joyful obedience of the Christian to his Redeemer. Islam is completely indifferent to what Barth here calls "obedience from the heart," "freedom," "conscience," "sympathetic understanding," and "wholehearted assent."
Objections, whether by atheists or Arminians, to God's rule over his creation according to his sovereign will in both its decretive and prescriptive aspects, i.e., his providential and moral ordering of all things, misses this fundamental point and so battles a straw man.
There is so much more to say on this subject.
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Good works
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